Isnt this a logical evolution for the grammar convention?
Then how will you differentiate between words like cant and can’t, or wont and won’t? Both of those already have their own meanings when the apostrophe is not present. Sure, you can tell from context most times, but there’s bound to be some confusion.
The solution is to replace the latin letters with letters that actually make sense for English, but that is about as likely to happen as the universal adoption of the Dvorak keyboard.
In this example, won’t and wont would have a different letter for the o position, since they are pronounced differently. At the minimum, English needs spelling reform. I’m not holding my breath though.
Why in the world would English need spelling reform? Language does not need to be streamlined. Any attempt at streamlining the language, “simplifying it for the benefit of the people” sounds a bit Orwellian. Well, maybe not that much so, but what are the benefits to changing our language in such a drastic way? Will you be able to convince the rest of the English-speaking world to do the same? Will it be worth eventually having to translate from the rest of the world’s English to American English?
And didn’t Cecil do a column about DVORAK vs. QWERTY? I seem to remember that the verdict was that people would type faster on whatever they were used to.
Why do we need spelling reform?
To get rid of such absurdities as weigh, thought, through, etc. English spelling has little to do with spoken english anymore.
Getting rid of absurdities in spelling is not streamlining language, I don’t see what getting rid of words has to do with their spelling. Other languages have survived spelling reforms just fine, so would english. I’m sure anyone who is trying to learn english now and in the future would see the wisdom in it.
Though context was mentioned I can’t see why we would’t use it. Read (reed and red) Present (here) And Present (gift). There are a lot of examples and we live with those just fine
I see English spelling reform happening when the majority of English speakers start caring about English spelling. If people can’t be bothered to spell correctly now (no, I’m not talking about dyslexics), why should we expect spelling reform to suddenly inspire them?
Meanwhile, people who drop their apostrophes around here deserve whatever abuse they get. 
What Cecil said.
The apostrophes are staying, and spelling reform is impossible.
Bernard Shaw tried to drop the apostrophes in some of his works, but he ran into the problem other posters mentioned: some words are ambiguous without them. For more fun with apostrophes, check out William Blake.
Spelling reform is impossible for a very basic reason: we don’t all pronouce the words the same way. A Bostoner says “cah,” whereas I say “car” with an “R.” And that’s just in the US. I say “Aitch Pee” for Hewlett-Packard, whereas my British colleage says “Haitch-Pee.” And so on.
Some apostrophes are dropped. For a while after people started shortening omnibus they wrote 'bus but not even the most irrationally conservative grammar pedants object to bus now.
Or, as Gershwin noted: “You say pa-tay-to and I say pa-tah-to . . . Let’s call the whole thing off.”
What, are you saying that people no longer properly use the word “violincello”?
I’m off to my piano’ lesson.
Ok, just for fun I’m going to try to repeat what you said in my completely made up new spellings for english 
wii duu wee need speling refoorm?
tuu get rid of such abserditees aas wei, thot, thruu, etc. Eenglish speling haas litul tuu duu with spooken Inglish eenimoor.
Why do we need spelling reform?
To get rid of such absurdities as weigh, thought, through, etc. English spelling has little to do with spoken english anymore.
Hehe, thats kinda funny! I heard that the dutch differentiate long and short vowel sounds by using either one or two vowels together. That’s what I tried to do, although it sort of depends on your pronunciation as well. I am from the south so I would pronounce the words get and rid with the same vowel sound! I am sure that not everyone would do so. But in the end, I don’t really know how much it would be worth it. For me, i think one of the things of having such a weird spelling is that the sounds of our words tend to mutate a little more. I had a few problems placing some of those sounds in my translation. In “Anymore” how would you say the first “is pronounced?” Its kind of like the “e” in “pen” but not quite. Its certainly not an “a” sound as with the word “any” to me. But you would have to actually think about the phonetics of the word when you spell it which wasn’t easy for me to do. I only know about the German spelling reform of a few years ago and that wasn’t very severe as what it would be to write English in purely phonetic terms.
Although I do admit it would be cool, and I’d like to learn how to write like that. It would be neat to learn something new but still the same at the same time.
Sorry that should be about the first “A” in “Anymore”
I’m afraid so. Cit’e
OK, the apostrophe isn’t really right there. “e” isn’t in “citation”. How DO you abbreviate in that way?
Without apostrophes, smart people wouldn’t be able to deride imbeciles about their incorrect use of “its” and “it’s.”
Where would the fun be in that?
Up your’s!
Apostrophes are not only alive and well, their use is expanding. Frequently a thread is started here about more sightings of apostrophes to denote plurals. I mean, “plural’s”.
Merkwurdigliebe- You’d really like Quickscript then.
To write it, you have to sound things out, but you get 40 letters to play with, one for each sound in english, so things work a bit better. I take notes in it, since it’s alot faster than writing in traditional english once you get the hang of it. A typical sentence can use half the pen strokes of a similar sentence written out the normal way.
Another neat thing about it is that you can see other people’s accents when they write, it truly is speach captured on paper. To the naysayers who say that different people’s accents make spelling reform impossible, I say it doesn’t matter. If you can understand what someone is saying aloud, then you can understand a phonetic alphabet. The differences between there, their, and they’re don’t need to be spelled out to you when you hear someone talk; you should be able to ( and can)figure it out on paper as well. You see these words misused all the time, yet you can still figure out what the person meant…the only thing throwing you off was the wrong spelling. If all three words were spelled the same, you’d never lose a beat.