As mentioned above, here is most of my post to the neurosciencenews.com website in response to this HN article:

"From my experience, English is a dog of a language, its grammar is hither and thither, its spelling and punctuation are all over the place, and I really feel sorry for a non-native speaker who has to learn it.

I've never been a good speller nor a particularly good reader so reading a passage aloud in public is not something I particularly relish. On the other hand, my partner is not only an excellent reader and speller but also she can do cryptic crosswords with great ease—which is a task that's always eluded me. (It's always seemed pointless to me to deliberately increase the entropy of what one is saying by choosing cryptic words and meanings. One could just use clear text to avoid confusion.)

I put my lack of ability down to both my marginal aptitude for languages and not having much interest in learning them when I was at school. (Whilst it's possible I'm on the edge of being dyslexic I don't consider my reading handicap sufficiently large to bother me.)

My spelling was always worse than my grammar and the ways we were taught at school didn't help. For instance, spelling tests were marked out of 50 instead of 100 with two marks taken off for every spelling mistake. I cannot remember the total number of words in the test but it was well in excess of 50 and that meant one could score negative marks for spelling, which I did on occasions (but I wasn't the only one, there were also quite a few others). It seems to me that giving negative marks wasn’t the most productive way to engage students' interest.

There's no doubt that words such as 'pint', 'lint', 'through', 'though', 'thorough', etc. are a major problem for bad spellers but it's the sheer number of them that's the problem, add the large number of 'strange' English proper names to this and we're in big trouble. Whilst the correct punctuation of words like 'Wycombe' and 'Warwick' are comparatively well known to native speakers there are many others of that kind which aren't—and I reckon those two words would be very problematic for those learning English as a second language.

That long intro leads to my main point, which is to ask a question I've asked many times before without ever having received an even partially satisfactory answer. That being why doesn’t English use accents/diacriticals marks to help resolve many of its peculiar spellings and wayward pronunciations. It seems to me that if ever a language needs diacriticals then it has to be English. The problem of how to pronounce 'pint' and 'lint' correctly would be solved instantly if a diacritical were to be applied to one 'i' and not the other (for instance 'ì' 'í' or 'î' could be used).

From my experience, if you ask those who are knowledgeable in English and competent in using it (such as English teachers or those who run grammar or spelling websites) about potential usefulness of using diacriticals in English then their responses are nearly always negative or at best nonchalant. As they have already mastered English without the need to resort to them, they never see any need to ponder the matter further—and those who would have actually benefited from their use have never had sufficient knowledge or wherewithal to push for their introduction, hence the complicated mess that we have today.

Moreover, both native speakers and those with English as a second language face significant problems when they first come across written words that are not common in everyday usage. For example, I recall that I first came across the words 'chiral' and 'enantiomer' in textbooks well before I heard them being used by professionals who knew how to pronounce them correctly, again diacriticals would have quickly solved the problem. One may well ask why not consult a dictionary and use the IPA references. Correct, one can do that but if one is bad at pronunciation and spelling then one finds so many such words it becomes a never-ending tedium, thus one just skips over them none the wiser.

It seems to me that people with dyslexia and or those who are having difficulty with pronunciation and spelling would be much better served if English used diacriticals; I base this on my own experience from having learned other languages. I studied French at school and like English, I was never particularly good at it, similarly, for some years I lived in Austria, so I've a smattering of German. What's relevant here is that when I was learning French it was drummed into me that it was essential to understand the differences in pronunciation of 'e', 'é', 'è' and 'ê', etc. Thus, I've not much difficulty in pronouncing words like 'd'être' or proper nouns such as 'Tahère' and 'Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre'—a name certain cognoscenti will no doubt recognise (sorry the circumflex is missing, so three will have to suffice; right, I don't know any names that use all four pronunciations of 'e'). ;-)

What I am saying is that I could mount a reasonable argument to say that my pronunciation of certain French words that contain characters with diacriticals is better than it is of many English words whose characters are missing them! <...>"