Where else would an antique prefer to be?
Like every antique, I'd prefer to be less antique, but that isn't an
availablle option.
John Field's problem is that he doesn't appreciate that written
language is conservative because it provides access to an enormous
mass of historical documents. Why should he - he clearly never reads
any of them.
The Chinese are perhaps the most extreme case. The written language is
used to represent a number of mutually unintelligible spoken
languages, and doesn't do the job all that well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_written_language
The ideographic characters are difficult to learn and people tend to
forget characters that they don't see too often - alphabetic - phoneme-
based - writing systems are much easier to acqure and easier to
retain, but the Chinese can't throw out their rotten writing system
without losing access to their historical documents.
Noah Webster's spelling reforms - such as they were - didn't help
anybody enough so you'd notice, and marginally impaired American
access to the body of English language documents.
John Fields claims that eliminating the redundant "u" in "colour"and
similar words makes an appreciable and worthwhile to the speed with
which you can type, but I'm sure that he doesn't use a Dvorak
keyboard, which would make a much larger difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
The fact that it has never become popular, illustrates the fact that
typing speed as such isn't particularly important.
