Generations of experts have put forward ways to improve the notoriously chaotic and inconsistent spelling of English. This isn’t the place to rehash the arguments on both sides but to note that the Spelling Society — founded as the Simplified Spelling Society in 1908, the British sister society of a US organisation generously funded by Andrew Carnegie — is celebrating its centenary in June by hosting a conference at Coventry University called The Cost of English Spelling. A first-year student there has worked out that some £18m a year is wasted teaching traditional spelling; the Society’s secretary, John Gledhill, says that this is compounded by what he calls the “psychological pain” caused to poor spellers. The Society is not the force it once was, with membership having fallen from a high of 35,000 in the early days to 500 now, because the subject does not attract the interest it once did. The Society no longer advocates a specific system of respelling, though its members often use simplifications such as Cut Spelling, which removes redundant letters from words and makes other substitutions to improve correspondence with the spoken word, leading to forms like frend, alfabet and scool. The result is text like “Th perenial complaint of oldr jenrations that ther desendnts fal short of ther eldrs has ofn been aplyd to languaj, and, within languaj, to yung peples spelng in particulr.”
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/qrsw.htm
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