Sunday, March 16, 2008

Just ranting

I've realized for quite some time that the English language is a collection of bent and broken rules. Everyone knows "i before e except after c or when sounding like a as in neighbor and weigh." But as I attempt to teach Isaac all the intricacies of the language it has become even more apparent just how horrible our language is.

Why is it that you can say you are going to raise a building or say you are going to raze a building and they mean opposite things?

And why don't "book," "tool" and "floor" rhyme?

And how many different ways do we need to say the letter "A"? There's ay (as in lay), a-consonant-e (as in vale), ai (as in vail), ei (also as in veil), ey (as in grey) and eigh (as in weigh). And although ea is supposed to say "E" as in leak, sometimes it also says "A" like in great, steak and break.

I have a proposition to recreate the English language phonetically. Each vowel makes it's regular short vowel sound when it stands alone in a word, and it's long vowel sound when it's doubled (the words bee and fee would stay the same, but today would be todaa). The "ow" sound could still be ow I suppose. Since we already have an s and a k, we don't really need c, so c should say the ch sound. We don't really need x either, so x can say the th sound, and I'd add one new letter called "Shay" to make the sh sound.

I xeenk xis wuud bee aa graat iideeu and wuud maak lerneeng eengli"shay" muc moor simpul. Noo moor haveeng tuu memooriiz seven diferent speleengs foor xu werd vaan or vaal or raan. Wiil wee or (xat's "are," not "or") at it, wee "shay"uud cuk ol uv xu duuplikit werds liik xooz listed ubuv. Noo moor wereeeeng wexer fulfil has wun "l" oor tuu oor haveeng tuu eksplaan wii "run" has wun "n" wiil "running" has tuu -- it's just run and runeeng now! Ol in faaver saa ii!

2 comments:

Robert Marshall Murphy said...

Such much for simple: it took me 10 minutes to read your Dutch-looking sentence! ;-P

Jimmy and Angela said...

Wow...did you scan my brain and steal my thoughts??

Angela