I almost feel like English should start from scratch with spelling, There are basically no consistent rules at all. I think we should assign spelling to kindergartners who actually follow the rules of English and spell things like they should be spelled.
Quinoa -> Keen-wa
Ballet -> Baal-Eh
Design -> De-zine
etc.
Chinese went through simplification, Japanese has kanji but they also have hiragana with consistent rules, etc. Why can’t English simplify?
Chinese, afaik, was simplified because the thousands and thousands of ideograms were far too much and too unwieldy for many people and made both writing and printing difficult.
English would be extremely difficult to simplify. For one, it’s already a more or less phonetic alphabet language. You mostly don’t need to know how to spell something as long as you can stick the right phonemes together. People might make fun of you but they’ll usually figure out what you’re trying to say.
For two, English has more exceptions than rules. As an unholy bastard stapled together from a dozen different languages the “rules” of English are full of contradictions, bits of grammar from other languages, deliberate choices made by the speaker, and deliberate subversion and breaking of rules for effect. I’m told English is a nightmare to learn because the rules are so bizarre and inconsistent. Trying to create any kind of consistent or coherent system out of it would be a fool’s errand, you’d be much better off just trying to get everyone to speak another language or build a conglang.
Simplification merged 73 characters out of tens of thousands. Simplification was just the codification of shorthands people have been using for thousands of years, some predating the Latin alphabet. It was mostly a nothingburger especially since people don’t handwrite much in the modern era and obviously Taiwanese people can still read and write fine.
Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought there was a lot more too it. Thank you.
Simplified Chinese was neither a massive reform nor is it a modern reform. Most of the simplified forms are pre-Qin from before 200BC and predate the Classical Latin Alphabet. The sum total of differences between traditional and simplified is literally only one page long. The current reforms were only accepted because they were based off of shorthand that people were already using. When the government tried to do a 2nd round of artificial simplification people just ignored them. Most people in the mainland still know traditional just from encountering it day to day or in historical documents.
The sort of phoneticization you want to do for English is closer to the reforms applied to the writing systems of minority languages like Yi and Zhuang and the result is that literacy rates for those languages are super low and those who do know how to read and write still use the old logographic orthography.
There’s currently a small movement of people who want to bring back traditional chinese in the mainland since the whole premise of it being harder to learn is objectively wrong since everyone already knows it. The only real opposition is just that HK/TW are so annoying that people associate seeing traditional online with liberal/chud opinions.
Also phonetically regular spelling reforms for English do exist and they usually require using a new alphabet and like 100 different edge cases. They usually aren’t compatible between American and British English and I doubt the type of nerd who comes up with these things have tried applying it to AAVE or Scots.