As a child I always struggled with English spelling. The second I felt like there was a pattern and rule I could follow a word would come along and break it. This is because our language is a smorgasbord of many linguistic origins. So, as a child, I was enamoured by languages like Korean writing using Hangul. I never understood why we wouldn’t all agree to spellings that actually sounded like the word we were writing.
But recently I appreciated a couple reasons why this isn’t realistic, and maybe there’s another side to this problem.
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I grew up in a somewhat microcosm of Southern English accents. To me, everyone phonetically sounded out each word in the same way. It seemed obvious that there could be one source of spelling truth for each word. As I’ve grown up, this has become obviously a poor observation. If there are near unlimited ways to pronounce each word, the sound and the written account of a word are actually two different tasks.
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As time goes on, word prounciations change, even in the same geographical location. For example in English we went through the “Great Vowel Shift” between 1400-1700. Words were locked in (thanks to small inventions like the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440) to how they were pronounced at that time; bite, meet, mate, etc.
There is a trade-off between the present readability of writing and the ability to read historic texts. If we constantly updated (new DLC just dropped from the Oxford dictionary!) the language we would much more quickly lose legibility of past works. Being able to build on our forebears is such a powerful tool, so locking down spelling as a different exercise to speech which is intrinsically more fluid is an asset rather than a short term curse.