The human, social and economic cost of today's spelling is incalculable. All writing and publishing wastes materials, time, money. Learners spend years at public expense trying to crack the code, when they could be gaining useful knowledge. T he problem with English spelling is that the letters do not correspond predictably to speech sounds. Any reform would therefore aim to improve their correspondence, but less clear is how big a change could, or should, be made.
Some proposals are very radical.
The dramatist G B Shaw actually wanted a brand new alphabet, as he thought today's Roman alphabet ill-suited to English. Other proposals use only the present letters, but make sure that each spelling is always pronounced the same and each speech sound is always spelled the same. Most modern schemes go less far. One ensures all spellings are consistently pronounced, though speech sounds can still have different spellings. Another regularizes consonants, but leaves most vowels as they are.