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Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the E

Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become 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 "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one 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 expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas."

anticristi 6y ago
I dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu mention meni iregular verbs. Mai vot gos tu som nordik languag like Svedish.
- dkdbejwi383 6y ago
  You're not going to get a lot of support here, unless you change your vote to Rust.
  - soldehierro 6y ago
    Esperanto > Rust
- sltkr 6y ago
  Does German have (significantly) more irregular verbs than English?
  - dmoy 6y ago
    No. German has significantly fewer irregular verbs than English. It's ~200 to ~300. (French is double that?) There's enough to be moderately annoying, but not that bad. Also (in my personal opinion), German irregular verbs tend to be not-as-irregular as English.
    - gecko 6y ago
      The fuzzy thing with counting French irregular verbs is that there are so many that follow similar patterns that they really can't be treated as fully irregular. More, like...oddly specific variants of the -re/-ir/-er verb classes. (You can get into this with English, too, in things like "to come", "came"/"to become", "became", or "to hold", "held"/"to behold", "beheld", but we actually IIRC have fewer groupings like this.) So the raw French number is higher in a strict sense, but potentially between English and German overall.
- yongjik 6y ago
  Unpopular opinion: Declension and conjugation are nice! It means different forms for the act of watching X (watching birds), X that is watching (watching eyes), or X that is used for the act of watching (watching post). So you immediately know which one is which, instead of trying to figure that out from context (you have 200 milliseconds before the next sentence starts, good luck).
  - HideousKojima 6y ago
    In English it's not based on context, it's based on word order. Declension is a cool concept but it's far more confusing to foreigners because word order basically doesn't matter. For example in Czech: Jan zabil Petra Jan Petra zabil Petra Jan zabil Petra zabil Jan Zabil Petra Jan and Zabil Jan Petra are all equivalent to the English "John killed Peter." Change Jan to Jana and Petra to Petr and all 6 of those become "Peter killed John." Even more confusing to a foreigner learning it is that Petra and Jana are the feminine forms of those names in the nominative case.
- vidarh 6y ago
  If you want to go that route, it's fun to imagine a "unified Germanic" achieved by systematic reform to bring the main Germanic language closer together. Start by purging English of French influence, starting with words where words of Germanic origin exists with a similar meaning. Simplify German grammar. Undo some consonant shifts. E.g (the German and Dutch I had to check/adjust w/Google translate; no guarantees for accuracy): Swedish: En dag kan vi alla tala samma språk Norwegian: En dag kan vi alle snakke samme språk (or "det samme språket") Danish: En dag kan vi alle tale det samme sprog German: Eines Tages können wir alle dieselbe Sprache sprechen Dutch: Op een dag kunnen we allemaal dezelfde taal spreken English: One day we can all speak the same language Now consider "speech" as an alternative to "language" in English (alternatively: "tale" is valid but archaic in Norwegian in this context and we have the English cognate "talk"), and undo that D->T consonant shift in German (e.g. compare Tag to Low German "Dag"), and replace "the" (compare det/de/die/das/der etc.). There are a whole lot of simple spelling and sound changes that'd bring the above languages a lot closer together very easily. Of course it's easy in theory - in practice I've lived through multiple Norwegian language reforms and know how excruciatingly slow it can be to get people to adapt (e.g. Norway changed the spoken form of numbers above 20 in 1952 from the equivalent of "four and fifty" to "fifty-four"; my parents learned the new forms in primary school, yet I still picked up the old forms from them in the late 70's and still switch back and forth between the old and new forms now)
- HDMI_Cable 6y ago
  I don't think declensions and conjugations matter all that much, seeing how Latin was the Lingua Franca for 2000+ years, and _the_ Lingua Franca: French, has a load of irregulars too. But we all know that it should be Esperanto.
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    Esperanto is more like Go. Rust is more like lojban
gxqoz 6y ago
The Economist had a recent article on why spelling reform never really gains traction. Basically, those in power to change it have no incentive to do so: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-so-hard-to-fix-maddening-spelling-systems https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-...
- ajuc 6y ago
  But other languages (like Polish or German for example) have spelling reforms from time to time.
  - anticristi 6y ago
    Also Norwegian and Swedish. Romania also had some spelling reform, albeit it was more motivated by a desire to distance itself from a communist past and not cleanup of tech debt.
  - kaesar14 6y ago
    I think it's easier when there's a single polity that represents the "entirety" of that languages speaking community. Nobody controls English in the same way - I'd say the US and UK have equal claim to being able to formalize language changes, but good luck getting 2 billion people to follow them.
  - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
    I think for those languages (I know French and German have them, unsure about Polish) there is a central body which "controls" the language, meanwhile in English we don't have one.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      There is one for Polish but I think English speakers overestimate the power such bodies have over people :) The only power they have is influencing the way kids are taught at school. Everything else changes by social pressure and exposure - most media choose to follow the new convention and people get used to it over time. The changes are very gradual - the only big one I remember was in 90s - changing how "not" was written with adjectives and adverbs. The rules got much simpler so few people complained.
