Richard Wade wants to change things for the better by liberalising spelling, and to publicise it he's put up a site called freespeling.com (with one l). Some may think it's a good idea, but for me it's like scraping my nails down a blackboard.
What do you think?
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He writes on his web page that his reason for doing this is that people can't read/spell and that English is a hard language to learn. My immediate reaction is to protest that English wouldn't be any harder to learn with revamped spelling, since the grammar would remain the same.
Also, history has already given us an example of a group of reformers trying to systematically change the way English was spelled--it happened just after the American Revolution! And even the small changes that they implemented (favor instead of favour--interestingly, Mr. Wade mentions this as a change he would make) caused what?
They caused a split in the language rather than a revision, a split that ultimately has caused far more trouble than its worth.
Not to mention the practical problems with trying to change a language that billions of people already speak...
Oh well. Thanks for the link; I enjoyed it.
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