Cite.
Ah, Twain. The prankster. 
As your cite points out (and as someone here on the Board has pointed out not that long ago) this piece seems to be misattributed to Twain.
Twain did give a speech on simplified spelling, but it’s substantially different.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Alphabet_and_Simplified_Spelling
You mean which dialect?
If the goal is to reflect the actual spoken language, we have the IPA. But the purpose of a regular alphabet isn’t really to do that. It’s simply to convey ideas. The Chinese system of writing uses what are essentially pictures that have nothing to do with the spoken language. Of course you can argue that it makes literacy more exclusive, but that’s just as much a socio-political issue as it is cultural.
It’s interesting to note that however “illogical” English spelling might be, it doesn’t prevent most people, with a modest amount of education, from becoming functionally literate.
This rant is likely to be enlightening. When I depose Skald the Rhymer and become His Universal and Catholic Basilikon Majesty I shall make the author my Plenipotentiary Linguistic and Stylistic.
Read the rest for more information on your future spelling system.
This is exactly how Americans came to misspell “colour” and similar words. As it isn’t broke, don’t break it.
Thank you, William Randolph Hearst, for giving the rest of the English-speaking world something obvious to look down their noses at Americans for, in perpetuity.
Simplified spelling is asinine, because words are not just a sound in the air, and their spelling bears information about more than the sound associated with the word. Adopting a simplified spelling scheme may make spelling simple words consistently easier for people with difficulties in this area, but this advantage is not worth the cost of severing the English language from thousands of years of development.
With traditional spelling, someone coming across an unfamiliar word is in a much better position to make inferences about its meaning, because it’s the spelling that contains the information which facilitates semiosis, not just the sound.
Switching to simplified spelling would be like mandating learning disabilities for your entire population. A horrifying idea, but then again I think Harrison Bergeron probably reads like a utopian fable to the sort of people who are saddled with the sort of intellect to which simplified spelling seems attractive.
Hefer? Bullshit. It shood be heffer.
Where are you from? Real Americans don’t care. Hell, most Americans don’t notice.
Yes, they are. The spoken language takes precedence. The spoken language is language. Otherwise, languages without a written form wouldn’t be ‘real’.
This is commonly a lead-off into the ‘etymological fallacy’, which is the unsupportable idea that the meaning of a word at some arbitrary point in the past is what the word ‘really’ means. In any event, it is more than a little addle-brained.
OK, you can study etymology. The rest of us will get on with it.
This would make sense if you were defending Traditional Chinese writing, where characters have semantic radicals in addition to phonetic ones and the move to Simplified Chinese would mutilate the key radicals. Making the same argument about English has obvious difficulties.
Only for those who would be in the best position to recognize the sensation.
I hesitate to ask what you think of those who speak, read, and write Spanish or Korean.
People should stop ghotiing around for solutions, and just learn to be happy in the moment.
I’m willing to share my welf wit anyone wit big tits.
I believe the original Cicero of antiquity said the same thing.
He was probably a pervert though. I am normal 
See, this just illustrates the problem with “simplified” spelling.
tdn’s original spelling is how I pronounce the final vowel in “moron”; Ludovic obviously pronounces it differently.
So, how do you have a universal, simplified spelling that accurately reflects the pronunciation of English around the world? Just not possible - there will always be spellings that do not match a particular dialect.
We already have two systems, each of them quite good but for fundamentally different purposes.
Conventional spelling is best for representing a word so that you can see their origins and see how words are formed from other words with prefixes and suffixes and other modifications.
original and origins; say and says; indicative and indicate; creator creation and creativity.
Phonetic spelling (the IPA being the best encoding scheme) loses that, but brings us accurate renditions of how a word would sound if spoken out loud.
It would probably be easier if kids were taught IPA in first grade and phonetic spelling was accepted as “correct”; learning conventional spelling is more of a structural study of the English language.
wi ɑlrɛdi hav tu sIstɛmz itʃ ʌv ∂ɛm kwaIt gʊd bʌt fɔr fandǝmɛntǝli dIfɚrǝnt pɝpǝsɛz.
kǝnvɛntʃǝnǝl spɛliŋ Iz bɛst fɔr rɛprizɛntiŋ e wɝd so ∂at ju kansi ∂ɛr ɔrIdʒInz and si haʊ wɝdz ɑr fɔrmd frʌm ʌ∂ɚ wɝdz wIθ prifIksɛz and sʌfIksɛz and ʌ∂ɝ mɑdIfIkeʃǝnz
ǝrIdʒǝnǝl and ɔrIdʒInz se and sɛz IndIkǝtIv and InkIket krietɚ krieʃǝn and kriǝtIvIti
fǝnɛtIk spɛliŋ ∂ǝ aI pi e biʔiŋ ∂ǝ bɛst ɛnkodiŋ skim luzɛz ∂at bʌt briŋgz ʌs akjurɛt rɛndIʃǝnz ʌv haʊ e wɝd wʊd saʊnd If spokǝn aʊt laʊd
It wʊd prɑbǝbli bi iziɚ If kIdz wɝ taʊt aI pi e In fɝst gred and fǝnɛtIk spɛliŋ wʌz aksɛptɛd az kɚrɛkt lɝniŋ kǝnvɛntʃǝnǝl spɛliŋ Iz mɔr ʌv e strʌktʃɚrǝl stʌdi ʌv ∂ǝ iŋlIʃ leŋwIdʒ
Naw. The Ludovic thing is just a meme from Fark.com. And, really, there’s very little difference between the broad a [ɑ] and the open o [ɒ]* in many English dialects. the problem is more that people want to interpet it as short a [æ].
*I’m sure some people use [ɔ] for open o, but I’ve never heard anyone pronounce moron as [mɔɹɔn].
No, AHunter, you’d be making things more complicated, as there are so many different accents. Each accent would have different spellings for the same word. Do you know what [meən] means?
It would present the same problems that different accents present in spoken English, sure.
Depending on context, it could be Billy Bob McAllister referring to the male of the species or Susie O’Malley speaking of the native Central Americans who did the clever calendars.
Derleth, can’t tell if this is intended as a personal insult or not, so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. We’re in MPSIMS, so keep it civil, please.
Spoken out loud by whom? By a Canadian, such as myself, with a bland Prairies accent? by a person from the Deep South of the United States? By someone from London, England? by someone from Aberdeen, Scotland? by someone from New Delhi?
Either you have wildly different phoenetic spellings to capture all of the different accents, which means that there is no longer a uniform spelling of the English language that all English-speakers can understand, or you have a “uniform authoritative phonetic” spelling, which is just as artificial as the current spelling and does not accurately reflect the actual pronunciation of English by the multitudes of English-speakers.
So does this phonetically represent how the same passage would sound if I read it? and how it would sound from the person from the Deep South? and the Aberdoonian? and the Londoner? and the New Delhian? or is it just as artificial as the conventional spelling?
Cripes, that was the first thing I thought of too.
“Johnny can’t spell because God hates fags!”