Robotbeat 6y ago
You still need c for “ch” so perhaps, like Indonesian, you can just use “c” in place of “ch.” Oh, and Indonesian is my favorite lingua franca. Super easy to learn for anyone and also simple, phonetic spelling. I had only ever learned Indo-European languages (ie English, Spanish, French) and a bit of Japanese (also unrelated to Indonesian), but I was able to pick up a useful amount of conversational Indonesian in about 3-4 weeks. Indonesian is an Austronesian language (actually a standardized variant of Malay) and totally unrelated to my mother tongue (American English), yet it was the easiest thing to pick up. Sounding out new words in Indonesian is actually easier than English to me.
mywittyname 6y ago
This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and makes changes which are important for the sound of the language. The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra are all totally different words to a native English speaker. I'm absolutely behind the idea of simplified English where spelling and pronunciation match. But that's a lofty goal, as first one would have to canonize English, which is basically impossible at this point. Then they'd have to tackle homonyms, like cot and caught (assuming canonized English has these pronounced the same).
- anticristi 6y ago
  So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum. An small change will make spelling closer to some dialect, and further from most other dialects. The current situation is suboptimal for everyone, but at least it's a Nash equilibrium.
  - rootbear 6y ago
    I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.
    - naniwaduni 6y ago
      You're hitting the phonological analogue of Moravec's law: the "ough" mess is precisely the kind of thing that can't easily be simplified in a way that works across English dialects. It hits a wide swath of basic vocabulary that originally had a small range of slightly awkward pronunciations that diverged in descendant English. Different dialects don't split those pronunciations the same way. The real low-hanging fruit is getting the British to give up on those spellings that follow a dead branch of French ;-)
  - 6y ago
dang 6y ago
Believe it or not, that joke originated in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884 and the links back from there. (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809658.)
mixmastamyk 6y ago
c can then be used as "ch", as in Italian. x can then be used as "sh", as in Portuguese.
- mason55 6y ago
  Speaking of Portuguese, I've always found the usage of "ç" to be interesting. I've never studied the language but just from looking at words it's clearly the way to represent the soft "c" sound before a "fat" vowel (a/o/u). How did those words ended up with a "ç" instead of an "s"? This thread finally made me remember to go look it up and it seems like the "ç" used to be a different sound (/dz/). I guess it evolved to the "s" sound we hear today sometime by the 1700s. I wonder if that means only words older than the 1700s have the cedilha and newer words would just be spelled with an "s"?
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Yes, I always figured it was related to the French usage. Not sure who used it first. Hmm, guess that leaves Þ | Θ - thorn or theta for "th", but I'm less enthusiastic.
zentiggr 6y ago
Very adept adaptation of the Mark Twain original!
mbroncano 6y ago
That is lovely, thanks for ‘ze laf’. One minor note, it reads much more like Dutch to me :)
- User23 6y ago
  As someone who speaks both English and German natively, I can say Dutch makes my brain hurt whenever I hear it. It’s like my brain can’t pick which neural pathways to use and the dissonance is awful.
  - sethhochberg 6y ago
    Even as a native English speaker who speaks no German, I find being in The Netherlands to feel a lot like the part of my brain that is hearing a conversation and trying to tune in is working at native speed, but the language parsing part can't make any sense of it. Sometimes when I'm in parts of the world where I'm surrounded by other languages I don't speak, I find I'm almost automatically tuning out people speaking them around me. That doesn't happen at all with Dutch.
fbellag 6y ago
I've half-jokingly, proposed a similar change to Spanish, basically: z, c (as in "ce", "ci"): use "s" (non european spanish speakers do not distinguish these sounds anyway) v: always use "b" c (as in "ca", "co", "cu"), q(u) (as in "que", "quiso"): replaced with "k" w: why do we have this letter?! use "u" y (as vowel): use "i" (basically only used as "and" in Spanish) y (as consonant): stays like it is now (important in some variants where it sounds pretty much as "sh" in English) ll as in "lluvia": replaced with "y" h (mute as in "hueso", "humano"): Just remove it (ueso, umano) ch (as in "chorizo"): replaced with "c" r, rr: Couldn't yet find a good replacement that's not ambiguous for the soft and vibrant sounds in all the use-cases... ñ: this stays. it gives the language personality! I've got not much traction with my friend, though!!!!!
- young_unixer 6y ago
  I would prefer B and V to keep being disctint letters. As far as I know, when properly pronounced, the V in Villa doesn't sound the same as the B in Billete. Sure, sometimes they blend into each other, but not always.
  - fbellag 6y ago
    Yes, in "proper" spanish they sound different. That said, except when exaggerating, I know noone who makes the distinction in day to day conversations!
    - pezezin 6y ago
      If you are pronouncing B and V differently, then it's not proper Spanish.
  - fbellag 6y ago
    At least not where I live, that's it!
- fbellag 6y ago
  Adding to my post, with regards to "y": In school we are teached there are 5 vowels "aeiou" yet the "y" sound when used alone is a vowel!
opencl 6y ago
That one predates Reddit's existence, it was already being passed around the internet in the 90s. There are a couple of slightly different variations floating around. https://web.archive.org/web/19991006200917/http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/humour/euroenglish.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991006200917/http://users.ox.a...

