Contrary to the opinion given
in this article, I believe its important for us to realize that habitual contraction of words is in fact a phenomenon which degrades our language. In linguistics, the concept of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) shows that a person finds it more difficult to learn the basics of a language when the language structure becomes more simplified than their first language.
As English is not the largest spoken language (
http://www.aneki.com/languages.html), it is only apparent that more people need to learn English to communicate in it. After all - English does power most of the worlds computers. So why is it so important to keep contracting the language?
Soon, if we followed the advice of Brian, our majestic British English will become like the following quote:
Source: http://www.qarxis.com/EuroEnglish
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The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of Europe, rather than German, which was the other possibilty. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish":
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 the "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 enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with"z" and "w" with "y". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaing "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leteres. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no more trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!!!! (Und zen ve vil take over ze vorld!!!!!)
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