A Euro English Take on Words

I received a humorous email this morning that I thought I would share today because it revisits the subject matter in my post about George Bernard Shaw and Phonetics. Read, notice the alternative spelling of words and enjoy...

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 upkonfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when thetroublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be 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 zeforst plas.

Apparently this is a fairly common joke about English spelling that can be readily found with different variations when doing an internet search; however, I had never seen it and thought it was fun. And, interestingly, there is a website called foolswisdom.com that claims Euro English is not a joke and is a serious project to make English words and spelling easier to teach.