..
When
you're preparing your firebombs, piano wire, lamp posts, candiru fish
and cockroaches for the coming revolution, make sure you have some
spare for this fucker:
John
Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London, is
proposing English adopts a phonetic approach to spelling in order to
relieve kids of the “burden” of learning to write our beloved mother
tongue as God intended.Wells will outline his proposals to the
the centenary dinner of the Spelling Society, using his position as
president to present his cunning plan to tackle the nation's literacy
problems, the Telegraph explains.He intends to say: “It seems
to be a great pity that English-speaking countries are holding back
children in this way. In Finnish, once you have learned the letters,
you know how to spell, so it would be ludicrous to hold spelling tests.
In countries like Italy and Spain it's similar. But with English it's
not phonetic, and there are just so many irregularities.”Wells
reckons, for example, that “give” would better be rendered as “giv”,
“river” should become “rivver” and, ahem, that Blighty should
reorganisze certain spellings in line with US usage.And, just
to make sure Middle England runs screaming for its Twat-O-Tron, Wells
will declare: “Text messaging, email and internet chat rooms are
showing us the way forward for English. Let's allow people greater
freedom to spell logically. It's time to remove the fetish that says
that correct spelling is a principal (principle?) mark of being
educated.”Finally, Wells intends to sound the death knell for
the bothersome apostrophe, suggesting: “Instead of an apostrophe, we
could just leave it out (it's could become its) or leave a space (so
we'll would become we ll). Have we really nothing better to do with our
lives than fret about the apostrophe?”
You feeble-minded relativistic, descriptivist……..a hat tip to Obnoxio for the abuv.
Now, this morons totally ridiculous story reminded me of a joke that was floated about years ago (I looked it up and the DOS date was 21/4/84, which is when I think it broke the spell checker).
How much truth is there is jest??
The European Commission have
just announced an agreement whereby
English will be the official
language of the EU rather than German,
which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, Her
Majesty's Goverment conceded
that English spelling had some room for
improvement and has accepted a
five year phase in plan that would be
known as
“EuroEnglish”.
In the first year “s”
will be replace the soft “c”. Sertainly this will
make the sivil servant jump with
joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in
favor of the “k”. This
should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have
1 less letter. There will be
growing publik enthusiam in the sekond
year, when the troublesome
“ph” will be replaced with the “f”. This
will make words like
“fotograf” 20% shorter.
In the third year, publik
akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
expekted to reach the stage
where more komplikated changes are
possible. Goverments will
enkorage the removal of double letter, which
have always ben a deterent to
akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that
the horible mes of the silent
“e”'s in the language is disgraceful and
they should go away.
By the fourth yar peopl wil be
reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th”
with “z” and
“w” with “v”.
During ze fifth yar, 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 yar, ve vil hav a reli sensibl
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
