What Do You Think?
PHONETIC SPELLING
Should we change our spelling so that it is phonetic (based on pronunciation)? There are many problems with that idea. One is that different people pronounce words differently so there would be no consistency. Another is that we would lose the relationship between words that are in the same word family. For example, the Greek pneuma means wind or air, and that helps us to understand such terms as pneumonia (a disease of the lungs), pneumatic drill (a drill using compressed air), pneumatic tyre (an air-filled tyre) and many other scientific and medical terms based on pneuma.
A good dictionary will tell you what the origins of a word are, usually in square brackets at the end of an entry. Knowing the origin of a word and its word family helps us build up our vocabulary and helps us nail the spelling more easily. Incidentally, the word phonetic comes from the Greek word phonos, meaning sound. Other words in the same family are megaphone (big sound), microphone (small sound), telephone (sound from afar), homophone (same sound) - and so on.