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"Prediction #16: ... Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers." Language varies too much and too quickly. Wasn't that why we adopted s

• berntb 17y ago
  A spelling reform for the English language was probably the craziest prediction... :-) Some languages, like Swedish and Finnish, had spelling reforms in the 19th century and are (more or less) trivial to pronounce from the spelling. Today, it would be much, much harder to do a really big spelling reform even for Swedish which should be a fraction of the problem size for English. For a few generations you'd have to teach people to read/write both spelling standards. In the 19th century Sweden, most people only read a couple of religious books (they had to). A spelling reform might be easy to do in a generation when the e-books have taken over. Just use automatic filters (not real translations -- grammar is the same) for English spelling standards in office programs, web browsers, etc.