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, 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.