Museamuse's query regarding "ize-ise" has left me wondering why we who speak English haven't incorporated some additional letters and standardis/z/ed the use of others. Russian, f'rinstance, has letters added to their basically Greek alphabet to properly render "shch" and "zh." Now why didn't WE think of that!
'Cause, if we can't even reform our spelling, how can we add letters. The older English alphabet had extra characters, e.g., þ, ð, but we dropped them. The letters j and w are rather new, i.e., the Roman alphabet didn't have them. We also seemed to have gone more for two-letter combos like ch, sh, and th. When Kyril and Methodius adapted the Greek alphabet to Russian, they got to do whatever they wanted because they were starting from scratch.
