Morpheus wrote:This is the most important issue in my opinion:
Change y and ý to i and í, respectively; this acknowledgment of the delabialization process is analogous to how Old Norse (ON) ǿ has merged with ON ǽ both in pronounciation and spelling - i.e., æ - in Modern Icelandic.
Examples: styðja v. 'support' and þýða v. 'explain' become stiðja and þíða, respectively. Compare with, e.g., ON bǿn n. 'prayer' which is written bæn in Modern Icelandic.
(Of course, one could alternatively make the orthography more consistent by respecting the distinction between ON ǿ and ǽ. The former could be written ø and the latter æ in Modern Icelandic. Hence, bøn n. 'prayer' but næmur adj. 'quick at learning'.)
So your problem isn't that the phonemes /I/ and /i/ both have two spellings, but rather that the spelling is
inconsistent in being more etymological in one place than in another? Now, I can sort of understand this myself, but I'm afraid that's probably an issue only a hardcore language geek would care about.
Most people who actually need to use the orthography in their daily lives are probably not all that concerned by this. A bigger problem for them, I presume, is remembering which words to spell with <i í> and which with <y ý> - and
that, I think, might be a real reason to consider getting rid of the latter pair in spelling.
Still, as I've said before, having two spellings for the same sound isn't always just a bad thing. I personally would keep <y ý> at least in the most common words, to disambiguate homophones, and for the i-umlauted versions of <u ú>. In other situations, <i í> could perhaps become acceptable variants, but I don't think I'd go as far as to prohibit using the traditional spellings altogether.