Worth mentioning that a spelling reform like Twain's would mean that every accent would need to be spelled differently, or the sounds wouldn't match for most speakers. It's quite possible that some British dialects would be very hard to read for some Americans and vice versa, even if they were used to the system for their own dialect.

For instance, Twain spells "after" like "aafte", but in my accent I would probably spell it "afdr".

Twain has also run in to the problem that spoken English has far more vowels then written English does. He uses "ai" in both "minds"/"maindz" and "replace"/"riplais", but presumably they represent different sounds.

Presumably OP's system has the same problems with the dialects of Chinese, now that I think about it. Although I know very little about Chinese unfortunately (only what I know now from a few seconds of googling).

An amusing example of this is the character Bascule in Banks' Feersum Endjinn, who narrates like so:

> Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Egrates the ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u 1/2 a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.

I personally enjoyed it and never had much trouble figuring it out, but know people who found it unpleasant and incomprehensible.

My Chinese knowledge is limited, but I believe that words in Chinese would not be affected by accent in the same way. This is because even though, for example, in the Taiwanese accent sh is pronounced like s, "shi" and "si" are still "spelt" differently and consistently when using a phonetic writing system like pinyin or zhuyin. There are still individual words that are pronounced differently in different regions, but that's not related to accent.

Not too far off from IPA

Had a good laugh reading this as it transformed along, that's great and could make interesting storytelling that would show the passing of time through a changing writing.

You may like the novel Ella Minnow Pea

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea

Year 15 seems particularly grating: English had letters for ch, th, and sh. Should have just started using those again. The kicker being that the single consonant for "ch" was <drumroll> just c.

You jest, but Simplified Chinese came into existence because Traditional Chinese is (and derivatives like Japanese Kanji are) generally regarded as too complicated.

Of course, the degree to which the complexity is disdained varies depending on who you ask: Japanese saw fit to reuse mostly as-is, Hangul chose to replace it wholesale, and so on. Simplfied Chinese is somewhere in-between, not replacing wholesale but simplifying characters often to the point of bastardization.

Japanese do have shinjitai characters which are also simplified, but differently, although there are definitely fewer such characters than in Simplified Chinese.

My favorite is the simplification of 龍 (dragon) - in Simplified Chinese, they took the right hand side and derived 龙; in Japanese Shinjitai, they took the left hand side and obtained 竜.

Chinese speakers would probably think it is 龟 instead loll

I learned Japanese first, and 龟 still regularly trips me up when reading simplified characters.

It wasn’t too complicated. 95% of the country couldn’t read it write. And printing was impossible.

You may want to read up on the history of printing in East Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...