Why it’s so hard to fix maddening spelling systems

“KEEPING SCHOOLS closed has DEVESTATING effects” on children, America’s Republican Party tweeted from its official account, before hastily deleting the post amid mockery. It’s not just American conservatives who stumble with their spelling even when writing about education. Replying to a parliamentary query, the head of the schools inspectorate in Spain’s Balearic Islands misspelled “recoge” (“to collect”, among other things) as “recoje”.

Writing systems flummox people around the world. These days many in China use the roman alphabet to find and enter the complex Chinese characters on phones and computers, meaning they increasingly cannot write many characters without help. French children fear the dictée, an exercise in which they must write down a passage read aloud by teachers. And many who haven’t mastered the notoriously difficult spelling system of English are publicly humiliated in the ritual of the school spelling bee. Rare is the system that seems elegant, accurate and well-suited to its language. (Korean’s Hangul script is one; it is so beloved that an annual Hangul Day commemorates its invention.) Why aren’t illogical writing systems ever reformed?