Symbols will not be as easily memorized by older readers.

While I think the standardization and simplification of written language would be a boon for teaching reading and writing English, I think the ASCII symbols would hamper its implementation. Two reasons 1) using symbols such as "^" and ":" would hamper the re-education of the public because it is too intimidating and unnatural. 2) using key strokes that require one to use the shift key would also be an annoyance and hamper the implementation of the ASCII written language.

Instead it would be more approachable if all sounds of the human language were converted into combinations of lowercase symbols of the 26 letter alphabet. For instance my name Kelly could be written "kehlee". Obviously this would lengthen some words but as I have stated the familiarity of letters would be much more comforting to people re-learning the language than would symbols. Obviously, to children, it would make not much difference because they are starting from a clean slate. But because we current users of the written language must be the ones to ultimately make the change it should be more easily accepeted by the older generations.

How about no? The language is really not that hard to begin with.

<<While I think the standardization and simplification of written language would be a boon for teaching reading and writing English, I think the ASCII symbols would hamper its implementation.>>

How come you don't make any mention of IPA and X-SAMPA, which are much more widely used than ASCII symbols?

<<Two reasons 1) using symbols such as "^" and ":" would hamper the re-education of the public because it is too intimidating and unnatural.>>

I really don't think it's too hard to learn the most commonly used IPA symbols, especially if you just limit yourself to the sounds of English.

<<Instead it would be more approachable if all sounds of the human language were converted into combinations of lowercase symbols of the 26 letter alphabet. For instance my name Kelly could be written "kehlee". >>

I'm sorry, but that's impossible. There is absolutely no way that you could convert "all the sounds of human language" into lowercase letters, unless you're willing to use a mess of non-intuitive digraphs, trigraphs, and possibly tetragraphs. You'd arrive at a system that would be no easier to learn than the IPA, and perhaps even harder.

<<But because we current users of the written language must be the ones to ultimately make the change it should be more easily accepeted by the older generations.>>

I think you're severely underestimating the ability of an adult to learn a new alphabet. Perhaps you could accuse me of the opposite, but I think that after a moderate level of study over the course of a few days, an adult could become proficient in IPA, just as they could in the Greek alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet.

The 26 letters we use in English are a subset of ASCII. What I believe you're refering to here is Antimoon's ASCII phonemic alphabet (which has rather fallen into disuse here on the forum).

http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-ascii.htm

There are 676 possible digraphs you can form using 26 letters. This is more than 3 times the number of IPA symbols. So you might be able to get by using single letters and digraphs most of the time. Though, yes, trigraphs and probably tetragraphs will crop up when you're converting from IPA symbols with diacritics.

Of course, this would produce something very unintuitive looking more like a code than normal writing. Nor would it be necessary. All you'd really want is to have a phonemic spelling for each language. However, even this is difficult for languages such as English with all its varied dialects.

Do we need spelling reform, though? English spelling is not perfect but it's not really all that hard most of the time.

Lazar and Jim- To be honest I will have to bone up on the subject to respond. Thank you for giving a point of reference from which to start. I realize that spelling reform is probably only an academic conversation however there are a few reasons it could be practical: 1) It could shave years off of the learning of the written language (so, yes, I think that there are many areas for improvement) 2) The more approachable we make language the better chance of children and adults to not be intimidated by written communication.

Jackson- Thanks for the smarta-- response. That is really beneficial to a thoughtful conversation.
"How about" tone it down a notch? Is there any reason for such a terse comment towards another person who has an interest (albeit budding) in this subject?