Here's why Melvyn Ramsden's "Real Spelling" argument is just plain wrong:
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A couple of years ago, I had to disabuse the ginormous Facebook SWI groups of their belief that that -s in besides and perhaps was marking a plural in words like besides, towards, afterwards, or perhaps after no one bothered to stop and figure out that there is no such thing as one *perhap.
I'm not calling this out because I love to be the smartest, or because I think it makes me morally superior. It certainly isn't making me richer.
Middle English is a bit of an orthographic free-for-all, but by the Early Modern Period, say about 1550 or 1600, the present-day spellings of these words had taken root.
"Spelling is so multidimensional," said my friend. "There's grammar here, etymology, lexical phonology, and prosody.""It's everything," I agreed. "Spelling is never just spelling."