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Posted on by Rick Steves

Europe Destined to Speak One Language?

I enjoy the emails people circulate, but rarely add to that cyberspace clutter by forwarding them along. But this exciting news needs to be shared:

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 five-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 favor 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 third 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 fourth 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 ze forst plas.

Comments

26 Replies to “Europe Destined to Speak One Language?”

  4. Rick……I hope they phase in all the changes you showed in increasingly elaborating examples ……………..I found that as I read on it was harder and harder to follow and understand……..not sure I like the whole concept of this plan………….

  6. Last year on a RS GAS tour, I attempted to send email to my husband. The keyboard was my worst nightmare. My sweetie said the funniest thing about my European travels are the emails he receives from me! Thanks for the memory Rick!

  7. That was really funny! I do have to admit, that as someone who has learned English as a second language, it has been a challenge for me with the letters c and s, to tell them apart. In Finnish language there is no c used except in foreign origin words. Also, Finnish is spelled exactly the way is sounds, so I basically had to memorize the whole spelling of the English language. I always use the spell check just in case, if it is available. On the other hand, of all the languages that I have studied, English was by far the easiest one to learn to talk.

  9. Zat mad me laf! Great post. Remember back in the eighties’ the gobbldyguk speak that was going to take over the world? It was some weird twist of the English language. Come on, I know there are some scholars on here that would remember. I am grateful that English is going to be the common language of the EU but isn’t it wonderful to hear native speakers of other languages? One time in Paris I botched asking a waiter for a fork in French, He finally understood me and he said it correctly it sounded so much more rich and clear. One other time I was in Ghent and Bruuge, Belgium and a tour guide we had spoke Dutch, French, Spanish, English and German. That will make your head spin. (Humberd- Yes, I have read your writing and seen your website. Richard nice Hawaii blog Entry). Kona is amazing.

  11. Having to travel in work from Portugal to France and Italy (and USA, by the way) I understand very well the need of a common language… As a tourist the only problem is asking something for lunch but working one got to explain and get that explanation understood. That’s not easy and a common language is wellcome. So in order to as first language English speaking people not have an unfair advantage… let’s adopt those rules! :)

  12. As a high school teacher I am used to getting many new standards thrown at me. I was completely sucked in by the post. It really made me laugh and snap back into reality. Thanks Rick!

  16. I read a joke email that was circulating exactly like that. In the joke they were talking about an official language for the USA..I think you’re having fun with us Rick!

  17. Holy Batcave Maggie there IS such a thing as Esperanto, what a trip. ***Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book of Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means ‘one who hopes’. Zamenhof’s goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.Esperanto has had continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers for over a century. By most estimates, there are approximately a thousand native speakers.No country has adopted the language officially.Esperanto was developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s by ophthalmologist Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, an Ashkenazi Jew from Bialystok, now in Poland and previously in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at the time part of the Russian Empire. After some ten years of development, which Zamenhof spent translating literature into the language as well as writing original prose and verse, the first Esperanto grammar was published in Warsaw in July 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian empire and Eastern Europe, then in Western Europe and the Americas, China, and Japan. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin denounced Esperanto as “the language of spies” and had Esperantists executed. The use of Esperanto was illegal from 1937 to 1956. In Germany, there was the additional motivation that Zamenhof was a Jew. In his work Mein Kampf, Hitler mentioned Esperanto as an example of a language that would be used by an international Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination. Esperantists were executed during the Holocaust, with Zamenhof’s family in particular singled out for execution.** Always something new on this board.thanks Maggie

  19. I don’t know what the big deal is, I can understand that just as well as I can understand other signs, billboards, and people in the 30 countries in Europe we have visited. Nothing is more confusing than a street sign in England telling me to make a “left turn” from the left most lane, into one or another lane in the street going different direction. When we were on a cruise ship going from Athens to the Black Sea, the variety of languages made it seem we were on the “Tower of Babel.” But we enjoyed it, as we tried to decipher who was talking what.

  22. While this is really humorous, Europe really is already ahead of the game. On our trips to Europe, we always take the Rick Steves Phrase Books, but everyone speaks English, almost like this article, and we can obviously understand them. Even elderly museum guards in Turkey and Russia speak broken English. It was heart-warming, but we rarely got to use our language skills, not even in small restaurants, pubs or bistros.

  23. Rick, thank you for your shows, buks, the price comparison across Europe, and pointing out that taking my dream vacation to Paris would be most cost effective than a $400 trip to somewhere else. I can just about recite your guide book to Paris. I’m zo glad they decided on Deutsch. That’s my best language, probably because I always rebelled against speling other than fonetically. I knew that if I held out everyone would bow to my will!

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