WI: Simple Spelling Board successful in reforming English spelling?

In 1906, Andrew Carnegie funded the creation of the Simplified Spelling Board (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board) in an attempt to greatly simplify English spelling and make it easier to learn. It was mocked in Britain, but gained ground in the US. The New York City Board of Education considered approving it, and President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order mandating federal communications be printed in this spelling style. Congress ultimately stopped that.

Suppose it had been successful. What would been the result?
 
The biggest problem with spelling reform is it usually tries to make the spelling phonetic (which is the whole point, right?), and that presupposes a standard dialect whose phonology you're rendering.

I've seen several attempts at such a thing and none used my speech.

Basically, you immediately make all Bostonians, NYC residents and Southerners (of their multiple different accents) second class citizens.

Could it be done? Maybe. But it would be incredibly difficult to pull off politically.
 

Puzzle

Donor
Could it be done? Maybe. But it would be incredibly difficult to pull off politically.
There's some low hanging fruit though. Foreign derived words, gyro springs to mind, could be respelled as jirro or hirro depending on what the true pronunciation is as opposed to using the exact same letters for two different sounds.
 
The weakness of any simplified system is that it reflects only one pronunciation. Just as current english spelling reflects the pronunciation of southern english by the educated and literate classes at the time when dictionaries and english grammar teaching took off. How would you choose which pronunciations to use equitably? A consequence could well be a more commonly used 'acceptable' one becomes increasingly national to the exclusion of others over time through schooling and media. One can see this in France and Britain where other modes are downgraded as poor english/french. An AH could be the Confederacy successfully seceding and developing it's own simplified national english based around a classic 'southern' set of pronunciations and becoming increasingly different to 'northern' english until they become mutually unintelligible.
 
Top