SUPPLEMENT 7

Examples of Linguistic Play

English Spelling

The text below represents a rather ironical attitude of its writ­er to the talks about hardships connected with learning English Spelling^1}.

Having chosen English as the preferred language in the EEC, the European Parliament has commissioned a feasibility study in ways of improving efficiency in communications between Govern­ment departments.

European officials have often pointed out that English spelling is unnecessarily difficult — for example, cough, plough, rough, through and thorough. What is clearly needed is a phased pro­gramme of changes to iron out these anomalies. The programme would, of course, be administered by a committee staff at top level by participating nations.

In the first year, for example, the committee would suggest using's' instead of the soft 'c'. Sirtainly, sivil servants in all sities would reseive this news with joy. Then the hard 'c' could be re­placed by 'k' since both letters are pronounced alike. Not only would they klear up konfusion in the minds of klerikal workers, but typewriters kould be made with one less letter. There would be growing enthusiasm when in the sekond year, it kould be an­nounced that the troublesome 'ph' would henceforth be written 'f'. This would make words like 'fotograf twenty pre cent shorter in print.

In the third year, punlik akseptanse of the new spelling кап be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible. Governments would enkourage the removal of double letters which have always been a deterent to akurate speling.

We would all agree that the horrible mes of silent 'e's in the languag is disgrasful. Therefor we kould drop thes and kontinu to read and writ as though nothing had hapend. By this tim it would be four years sins the skem began and peopl would be reseptive to steps sutsh as replasing 'th' by 'z'. Perhaps zen ze funktion of 'w' kould be taken on by V, vitsh is, after al, half a 'w'. Shortly after zis, ze unesesary 'o' kould be dropdfrom words containing 'ou'. Similar arguments vud ofkors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

Kontinuing zis proses yer after yer, ve vud eventuli hav reli sensibl riten styl. After tventi yers zer vud be no mor trubls, difikultis and evrivun fin it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drems of the Guvernmnt vud finali hav кит tru.