Noah Webster's spelling reform. Was it a bad idea?

[Travis B.]

To be completely honest, people who call British spellings "international" as if that were some reason to favor them annoy me, since should it not matter that a majority of native English-speakers speak American English varieties and presumably use American spellings?

[Zaarin]

Gray is just obscenely ugly.

May, day, bay, lay, play, say, ray, way...etc

Those must be hideous, huh.

No, they're fine, especially since a bey, ney, and Rey are completely different things from a bay, nay, or ray. :p It's not <ay> that's ugly; it's <ay> specifically in the color between black and white in luminosity that's ugly. :p

[Travis B.]

We can do better.

"Color, colour" "kuller"
"favor, favour" "faver"
"Neighbor, neighbour" "naber"
"Acre" "aker"
"Liter, litre" "leeter"

The problem with spelling reform is that it makes a specific pronunciation or set of pronunciations standard by encoding them in spelling, whereas spellings rather divorced from pronunciation have less standardizing force upon language varieties. Of course standard varieties can certainly exist without their being encoded in spelling, but spelling reform reinforces them, at the detriment of nonstandard varieties.

[Raholeun]

To be completely honest, people who call British spellings "international" as if that were some reason to favor them annoy me, since should it not matter that a majority of native English-speakers speak American English varieties and presumably use American spellings?

In the non-anglophone world, you generally get taught British pronunciation and the British spelling system. However, since most of the media intake comes from the US, you learn the Hollywood pronunciation and spelling. Sigh. My writing is a mess and my accent has become idiosyncratic to put it euphemistically.

[Imralu]

Even as a native speaker, having two main standard spellings for some words trips me up. Obviously it doesn't matter which standard is used, but it's nice to be consistent. I write with non-US spellings except, for some reason, I was never exposed to the spelling of "tumour" from a non-American source so I wasn't even aware that it was one of these -our words until well into my adulthood. Obviously I knew the word, and I pronounce it "chooma", but previously I would have written " a grey-coloured tumor", which is stylistically a bit bleurgh.