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August 24, 2005
English to be European official language
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. French and Spanish were rejected earlier. The report explains:
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’. his 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.
[Anonymous via Useful Sounds, Nicole Simon’s German-English podcast]
Posted by Simon Holledge at August 24, 2005 01:12 PM
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Comments
It reads a bit like scandinavian german
Posted by: fbi at August 25, 2005 06:09 PM
Whatever. Either way, it'll upset the French. And we do love doing THAT, don't we?
Posted by: Mark Gamon at August 26, 2005 01:05 PM
The French will be desole. But it won't matter for long because they won't ever come out of France and will pretend not to understand visiting EuropeanUnionites.
The fact I have a bit of French blood gives me carte blanche (as we say) to make bigoted statements.
Posted by: Caroline M at August 29, 2005 06:27 AM
Welcome Caroline (great blog you have, by the way)!
Do the French have worse spelling (in French, I mean) than the English?
Maybe Italian would be the best language for the EU?
Posted by: Simon Holledge at August 29, 2005 06:53 AM
Thank-you Simon. I take your comments as a great accolade as you are clearly a Serious Person.
Unlike me. I can't spell in many languages, including my own.
Some of Italian culture should definitely be absorbed into the Nu (it's only a matter of time) Union. Although we might want to by-pass all the bribery and corruption and hang-on to their genuine love of people, especially children. But not Italian children toting machine guns, obviously.
Posted by: Caroline at August 29, 2005 09:50 AM
this is a very old story that was circulated years ago on email... Was it seriously published by some newspaper!?!?
[Ed. It's supposed to a joke. . . a joke . . . oh, well.]
Posted by: Wonderful Italian at August 31, 2005 01:37 PM
That's logical. It's not only european official language but the world's lingua franka.
Posted by: Helen at December 12, 2005 10:39 PM