English is a Mess, for Good Reasons

English is often cited as a very difficult language to learn. Personally, I think that all non-invented languages are difficult to learn. They’ve got edge cases, weird rules, and redundancies that all need to be memorized to understand them. In fact, from what I’ve read on Interlingua and Esperanto, they aren’t so great either.

Obviously, nobody sat down one day and said, “I decree, as King of England, that our language shall be complicated!” All our languages got their complications from being modified over time. We “loan” (I prefer “rip off”) words from other languages all the time. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to talk about new concepts that originated in countries speaking another language. Furthermore, the sciences, engineering, and medicine are inventing new things all the time, and we definitely need new words to talk about those things, and anything related. We’ve also got a lot of wird things left over from when the language was new, because people were speaking and writing things before the rules got codified.

Why Change It?

There’s a lot of different things in the world to learn; Chemistry, statistics, history, computer science, medicine are but a few. So many areas of study, that nobody could possibly be proficient in all of them. Furthermore, they’re so deep that noone could manage to be an expert in more than a handful. With the limited time any person has to live, I’d say that we’d be better off as a whole, if we wasted less time learning things that aren’t directly related to the things we actually want to learn. “I’ve never used calculus after school; Why did I have to learn it?” is a common remark among adults. Children are similarly frustrated, when they have to learn about their first homonym, homophone, or the difference between “phantom” and “fantastic”.

Furthermore, anyone who is trying to learn English as a second language has to put up with its weirdness. (I myself face a similar challenge whenever I practice Ukrainian; I don’t doubt that if I tried to learn any other language, I’d be annoyed all over again.) The people I’ve worked with who come from another country often ask for explanations as to why certain spellings or grammar rules apply. My answer nowadays is, “English is weird. At least nobody cares if you make mistakes because of its weirdness.”

In the name of wasting less of people’s time, I propose that we fix the English language. It would have a small increase in the up-front cost of learning it, but I suspect that these would start paying off very quickly. Children would have more time to learn about math, and adults from other countries could start using our language with less fristration. So, without further ado, I’ll start listing problems, and proposing fixes.

Plural

This is a fairly minor one, but why bother keeping any weirdnesses at all? We’re already fixing everything, why not fix everything? Do we really gain anything from having “foxes” or “pits”? We’ve already got words and numbers, to indicate plurality. I think the marks and suffixes we use for this task can be simply removed from the language.

I don’t think that any of these sentences are made particularly more awkward, compared to the version with plurals. Consider “Please pass me those pencils.”, “Please pass me those pencil.”. Also, “Your dog is noisy.” vs “Your single dog is noisy.”, if it’s not already obvious from context, that the person only has one dog.

Prefixes

Prefixes on words often trip people up, since it means you can’t look it up in the dictionary unless it’s common enough to be listed with its prefix. I’ve personally encountered this problem with Ukrainian, when I try to look up a word, only to find that it apparently doesn’t exist. Computerized tools help with this, but it’s still a needless problem.

To fix it, I suggest we separate prefixes from the words they modify, with some mark. e.g. “un-balanced” or “un᛫balanced”

K, C and S

This is just sillyness. We’ve got two distinct letters whose role is clearly shown by the word “snake”. Why is it, then, that “cross” and “balance” use different letters? Just get rid of the letter C, or use it for something else.

Ph and F

Just use F instead of Ph. Problem solved.

Double Consonants in the Name of Vowels

“Dribble” and “bible” show this one nicely. The rule is something like, “If there’s two consonants after this vowel, it sounds like this, otherwise, it sounds like that”. Most vowels stick to this rule, so I might have decided it’s worth keeping. However, “dribble”, “bible”, and “fish” show that the same sounds don’t always come from the double-consonant, and are just weird things you need to memorize. Solution: just use a different mark for these different vowel sounds. In fact…

Vowels in General

Just have different letters for each vowel sound. Other languages like Ukrainian (pretty much) do this already. It’d be overall just easier for everyone.

Weird Spellings Because We Copied It From Another Language

Other languages rarely show the same courtesy when taking things from English. If it’s using sounds we already have letters for, use those letters. If we don’t have a letter for some sound, make a new one!

Final Thoughts

If there’s something not listed here, it’s either because I’m OK with it, or I haven’t come back and updated this list. I’ll probably also make an exemplary paragraph in two forms, shown the current English language, and in the new version of English, with all the fixes in place.