anticristi 6y ago

I dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu mention meni iregular verbs. Mai vot gos tu som nordik languag like Svedish.

dkdbejwi383 6y ago
You're not going to get a lot of support here, unless you change your vote to Rust.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  Esperanto > Rust
sltkr 6y ago
Does German have (significantly) more irregular verbs than English?
- dmoy 6y ago
  No. German has significantly fewer irregular verbs than English. It's ~200 to ~300. (French is double that?) There's enough to be moderately annoying, but not that bad. Also (in my personal opinion), German irregular verbs tend to be not-as-irregular as English.
  - gecko 6y ago
    The fuzzy thing with counting French irregular verbs is that there are so many that follow similar patterns that they really can't be treated as fully irregular. More, like...oddly specific variants of the -re/-ir/-er verb classes. (You can get into this with English, too, in things like "to come", "came"/"to become", "became", or "to hold", "held"/"to behold", "beheld", but we actually IIRC have fewer groupings like this.) So the raw French number is higher in a strict sense, but potentially between English and German overall.
yongjik 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: Declension and conjugation are nice! It means different forms for the act of watching X (watching birds), X that is watching (watching eyes), or X that is used for the act of watching (watching post). So you immediately know which one is which, instead of trying to figure that out from context (you have 200 milliseconds before the next sentence starts, good luck).
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  In English it's not based on context, it's based on word order. Declension is a cool concept but it's far more confusing to foreigners because word order basically doesn't matter. For example in Czech: Jan zabil Petra Jan Petra zabil Petra Jan zabil Petra zabil Jan Zabil Petra Jan and Zabil Jan Petra are all equivalent to the English "John killed Peter." Change Jan to Jana and Petra to Petr and all 6 of those become "Peter killed John." Even more confusing to a foreigner learning it is that Petra and Jana are the feminine forms of those names in the nominative case.
vidarh 6y ago
If you want to go that route, it's fun to imagine a "unified Germanic" achieved by systematic reform to bring the main Germanic language closer together. Start by purging English of French influence, starting with words where words of Germanic origin exists with a similar meaning. Simplify German grammar. Undo some consonant shifts. E.g (the German and Dutch I had to check/adjust w/Google translate; no guarantees for accuracy): Swedish: En dag kan vi alla tala samma språk Norwegian: En dag kan vi alle snakke samme språk (or "det samme språket") Danish: En dag kan vi alle tale det samme sprog German: Eines Tages können wir alle dieselbe Sprache sprechen Dutch: Op een dag kunnen we allemaal dezelfde taal spreken English: One day we can all speak the same language Now consider "speech" as an alternative to "language" in English (alternatively: "tale" is valid but archaic in Norwegian in this context and we have the English cognate "talk"), and undo that D->T consonant shift in German (e.g. compare Tag to Low German "Dag"), and replace "the" (compare det/de/die/das/der etc.). There are a whole lot of simple spelling and sound changes that'd bring the above languages a lot closer together very easily. Of course it's easy in theory - in practice I've lived through multiple Norwegian language reforms and know how excruciatingly slow it can be to get people to adapt (e.g. Norway changed the spoken form of numbers above 20 in 1952 from the equivalent of "four and fifty" to "fifty-four"; my parents learned the new forms in primary school, yet I still picked up the old forms from them in the late 70's and still switch back and forth between the old and new forms now)
HDMI_Cable 6y ago
I don't think declensions and conjugations matter all that much, seeing how Latin was the Lingua Franca for 2000+ years, and _the_ Lingua Franca: French, has a load of irregulars too. But we all know that it should be Esperanto.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  Esperanto is more like Go. Rust is more like lojban

