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It's actually worse than this; you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well. Otherwise, would a speaker of local Dublin english spell tree and three the same? And should a speaker of South Eastern Hiberno-English spell three and tree differently, even though the difference in their t and th is indistinguishable to most speakers of British English?

The lack of exact correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is a feature, not a bug.

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> you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well.

No, not at all. Several Italian words have regional variants, and they are simply spelled differently.

When you are used to a phonetic alphabet, you never wonder how to write what you say.

The differences in regional accents between say local Dublin English and the Supra regional Dublin accent (i.e. without even leaving the city) are reasonably large. I dunno what italian dialectal differences is, but Englishes are often very large city.

I'm not saying it's impossible; Trainspotting, for example, is mostly written in phonetic Scottish english. Many english speakers find it difficult to read though, for precisely that reason…

I would say that an exact, unambiguous phonetic writing (like in Spanish, Korean, Japanese kana, Mongol in Cyrillic mode, etc) would help flatten the pronunciation differences.

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