Spelling reform will fail because of regional differences in pronunciation.
Indeed, it’s problematic that English is open source instead of having a central authority. But just like the printing press standardized written German, the internet may make spoken English more homogeneous. In the spirit of efficiency, my not-at-all-humble opinion is that local linguistic variations ought to be regarded as a bug, not a feature. Regionalism be damned.
people taught the new system will be unable to read older material
...so you can’t read Beowulf because you don’t know the Saxon script?
The People’s Republic of China is the biggest example of a successful comprehensive script reform. Korea loves its totally artificial Hangul, and Turkey is doing fine with the Latin alphabet. Japan took a lot longer to standardize its script, but it makes a lot more sense now than in the past. In each country, scholars who want to work with old books can still learn the former scripts.
The language of Beowulf is far enough from ours that I need to do a lot of studying before I can read it anyway, so the additional effort to learn a script wouldn’t make much of a difference. If, for instance, Shakespeare was in a different script, it would certainly cut down on the number of people who read Shakespeare (unless translated versions became widely available, which is possible for Shakespeare, but would not be true for most old works.)
Furthermore, doing such reform now would mean doing it after cheap mass market printing, which would make the effect much worse (and unlike Shakespeare, the works would be copyrighted, so if the owner refuses to publish a translated version, nobody else could). I don’t know how many mass market books there were in Turkey in the 1920′s.
Simultaneous with the script reform in Turkey was a language reform that tried to remove Arabic words, to align it with the West. Not being able to read the old books may have been the goal.
Indeed, it’s problematic that English is open source instead of having a central authority. But just like the printing press standardized written German, the internet may make spoken English more homogeneous. In the spirit of efficiency, my not-at-all-humble opinion is that local linguistic variations ought to be regarded as a bug, not a feature. Regionalism be damned.
...so you can’t read Beowulf because you don’t know the Saxon script?
The People’s Republic of China is the biggest example of a successful comprehensive script reform. Korea loves its totally artificial Hangul, and Turkey is doing fine with the Latin alphabet. Japan took a lot longer to standardize its script, but it makes a lot more sense now than in the past. In each country, scholars who want to work with old books can still learn the former scripts.
The language of Beowulf is far enough from ours that I need to do a lot of studying before I can read it anyway, so the additional effort to learn a script wouldn’t make much of a difference. If, for instance, Shakespeare was in a different script, it would certainly cut down on the number of people who read Shakespeare (unless translated versions became widely available, which is possible for Shakespeare, but would not be true for most old works.)
Furthermore, doing such reform now would mean doing it after cheap mass market printing, which would make the effect much worse (and unlike Shakespeare, the works would be copyrighted, so if the owner refuses to publish a translated version, nobody else could). I don’t know how many mass market books there were in Turkey in the 1920′s.
Simultaneous with the script reform in Turkey was a language reform that tried to remove Arabic words, to align it with the West. Not being able to read the old books may have been the goal.