The Written Word

Throughout my life I've suffered at the hands of the English language. It may not be apparent in my final drafts, but translating the known word (ideas and concepts) into the spoken word of English (in the American dialect) and then into the written word can be a very frustrating process.

I can only assume that I am not alone in my thought process and frustrations therein. These frustrations rarely come to the surface in conversation because in this country we so frequently go through the grievous process.

I was blessed to grow up bilingual, and it is to my shame that I am no longer bilingual. In the language I grew up around, the known word still had to be translated to the spoken word, but the written word closely mirrored the spoken word. My parents sought to aid me in my frustrations by providing "The Phonics Game" to my tools of syntactic analysis, but there were so many exceptions and foreign words that had been left with their original spellings that the game only applied to an arbitrary half of the language that I needed to master.

I've known all my life that there must be some solution to this problem, and I thought, for most of my life, that it was beyond the bounds of the English language. It wasn't until I began to play with programming languages in my early years of college that I realized that the English language could be adapted to become an easily learned international language. I wasn't the only one to think of it either: Orson Scott Card referenced a language called Common in his Ender's Game series. Common, according to Card, is the "more or less phonetically spelled English language" used as a standard for international communication.

I believe it is possible to create such a standard and blend it into the school systems as the international language. With English as a phonetic language as well as the language of programming, science, and trade, other countries would more quickly accept it as the global trade language.

The English language has the most potential for such a shift (thanks to computer keyboards, no pun intended), but if the English speaking community does not make a move within the decade, Mandarin and Spanish will become the international languages. Mandarin because it is already spoken by over a billion people on the planet as a primary language, and Spanish because it is next in line behind English and quickly spreading throughout North America.