Re: The Worldwide Queen's English
By Darrell Clarke
Robbie et al (now that's not English!),
I had a gud larf at ze mesij and fownd it not at orl difikult to reed, wich iz rarver teling!
This is not a new problem as you will appreciate and a number of serious attempts have been made to address it in the past, particularly in the U.S. (Ben Franklin etc.), mostly unsuccessfully. The French Word Police have been fighting a losing battle against the inroads from other languages. Once again though, especially in the U.S., the process has been occurring naturally, promoted by large numbers of writers who learnt English as a second language. Education via the television set has made an enormous "contribution". The Internet, I believe, has a large number of participants who are more comfortable speaking rather than writing English and this shows up not just in spelling, but in grammar and usage. Now we have authors who previously would have been unlikely to have been writing so frequently, communicating widely with many others similarly situated. I think this will hasten the changes (and I have very mixed feelings about it) as people become more confused about "correct" usage of the language. As an example, I have seen vacuum spelt "vaccume" quite commonly and I expect it might become "vacume" before long! Some of us will, however, be attempting to hold back the irresistable tide.
BTW, over here, we do pronounce the "e" not as an "i" in enquiry, as we do also in "ensure".
Cheers,
Darrell |
(Message sent Mon 30 Sep 1996, 16:23:00 GMT, from time zone GMT-0600.) |
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