Oxbridge English
A good reference for the history of the English language is 'Mother Tongue' by Bill Bryson.
In it he documents how pronunciations change over time. So for example 'knight' didn't always have a silence K. Which is not to say that we should remove the first letter, as that would make it indistinguishable from another word. Any phonetic spelling would make knight and night, which and witch and dozens of other words indistinguishable.
A good modern example would be ‘hiccough’, which almost everyone pronounces and most people spell as ‘hiccup’. There was a time when it was spoken as hic-cough and thus spelt accordingly. It isn't any more and a closer spelling is becoming the norm.
These changes have been happening since the time of Chaucer, and the one thing that we do know is that they occur naturally. There are few occasions (Noah Webber's dictionary being the most famous exception) when a small group has imposed new spellings on the population.
Finally, whose phonetic spelling is correct? I am from Birmingham (UK, not Alabama), but should my home city be renamed Burmingum, as we locals pronounce it? What about words that are pronounced in quite radically different ways across the country? Oxbridge phonetic English would be no closer to how most people speak than the current spellings.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
