I have no educational credentials to offer here, but I'm going to give my two cents anyway. I just need to say to Skeeter Lewis that your comment "It's based on the fallacious idea that words have to be pronounced as they are spelled" is highly irritating. I live in an area where people make up incredibly annoying spellings for names because they don't believe things need to be pronounced the way they are spelled. People can't just go around creating new spellings for sounds that already exist in the English language and write it off as "words don't have to be pronounced as they're spelled." Just sayin'.