gxqoz 6y ago

The Economist had a recent article on why spelling reform never really gains traction. Basically, those in power to change it have no incentive to do so: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-so-hard-to-fix-maddening-spelling-systems https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-...

ajuc 6y ago
But other languages (like Polish or German for example) have spelling reforms from time to time.
- anticristi 6y ago
  Also Norwegian and Swedish. Romania also had some spelling reform, albeit it was more motivated by a desire to distance itself from a communist past and not cleanup of tech debt.
- kaesar14 6y ago
  I think it's easier when there's a single polity that represents the "entirety" of that languages speaking community. Nobody controls English in the same way - I'd say the US and UK have equal claim to being able to formalize language changes, but good luck getting 2 billion people to follow them.
- HDMI_Cable 6y ago
  I think for those languages (I know French and German have them, unsure about Polish) there is a central body which "controls" the language, meanwhile in English we don't have one.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    There is one for Polish but I think English speakers overestimate the power such bodies have over people :) The only power they have is influencing the way kids are taught at school. Everything else changes by social pressure and exposure - most media choose to follow the new convention and people get used to it over time. The changes are very gradual - the only big one I remember was in 90s - changing how "not" was written with adjectives and adverbs. The rules got much simpler so few people complained.

Robotbeat 6y ago

You still need c for “ch” so perhaps, like Indonesian, you can just use “c” in place of “ch.” Oh, and Indonesian is my favorite lingua franca. Super easy to learn for anyone and also simple, phonetic spelling. I had only ever learned Indo-European languages (ie English, Spanish, French) and a bit of Japanese (also unrelated to Indonesian), but I was able to pick up a useful amount of conversational Indonesian in about 3-4 weeks. Indonesian is an Austronesian language (actually a standardized variant of Malay) and totally unrelated to my mother tongue (American English), yet it was the easiest thing to pick up. Sounding out new words in Indonesian is actually easier than English to me.

mywittyname 6y ago

This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and makes changes which are important for the sound of the language. The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra are all totally different words to a native English speaker. I'm absolutely behind the idea of simplified English where spelling and pronunciation match. But that's a lofty goal, as first one would have to canonize English, which is basically impossible at this point. Then they'd have to tackle homonyms, like cot and caught (assuming canonized English has these pronounced the same).

