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Viliam comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong
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Spelling is more a gauge of how attentive you were in early schooling than of how intelligent you are. It's basically a form of conspicuous consumption of the scarce resources of childhood attention and teaching time.
The cultural notion that bad spelling is an indicator of stupidity is self-reinforcing, though: it prevents English from undergoing spelling reforms like those German, Spanish, Russian, and many other languages have had, because any "reformed" spelling will necessarily look like ignorant spelling.
Because English spelling is unusually difficult, it is a challenge. Because it is a challenge, people who have mastered it care about the fact that they have mastered it. And because of that, it can't be made easier.
It is much easier to do a spelling reform in a mostly illiterate country, where you can defend it by saying "look, most people can't read, we need to make it easier for them". Having a monarchy or dictatorship also helps to introduce the changes quickly and everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography
Today I learned: Russian once had a letter for "th", but it was removed and replaced by either "f" or "t".
Indeed. Look at the rejected recent German orthography reform – and the changes were (relatively) minor.
Or the messed up Slovak orthography reform from the '90s – and that was mostly a few acutes here and there.