Simplified English

Right now, English is one of the most complicated languages because it is so non-standard.  If someone asked you to pronounce a word, you may or may not be able to do it because English pronunciations are so weird.  However, if you only took a week of Spanish, you could pronounce every single word in that language.  Chinese used to be very complex, too.  But they simplified it down from Traditional to Simplified Chinese.  Too bad it's still kind of complex, although their pronunciations in pin-yin are very easy to read.

Here's a famous question: How to you pronounce "ghoti"?  The answer is the same way you pronounce "fish."  As in enough, women, nation.  How strange!  It's no wonder kids have so much trouble learning spelling and speaking.

I think English should be simplified to be a phonetic language, or as close to one as possible.  For starters, the letter "C" should be entirely removed from the alphabet.  It only serves one purpose: to make the "CH" sound, which maybe should get it's own character.  Or, it can just stay and become one of those rarely-used letters like "j", "q", "x", and "z".  Maybe "KH" can be used to substitute for the old "CH" sound.

"G" will lose it's soft sound, which is when it sounds like a "J".  The "G" should GO let the "J" do it's own JOB!  That way, there will be less confusion.

The vowels can still retain their hard and soft sounds, but they should get an accent, a bar, or some other tone marking to show that it is a hard sound (or soft sound -- which ever occurs less in the English language... I'll have to ask a professional language guy).

Now, the alphabet can also be changed to something I called "Simplified English."  All the letters are still the same, but now they look different.  All of them can now be drawn in one stroke -- no more lifting the pen to dot your "I"s or cross you "T"s.  However, if accents are added, it may present a problem because accents would need another stroke.  Since it's so standard now, all characters are drawn from top to bottom (or left to right if the endpoints are at the same height, as in the case of the capital letter "A").  They also take less ink to write.  Have a look:

As much as I hate to admit it, there are some faults to this.  Since the letters are more minimalist, it can sometimes be harder to distinguish between letters.  That means the already-messy handwriting for some will become a total disaster in Simplified English.  Of course, there can be some slight alterations, such as the curling of the tails on the "g" and "y", but overall, I'd say the letters can't change much.  Also, this system has rather poor compatibility with math because the "B" now looks like "3", the "I" and "l" both look like "1", the "O" looks like a "0", and the "Z" looks like a "2".  Also, a system in the English language already exists to make writing faster and supposedly easier: cursive.

However, the biggest problem with this whole idea is that change is difficult.  The entire world now basically speaks English -- it's the Earth's planetary language now!  If aliens came down and asked what language we all spoke, we'd probably say English.  So that means we'd have to effect that massive change on basically everyone.  I remember some talk about creating a universal language a while ago, but it didn't go through.  Obviously, some people didn't feel the need or desire to learn another new language.  Revising the English language is probably more difficult than reforming Chinese because many people are learning English as their second language, which means they have to re-learn a language they are currently learning.  On the other hand, everyone in China spoke Chinese, so they all changed their first language, which was probably easier for them.  It also was not on a global scale.

Another problem of converting to an entirely phonetic language is that there are a ton of homophones in English.  These are words that sound the same, so they are only distinguished by their different spellings.  Now, all the homophones will combine into one spelling, making it probably a bit more difficult to figure out what certain text is actually saying.  People will need to be more adept readers who can use context clues to figure out what meaning of the word it actually is.

Even though this whole idea is pretty preposterous, you should try writing in Simplified English sometime.  After reading this through, try reading the first paragraph in Simplified English (an accent means that it is a hard vowel sound):

Rít now, Inglish is won of thé móst komplex lánguijes békuz it is só non-standerd.  If sumwon askd yú tú prónows a werd, yú má or má not bé abl tú dú it békuz Inglish prónowséáshins ar só wérd.  Howevr, if yú ónlé tuk a wék of Spanish, yú kud prónows evré singul werd in that lánguij. ...

It was so hard just to translate those few sentences from English to Simplified English -- I didn't even write out the new characters and it was still a massive pain.  New "Simplified English Keyboards" might have to be made so that accents are easier to type (the Spaniards would surely love that!).  Now that kind of thing would stop people from even trying to learn it.  I don't even know if I translated it 100% correct.  I probably left out an accent here or there or broke one of the rules.

Even though I think this is a pretty good idea for an idealized world (or a very small population), it has no place in the real world.  It's just cool to think about it.  What do you think?  Would it be a good idea to switch to Simplified English?