A bizarre incident involving a mentally ill woman recently occurred at a store in Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province, where the suspect, wielding knives and wearing a cat mask, threatened employees and customers, including small children.
When the police arrested her and asked why she did it, she answered “meow” and said, “Can’t tell you that, meow.”
They also simplified spelling to make literacy a bit easier. The downside was that it obscured etymologies. And they didn’t reform spelling all that much. The last time written English was a phonetic representation of spoken English was in Chaucer’s time, before the Great Vowel Shift. Even then, there were big dialectal differences that weren’t always respected in spelling (e.g., Somerset’s metathesis of “great” into “gurt,” which still survives in some rural populations).