Vicki's Right - and well thought out...
The Chinese have a different but similar problem.. Their pictographs originally were sposed to be ideographic - compound ideas to represent more difficult concepts, etc..
The problem was that Han Chinese was only one of hundreds of varied dialects that developed over the millenia (Chinas a huge place). To make a long story short, Chinese today is a combination of ideographic, phonetic (horse+female means mother as horse indicates a "ma" sound.) deflective ( ideographs one step removed etc.) and lastly there are pictures that represent things that noone can figure out how and why the hell they got that way. :)
As [[ethnoconvergence]] continues at its speedy rate - the notions of holding onto traditional ways of doing things should simply be left to happen, But this wont happen - it will cause people to get pissy and wars will happen and thats what sucks about humanity. Funny I just read a little piece about this in a well known graphic novel - (email for the torrent file - clear a cd worth of disk.)
But Vicki hits it. I think the answer (in part) is a pure ideographic system - based on the thousands of years development of Han gi (Kanji). This could cross boundaries and be language independent. And yes, Daniel, I would be more than glad to correspond with you on developing this idea further. Get a trial copy of FlashMX - and email me.
WikiLovin to all :) -SM
The problem with phonetic spelling is, always, whose dialect? The Texan
one
that Molly Ivins renders by spelling business "bidness"? New York, with our wondrous mix of four centuries of languages and accents? Glaswegian? A friend of mine was greatly confused when someone told her that "The mile is on strike"--she wondered what that meant, and whether they could use kilometers instead, before realizing that while she'd heard "mile", her Australian friend had meant "mail."
As for making English easier, the language has the momentum of a billion speakers. Efforts at standardizing on any simplified English have fallen down
because
people want the flexibility they get from wide vocabulary (which is not unique to English--the same problem would emerge in trying to standardize and simplify any living language).
Making individual articles, paragraphs, and sentences clearer and easier
to
read is a worthwhile task. It's one of the ways I make my living. And it can't be reduced to a formula.