European English

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.

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 replased with “f.” This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spellingkanbe 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.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl.

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I do not claim aithorship of this piece. I received it from a good friend of mine by email and don’t know where it originated. Enjoy!

As a Englishman who has become a U.S. citizen (and who rents an apartment from a German lady) I can say with some authority that this sounds *exactly* like the kind of policy the EU would actually come up with :-) Well, I'm really no authority at all, but it still made me chuckle. Thanks for the Monday morning laugh. While coding and Web standards are interesting, this is a welcome change of pace.

Dylan

Hey, I thoght it was for rel. Zat reli freks me out nov kos vhen I first rad it, I didn't shekk it if it's just a jok. You shuld hav spesified it's just a joke, not rel. Hov tricky!