language
Thought the TOC-ers might be
interested
Anjana Basu
The European Commission
has just announced an
agreement whereby English
will be the official
language of the EU rather
than German which was the
other possibility. As part
of the negotiations, Her
Majesty's Government
conceded that English spelling
had some room for
improvement and has accepted a 5
year phase-in plan that
would be known as
"Euro-English".
In the first year,
"s" will replace the soft "c".
Sertainly, this will make
the sivil servants jump
with joy. The hard
"c" will be dropped in favour of
the"k". This
should klear up konfusion and keyboards
kan have 1 less
letter.
There will be growing
publik enthusiasm in the
sekond year, when the
troublesome "ph" will be
replaced with
"f". This will make words like
"fotograf" 20%
shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik
akseptanse of the new
spelling kan be ekspekted
to reach the stage where
more komplikated changes
are possible. Governments
will enkorage the removal
of double letters, which
have always ben a deterent
to akurate speling. Also,
al wil agre that the
horible mes of the silent "e"s
in the language is
disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the fourth year, peopl
wil be reseptiv to steps
such as replasing
"th" with "z" and "w" with
"v".
During ze fifz year, ze
unesesary "o" kan be dropd
from vords kontaining
"ou" and similar changes vud
of kors be aplid to ozer
kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil
hav a reli sensibl riten
styl. Zer vil be no mor
trubl or difikultis and
evrivun vil find it ezi to
understand ech ozer.
Ze drem vil finali kum
tru! And zen ve vil tak over ze world!