I saw today that there’s some proposed French spelling changes, and it made me think we should do the same for the English language too, which is riddled with inconsistencies and unnecessary letters that create bizarre exceptions that need to be learned.
Here’s what I’d change:
- Remove that pointless first “d” from “wednesday”, and the first “r” in february.
- C at the start of any word should be replace with a k (unless it’s followed like a h, like “church”). Making “kool”, “krafty”, “krust” the same as the “k” in “kangaroo”.
- Remove all silent ks, as in “knight” because it’s pointless. If people wanted to differentiate “knight” from “night” written down, they shouldn’t have used the same word to begin with!
- Remove pointless silent gs from “gnaw” and “gnat”, they’re not needed.
- Any w before an “r” at the start of a word is unnecessary too. “Wrap”, “wrinkle” and “wrist” would still make sense without it.
- Replace any “x” at the start of a word with “z” as in zebra. Because z is cool and doesn’t get used enough.
- Actually we can make use of z more, for example the word “lose” doesn’t seem to follow normal rules (it’s nothing like the similarly spelled ‘dose’ for example). So maybe we should spell it ‘looze’.
- We pronounce a z in “organise” and “normalise”, so we might as well spell it that way.
- Remove the unnecessary “ue” from the end of “dialogue”, “monologue” and “analogue”. I actually agree with Americans on this. Also on simplifying “doughnut” to “donut”.
Just think of all those letters we’re omitting. If everyone adhered to this in every email and Facebook statuses, just think how many bytes we’d save on the internet! It’s like adding our own level of compression 😀