The English language is a glorious hodgepodge of a variety of mother tongues. There are bits of Welsh, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and a bit of original English in this language. This is why there are so many ways to spell the same sounds. That and of course people would always spell the way they wanted to before dictionaries were invented. 😉
Since I have a very hard time remembering how to spell certain words, I am in favor of scrapping the current way of spelling things and coming up with an alphabet that allows us to spell words the way they sound.
I’m sure we could get rid of the C, Q and X. These can be replaced by S, K, KW, KS and EKS. Should there be multiple letters for the long and short vowel sounds? What about those the Th and Sh sounds? New letters? Maybe. The easiest to teach would be 1 letter per sound. If we keep everything close to the current looks of the alphabet, it would be easier to learn than the metric system. 😉 Just think no more I before E except after whatever…. No wondering if that was spelled with a C or an S or maybe a K. What are we waiting for. So to experiment, I give you the following (long vowel sounds will be replaced by double vowels and the Th and Sh and Ch will remain — No new letters on this keyboard.)
II was up laat tuuniit beekuz II fel asleep direeng aa balgaam. II wook up direeng thu last ineeng. The Tiigers wun. If thaa win tuumoroo, thaa wil bee the Sentral leeg champs. Goo Tiigers!!
Dang, that was difficult to type. Maybe the learning curve is steeper than I thought… 😉
easier to read than type apparently. But, ok.. GO Tigers (for now, anyway)
For some reason, grammar and spelling rules were always much easier for me to remember than most things, so I’ll have to disagree with you – at least what you said before you blew the learning curve, ha ha!
I always had issues with the smarty pants who ruined the curve in school… oops, I guess at times that would have been me.
If you want easier phonetics, learn Chinese. One character per word.
Or many characters that can mean the same word, depending on where you are in China.
That was hard to read!!! I think I’ll stick with the old regular way. 😉
😀
Your post just reminded me of a joke I read awhile back… [checks Google] ah, here it is:
Euro-English
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 people 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 sensibl 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.
Great joke, Derek!
Oh, YAH! Very funny! 😀 Mein Kapitan
Derek, or at least with a German accent. 😉
Thanks, but I didn’t write it, just dug it up. 🙂