Proposal For A More User-friendly English

[thommie77]

PROPOSAL FOR A MORE USER-FRIENDLY ENGLISH

Recently I became aware of a proposal to the Council of Ministers of the European Union for the phased introduction of a Pan-European standard for a more user-friendly communication:

‘Having chosen English as the preferred language in the European Union, the European Parliament has commissioned a feasibility study into ways of improving efficiency in communications between Government Departments.

European officials have often pointed out that English spelling is unnecessarily difficult. For example: cough, plough, rough, through en thorough. What is clearly needed is a phased programme of changes to iron out these anomalies. The programme would, of course, be administered by a committee staffed at top level by all participating nations.

In the first year, the committee would suggest using ‘s’ instead of the soft ‘c’. Sertainly, sivil servants in all sities would reseive this news with joy. Then the hard ‘c’ kould be replaced by a ‘k’, sinse both letters are pronounced alike. Not only would this klear up konfusion in the minds of klerikal workers, but keyboards kould be made with fewer letters.

There would be growing enthousiasm when in the second year it was announced that the troublesome ‘ph’ would hensforth be written with ‘f’. This would make words like ‘fotograf’ twenty persent shorter in print.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kould be ekspekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible. Governments would enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always been a deterent to akurate speling.

We would al agre that the horible mes of silent ‘e’s in the languag is disgrasful. Therefor, we kould drop thes and kontinu to read and writ as though nothing had hapend. By this tim it would be four years sins the skem began and peopl would be reseptiv to steps sutsh as replasing ‘th’ by ‘z’. Perhaps zen ze funktion of ‘w’ kould be taken on by ze ‘v’, vitsh is, afteral, half a ‘w’.

Shortly after zis, ze unesesary ‘o’ kuld be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’. Similar arguments vud ofkors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

Kontinuing zis proses yer after yer, ve vud eventuli hav a reli sensibl vriten styl. After tventi yers zer vud be n mor trubls, difikultis and evrivun vud find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Zen ze drems of ze Guvenment vud finali hav kum tru.’

[Thomas_Merton]

Kontinuing zis proses yer after yer, ve vud eventuli hav a reli sensibl vriten styl. After tventi yers zer vud be n mor trubls, difikultis and evrivun vud find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Zen ze drems of ze Guvenment vud finali hav kum tru.’

The Norwegians actually did this with their language.

Any Dane or Swede (who understands Norwegian) will tell you how funny it looks.

Rumour has it the reason Norwegian sounds as though it is sung, is because those Vikings are so happy they no longer make spelling mistakes.

[kayo]

Thank god this is in the jokes section! I nearly had another of those, "Oh my god what is the world coming to??" moments...

Zose ´appen so frikwentli zese dayz