anticristi 6y ago
So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum. An small change will make spelling closer to some dialect, and further from most other dialects. The current situation is suboptimal for everyone, but at least it's a Nash equilibrium.
- rootbear 6y ago
  I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.
  - naniwaduni 6y ago
    You're hitting the phonological analogue of Moravec's law: the "ough" mess is precisely the kind of thing that can't easily be simplified in a way that works across English dialects. It hits a wide swath of basic vocabulary that originally had a small range of slightly awkward pronunciations that diverged in descendant English. Different dialects don't split those pronunciations the same way. The real low-hanging fruit is getting the British to give up on those spellings that follow a dead branch of French ;-)
- 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Believe it or not, that joke originated in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884 and the links back from there. (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809658.)

mixmastamyk 6y ago

c can then be used as "ch", as in Italian. x can then be used as "sh", as in Portuguese.

mason55 6y ago
Speaking of Portuguese, I've always found the usage of "ç" to be interesting. I've never studied the language but just from looking at words it's clearly the way to represent the soft "c" sound before a "fat" vowel (a/o/u). How did those words ended up with a "ç" instead of an "s"? This thread finally made me remember to go look it up and it seems like the "ç" used to be a different sound (/dz/). I guess it evolved to the "s" sound we hear today sometime by the 1700s. I wonder if that means only words older than the 1700s have the cedilha and newer words would just be spelled with an "s"?
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Yes, I always figured it was related to the French usage. Not sure who used it first. Hmm, guess that leaves Þ | Θ - thorn or theta for "th", but I'm less enthusiastic.

zentiggr 6y ago

Very adept adaptation of the Mark Twain original!

mbroncano 6y ago

That is lovely, thanks for ‘ze laf’. One minor note, it reads much more like Dutch to me :)

User23 6y ago
As someone who speaks both English and German natively, I can say Dutch makes my brain hurt whenever I hear it. It’s like my brain can’t pick which neural pathways to use and the dissonance is awful.
- sethhochberg 6y ago
  Even as a native English speaker who speaks no German, I find being in The Netherlands to feel a lot like the part of my brain that is hearing a conversation and trying to tune in is working at native speed, but the language parsing part can't make any sense of it. Sometimes when I'm in parts of the world where I'm surrounded by other languages I don't speak, I find I'm almost automatically tuning out people speaking them around me. That doesn't happen at all with Dutch.

fbellag 6y ago

I've half-jokingly, proposed a similar change to Spanish, basically: z, c (as in "ce", "ci"): use "s" (non european spanish speakers do not distinguish these sounds anyway) v: always use "b" c (as in "ca", "co", "cu"), q(u) (as in "que", "quiso"): replaced with "k" w: why do we have this letter?! use "u" y (as vowel): use "i" (basically only used as "and" in Spanish) y (as consonant): stays like it is now (important in some variants where it sounds pretty much as "sh" in English) ll as in "lluvia": replaced with "y" h (mute as in "hueso", "humano"): Just remove it (ueso, umano) ch (as in "chorizo"): replaced with "c" r, rr: Couldn't yet find a good replacement that's not ambiguous for the soft and vibrant sounds in all the use-cases... ñ: this stays. it gives the language personality! I've got not much traction with my friend, though!!!!!

young_unixer 6y ago
I would prefer B and V to keep being disctint letters. As far as I know, when properly pronounced, the V in Villa doesn't sound the same as the B in Billete. Sure, sometimes they blend into each other, but not always.
- fbellag 6y ago
  Yes, in "proper" spanish they sound different. That said, except when exaggerating, I know noone who makes the distinction in day to day conversations!
  - pezezin 6y ago
    If you are pronouncing B and V differently, then it's not proper Spanish.
- fbellag 6y ago
  At least not where I live, that's it!
fbellag 6y ago
Adding to my post, with regards to "y": In school we are teached there are 5 vowels "aeiou" yet the "y" sound when used alone is a vowel!

opencl 6y ago

That one predates Reddit's existence, it was already being passed around the internet in the 90s. There are a couple of slightly different variations floating around. https://web.archive.org/web/19991006200917/http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/humour/euroenglish.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991006200917/http://users.ox.a...