The European Union Commission has announced that an agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for communications within the EU, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the final negotiations however, Her Majesty’s Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as Euro-English (EUnglish for short).
In the first year, “s” will be used instead of the soft “c”. Sertainly, sivil servants and will resieve this news with joy, as will the insolvensy and bankruptsy world. Also, the hard “c” will be replaced with “k”. Not only will this klear up konfusion, and improve kross-border koordination and kommunikation, but laptops kan have one less letter.
In the sekond year, there will be growing publik enthusiasm, when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced by “f”. This will make words like “fotograf”, “filantropik” and “foenix” 20 per sent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the kreative alfebat under konstruktion kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated and kreative changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben difikult and a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible unatraktive mes of silent “e”s in the language is disgrasful, and they would go.
By the forth yer, peopl wil be reseptiv to desisions such as replasing “th” by “z” and “w” by “v”. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli ensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
[reworked ‘office joke’ of around 2000, when I worked in London]