The official Dutch language received its third revision about twenty years back. The first edition in the late 1800s was meant to do exactly what you are writing about: turning the hodgepodge of writing styles into a common system.
Roosevelt would today be written as Rozenveld, meaning rose field.
[Both versions have the same pronunciation because the single ‘o’ is already the same sound as the ‘oo’ when it is followed by a single consonant plus vowel, the ‘z’ is closer to the actual pronunciation than the ‘s’ is (but the sound would be an ‘s’ for a singular ‘roos’ by itself), the rule for pronouncing an 'n' allows for a hardly audible sound and it does not need emphasizing here, and the 'd' at the end of a word has a 't' sound to it, all according to the current rules].
The writing rules are applied only to things government and schools. Anyone else can write whichever way they want; there is no policing, except for schools and governments (in Belgium, the Netherlands and Suriname). For instance, contact is the official spelling, but I like to write it as kontakt because the k is simpler (has just one way of pronouncing it). It gets trickier with accept because I write it as aksept. Folks can get on edge when they have to think about something they really don't want to think about. Call it habit. Most of my friends write the official way, as do all newspapers, but they can read my way of writing fine in most cases.
What I really dislike about the way English is written is that one cannot know beforehand how to pronounce a word. In Dutch, thanks to the rules, that is close to impossible (but not fully impossible). I've been told that Spanish is truly accurate in the way it is written and pronounced.
While it is time for some good revision, I do not mind if foreign words are written according to foreign rules. That way, one can see that a word is foreign in origin.
But true English words should be written according to a basic set of rules.
To finish this off: three English words that can be recognized in Dutch words without too much trouble. Notice how the English words don't and the Dutch words do follow the same writing rules.
High --- hoog
Dry --- droog
Eye --- oog
Thank you for saying out loud what should already be in place for English but isn’t.
