ENGLISH OF TOMORROW EU ANNOUNCEMENT 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 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 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. If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl.
Deutsch Schafe in Wales, nun das ist erschreckend You only have to read some discussion forums on the internet to see the standard of English is already declining.
a ha ha very good. Where on earth did you find that? BTW ... I felt a little concerned because I discovered I was easily able to read that. Does that mean something important do you think?
Whenever I see these things I grab the first couple of lines and paste it into Google Peter, it's the quickest way to find out all the other places it's popped up already, this one has been doing the rounds for a long time but yes it is marvellous and a great find Dom loved it That's also a good general technique to detect plagiarism, if someone is posting something and claiming it is theirs, then if you can find a couple of paragraphs of identical work not already attributed to the same person then they are at it. Not accusing you of plagiarism Dom, I know full well that this was just a good find
Also a good way to see how long those 419 fraudster letters have been doing the rounds. The OED also loves to track the first usage for words/phrases. I remember once speaking to an OED researcher; he reckoned the best research material in ensuring the accuracy of the OED, was the OED itself! I wonder if he would say that with the advent of the internet? I think you can actually buy software to detect plagiarism too! I know some Russian students whose English appeared to dramatically improve when writing essays - then was until I typed their text into Google and found they had not written it at all!
