Ideas Up for Grabs

Shadow English

English seems to be destined to become the one language of the world sooner or later. Millions and millions of people speak or study it. However, there are some big problems for language students.

Somebody should come up with a version of English, which could be used by foreigners much more easily than the original version. Still, it would not become a second-rate language, a new pidgin English, since its development would follow that of the original English language. In this sense it would be a shadow English.

This idea would deserve a more thorough and more systematic treatment, but I would like to sum up the main points here.

English students have three basic problems: 1. non- phonetic writing, 2. the difficulties of the tense system, and 3. irregularities.

Let's see.

1. English writing could be made phonetic, although the end product would look disappointingly ugly. Never mind. Compare this to the agony of the Japanese and Chinese when they try to transliterate their beautiful signs into the limited character set of English. In this process a few delicate sounds would be lost, but the text would still be clear.

The character "j" in several languages sounds like Y in "you," "a" sounds like A in "smart," "e" like E in "end," "u" like OO in "soon," etc. It may seem strange to English speakers, but it's quite fine with those who are familiar with Latin and other European languages. The combination TH poses a special difficulty, since it has two different ways of pronunciation, one in "this" and one in "faith." I think the former could be replaced by "dz" (the way foreigners are often mimicked in satirical novels) and the latter could remain "th."

So if I want to transliterate a sentence like "I am afraid that you are wrong," it would look in this way: "Aj em efreid dzet ju ar rong." Looks stupid, isn't it? Still, I think this way of writing would be easier to teach and to learn. And it would be a lot easier to transmit than the signs of the special linguistic transliteration system used in British dictionaries. Finally, there is the problem of wovels not represented by a clear character in English. Follow the Dutch method: that with double characters. Hence, "occur" could be transcripted "oekoeoer" ("oe" must be doubled because of length). It works in the Netherlands.

2. How come other languages do not have the complex tense system and they still do well? The answer is: they use a word which makes the context clear. One such word is "already." So if we take the most horrible example of my English studies and want to express the idea: "I will have read this book when you come home," we can express this idea much more simply in this way: "I will read this book already when you come home" -- or transliterated: "Aj wil red dzis buk olredi wen ju kam houm." So, what has been really missed?

3. The third step is not as important as the former two, but if you want to match the simplicity of Esperanto, you might want to try this. The point is, you may treat irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular. So "be / was / been" could be "bii / bii-ed / bii-ed," and "goose / geese" could be "guus / guuses" -- the way some people try to make a difference between "mice" (animals) and "mouses" (computer input devices).

In this most radical way, this is how an English sentence would look:

Two symposia have been held in Greenwich. --> Tuu simpoziums bii-ed in Greenwich. (Geographic names should be kept for identification purposes.)

Ridiculous? Well, ask a Chinese.

Finally, why would this version be a shadow English? Because whenever a new phenomenon shows up in the natural evolution of English, it could be promptly adapted to this international version. Shadow English would be a different script (plus the optional avoidance of irregularities) of the same, living language.

Since the differences between real English and shadow English would be consistent, it would be fairly simple to write a computer program to transliterate a text for us.

Someone should write this book -- and write the program. And ... dzer wuld bii nou moor problem!

:)



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