Niu inglish

 A niu inglish

 

English is the de facto lingua franca of humanity. It's a fundamental asset of civilization as we know it, and a cultural tool of global interest. It cannot, therefore, be considered the exclusive property of a medium-sized North Atlantic island (a part of it).
English is rather unique in several respects.

Its syntax is fairly basic, consisting largely of juxtapositions and idiomatic expressions, often built around simple, generic verbs (put, set, etc.) combined with modifiers (up, down, etc.). The same applies to the frequent use of nouns as modifiers, which can often be ambiguous (e.g. women hunters). This may sound rather barbaric to speakers accustomed to highly structured languages such as Classical Greek or Latin. The lack of generally regularized rules may help explain why many native speakers make basic mistakes even in formal writing (e.g. that vs which, its vs it’s).

Its vocabulary is vast (estimated to range from about 170,000 to over one million words), yet the overwhelming majority of users employ only a tiny fraction of it. Fluency is estimated to require as few as 3,000 words—roughly half of what is needed for languages such as Italian or French.

Mutual intelligibility among local pronunciations is often low. Try following a cricket match commented on by an Australian or a New Zealander and you will understand what I mean. Even within the same country, different social strata may speak in ways so divergent that courts sometimes allow official interpreters (I personally knew one who translated in the UK from upper-class to lower-class English).

The most peculiar feature, however, is the lack of a one-to-one relationship between spelling and pronunciation. The problem is so widespread that the practice of “spelling out” words is common, whereas it is virtually unheard of in most other languages. Examples are countless. Wind and windy are bizarrely pronounced waind and windi. Why is "ship" written with i, while "shiip" (as it is pronounced) requires double e? I challenge anyone without prior knowledge to guess the correct pronunciation of choir. At times, even the so-called pronunciation rules are blatantly violated, as in the case of Houston, the US city, which should logically be pronounced "huston", rather than "hiuston" as it is currently the case, or else written "Huston". My first and only formal English teacher—a brilliant man from Oxford who happened to live in my home village—once told me that the correct pronunciation of the preposition "for" is actually "f", and that the only case when it is pronounced "for" is when one asks, “What is the pronunciation of for?”

As a result, the transliteration of foreign languages has faced serious difficulties. I recently read Typee by Melville, and trying to infer the actual Polynesian pronunciation of many words is often frustrating (indeed, the title is pronounced Taipi). Possibly for related reasons, English people has historically misunderstood the pronunciation of many foreign words. For example, the nut of Anacardium is called cajù. English transliterated it as cashew, whereas French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Hindi all use forms derived from cajù (cajou, cajú, kajù,  etc.). Even more striking is the history of tea: throughout Asia it is called some variant of cha (chai, cha, ocha, etc.). The English colonisers didn't get it right, spelling it as "tea", while Portuguese still say and spell it "chá". Even today, many native speakers struggle to understand that my name is Paolo, not Paulo, despite my repeating it clearly and stressing the "o".

Americans—certainly with the intention of asserting independence from the British Empire—began to regularize spelling, but they stopped short of completing the task, thereby adding further uncertainty and complexity.

In many parts of the world, users have partially improved the situation by adopting spellings that more closely reflect actual pronunciation (e.g. restoran, taksi, otel). I therefore propose extending this approach by adopting a standardized, simplified transliteration of spoken English. The advantages would be immense: learning the language would become much easier, its use even more widespread, mutual understanding improved, and common pronunciation errors reduced. In this way, the unifying role of the English language would be strengthened, to the long-term benefit of all humanity.

Du de rait thing, don bi sciai, rait as iu spik !