"Our written language is not a picture of so much as a grotesque cartoon of spoken English." While there are mostly logographic writing systems, the purpose of alphabetical writing is to record sounds not abstract pictures of individual words. The principal arguments against spelling reform, with their corollaries, are summarized, with appropriate comments and quotations:

1. Statement: Phonetic spelling would obscure the derivation of words. From the Corollary: To memorialize historic facts of a language is a legitimate or primary function of a current orthography.
     Comments The primary purpose of spelling is to record speech, which is the language. "The true and sole office of alphabetic writing is faithfully and intelligibly to represent spoken speech" American Philological Assoc., 1876 report. The etymologist is the first to repudiate the argument in the corollary.
"In the interests of etymology we ought to spell as we pronounce. To spell words as they used to be pronounced is not etymological, but antiquarian. --W.W. Skeat.
    Phonetic spelling would give a continuous picture of the whole history of each word, whereas fixed conventional spelling gives, at best, only a single picture of one episode. "The real etymologist, the historic student of language, it is wholly independent of any such paltry assistance, and would rejoice above measure to barter every 'historical' item in our spelling during the last 300 years for a strict phonetic picture of the language as spoken at that distance in the past." William Dwight Whitney. Even such etymologic information as is suggested is often in error; the result of some superficial wrong assumption, e.g., comptroller, debt, delight, haughty, island, sovereign, sprightly Such accurate information as present conventional spelling gives is now securely preserved in innumerable books, regardless of present or future spelling and. The scholar does not need, and the average layman does not appreciate or understand such information.

2. Statement: Phonetic spelling would cause serious confusion between words of like sound (homophones), now distinguished by different spellings, e.g., right, rite, write, wright buy, by, bye cent, scent, sent hear, here road, rode, rowed hour, our sew, so, sow knew, new to, too, two one, won, etc., etc. Corollaries: A spelling is a word. Such distinctions are an intentional and desirable feature of English spelling.
     Comments Context makes clear such distinctions in speech, which has no spelling to give help; still more so is it used in the more deliberate processes of reading, with opportunity to glance backward or forward if necessary. As against a few hundred homophones now distinguished more or less fortuitously by different spellings, there are in traditional orthography many thousands of words of like sound and spelling (homographs), and there is no demand to create artificial distinctions for these. A few suggestive examples are-- bay (a color, a tree, part of a building, a body of water, a dog's howl) fair (good weather, impartial, an exposition) right (a privilege, opposite of left, opposite of wrong) sound (a condition, a noise, a body of water) spring (a season, a leap, an elastic device) state (to express in words, a condition, a unit of government) can (to be able, a container). down (a direction, soft feathers) note (a musical tone, a monetary obligation) pool (of water, a game) present (a time, a gift) well (a state of health, a hole in the earth) Fries reports that for the 500 most used words of English the Oxford Dictionary records 14,070 separate and different meanings - an average of 28 different meanings for each word. There is another group of homographs, spelled alike but pronounced differently, occasionally confused in reading, which phonemic spelling would clearly distinguish, e.g., bow (boe, bou); similarly, mow, row, sow. close (cloes, cloez); similarly, excuse, house, use, etc. aged (aejd aejed); similarly, blessed, (blest, blessed), beloved, learned. lead (leed, led); similarly, read live (liv, liev); tear (taer, teer); wind (wind, wiend); wound (wuund, wound); primer (primer, priemer), etc.

3. Statement: Phonetic spelling would require all existing books to be reprinted.
    Comments Most current reading matter is ephemeral. Books of enduring worth are constantly being reprinted in current spelling. No one but the linguistic scholar today reads Chaucer, or Spenser, Shakespeare, or even Milton, in the original spelling. Compatibility makes a reading knowledge of traditional orthography relatively easy.

4. Statement: Phonetic spelling would require a fixed standard of pronunciation, which does not exist.
    Comments Accurately phonetic writing is neither necessary nor desirable. At the phonemic level, there does exist an acceptable standard, increasingly established by national and international radio and television. As early as 1935, the British Broadcasting Corp. had successfully established a standard, Broadcast English, for announcers. [1] So far as regional differences are concerned, the individual tends to project on to the phonemic symbol his own interpretation. The few broad differences in pronunciation between British and American usage, i.e., either (iether, eether), clerk (clark, clurk), leisure (lezher, leezher), will be no more confusing in phonemic spelling than in speech, or than differences in choice of words such as lift for elevator. Phonemic spelling would be a strong conservative factor in preventing deterioration or corruption of language. Present lack of any clearly discernible relation between the written and the spoken word conduces strongly to variation.

5. Statement. No one has authority to tamper with the language. "The language of Shakespeare and Milton is good enough for me.' Corollaries: The written word is the language. The language (or spelling) used by past masters of English has remained substantially static, or Language (or spelling) evolution is a natural process, independent of human control.
    Comments Our language is speech, not spelling; the spelling is, or should be no more than a picture (now too often it is a cartoon) of the spoken word. Change, both in language and, until recently, in spelling, has been continuous, both before and after Shakespeare and Milton. Phonemic spelling would conform to and record actual change and, incidentally, would tend to reduce change by giving guidance as to pronunciation, now wholly lacking. All evolution in spelling, thus far, has resulted from conscious, deliberate, individual choice or action.

6. Statement. Phonetic spelling is ugly, uncouth, grotesque.
    Comments: Twain remarked that he could find beauty in the way that foreign languages were written but not in the simplified spelling of English.  He proposed a new non-roman alphabet that would not be confused with traditional written English.  We often find the odd and unfamiliar to be ugly. 
    No one would seriously claim that the particular configurations of traditional orthography, the succession of ascending, descending, and middle letters, possess any intrinsic esthetic value. The true charge against phonemic spelling is its strangeness. Many proposed phonetic alphabets have been esthetically unpleasing, due to diacritics, wrong fonts, inverted letters, non-Roman characters, etc., but there is no inherent reason why a phonemic alphabet cannot be made as esthetically pleasing as the present Roman alphabet, if it observes the same canons of design; e.g., the Simpler Spelling Association Fonetic Alfabet.

The i.t.m. technique, which accustoms the eye to rational reforms, is one important element in breaking down the next generation's resistance to spelling reform.

7. Statement: It's too much trouble. I have learned to spell.
    Comments: This, the inertia which dreads the effort of the change, is the main reason why the present adult generation should not be expected to change. "It is the generation of children to come who appeal to us to save them from the affliction which we have endured and forgotten." William Dwight Whitney
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*Being Appendix C of a monograph presented at the 4th International i.t.a. Conference, Oct. 1967, McGill Univ., Montreal. [1] For American, see Bender, James F., N.B.C. Handbook of Pronunciation, New York, Thos. Y. Crowell Co, 1944, 289 pp. [from] [Spelling Progress Bulletin Spring 1968 pp14-16]