One for our resident spelling master

[tony]

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 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.

[OLR-067]

hat Sinn zu mir.....

[Tommy]

Mein Gott in Himmel. Welsh Die Welt ist, Die Dazu Kommt. Wir Werden alle Deutsche werdens. Ebenso Lange, Wie Wir Noch Unsere Landrover Behalten Können.

[JDNSW]

No real comment needed - but it does point out several of the problems with "spelling reform" in English; the most obvious one being that if any local reform like this took place, the rest of the English speaking world would be cut off from the reformed area, at least as far as written English goes.

Note that no spelling reform has ever been successful for any language where there is less than a large majority of speakers in the country making the change - and even there it has been a tremendous effort.

With an international language like English, changes come through useage and cannot be mandated.

John