[mattferderer]

Made me think of this old joke that's been on HackerNews, Reddit, etc for years:

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 up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "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 peopl 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 sensi bl 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 ze forst plas.

---

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/leq19j/english_to_be...

[vundercind]

Reads like Mark Twain’s short piece “A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling”

https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html

[edit] Maybe Twain, anyway. The attribution is dubious, but common.

[nobody9999]

>Reads like Mark Twain’s short piece “A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling”

Which is a gem, regardless of authorship. Another related bit associated with Twain is:

“whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”[0]

Which, as a native English speaker who learned German, I find both amusing and (mostly) correct.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/115614-whenever-the-literar...

Edit: Added source reference link.

[Semaphor]

As a German, I must say this is very well done. It went from clear English, over me having to think about every word, to clear English again (though only if I read it out loud)

[_visgean]

I think the conclusion is wrong; that sounds much more like dutch.

[diggan]

I think that says a lot about the origin of the joke, which most likely comes from outside Europe :)

[int_19h]

Dutch is more or less what you get if you take German and English and meet in the middle.

[indigoabstract]

Nice one. This confirms my long held suspicion that German contains a lot of badly spelled Englisch words. Or maybe, it's the other way around?

[xxs]

Two beers fine for an old joke!