Letter: A mongrel language

Mrs H Marie Bell (letter, 30 January) recommends phonetic spelling reform to encourage early literacy in children. Fine! Let's write "ov" for "of", "hed" for "head" and eliminate "gh". Go beyond such timid steps, however, and you force millions worldwide to bow down to RP. Try selling that.

And once children have learned to read only the new code, try getting them to take an interest in the 600 years of English literature which will all suddenly look archaic. Or will they just scroll up a few controversially re-spelt Internet versions?

While localised, ethnically pure, languages like German can promote a degree of cohesion by imposing a phonetic system favourable to the elite dialect, I'm afraid our haplessly universal and mongrel language can only retain its own cohesion by, in the main, sticking to its historical morphology, to grasp which, incidentally, is an education in itself.