Easy English:
How to Make Language
Simpler
By Paul VanRaden
2024
You and I need to talk. At
times we may need words to cheer us up, calm us down, or help us go ahead. We
may learn new things by talking. The words we use need to be in the same
languages and subsets of words that we both have learned. A third person or a
machine could translate our words, but talking to each other is easier and more
fun. You are more likely to get the meaning of my words and sentences if I use
only easy words. Even if you have learned every word in English or in your
first language, you can also learn to use only the easy
words that make language easier for others to learn. The best words are short,
with only one meaning, and they sound like you spell them, or they are like
words that mean the same thing in other languages, making those words easier to
learn for people who speak similar languages.
We can make even a very good
language easier and better over time. First, we need to see if English is the
best language now or will be in the future. A list of its strong points, weak
points, opportunities to improve, and threats to its use (SWOT) lets you
compare English to the many other languages you may use or want to learn.
Strong points (good)
More people speak English than
any other language as of 2023, but they are only 19% of all people on earth.
About 400 million speak English as first language and 1,100 million as second
for a total of almost 1.5 billion. About 900 million people, mostly in China,
speak Mandarin and 350 million, mostly in India, speak Hindi as their first
language, but far fewer (about 300 million each) speak those as a second
language. The next languages that people speak the most are Spanish, French,
Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, and Russian, each with more than 250 million.
English use has grown fast. A British
study in 1997 predicted that the numbers of people speaking English as a
second or as a first language would be about equal 10 years later in 2007.
Already by 2024 after just 17 more years, almost 3 times more people speak
English as a second than as a first language.
Students in most countries now
learn some English in school but few learn any of the other languages listed
above. Later in life, they can learn to speak English more easily than other
languages because they had a head start in school. Many people also hear
English words in songs and movies or read English words from the internet.
Languages such as English use
letters to spell words. If you learn to spell a word you can also say it, or
vice versa. Other languages such as Mandarin or Japanese use picture symbols.
Learning to both draw and say each Mandarin word may take twice as long as a
language that uses letters to match the sounds.
English began before year 500
but its words and rules changed less over recent centuries than some other
languages. British kings and queens passed their language to their children and
to their Empire, which let many people across earth learn the same language
over hundreds of years and in faraway places. Other languages may have changed
more if new rulers killed or jailed those who ruled before them.
Weak points (bad)
English is not the best
language but is the one the British people took to the many lands that they
governed in past centuries. Americans and Canadians took English further west
after taking most of North America’s land by force from the Indians. English
then went southwest to the Mexican states of Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and
California after Americans took those by force in 1848. The first newspaper to
print the Declaration of Independence printed it in German July 5, 1776, before
the English text was printed July 6 in another newspaper. Many American cities
and towns had German newspapers and church services until the World Wars when
some states passed laws to stop people from teaching or speaking German. George
Orwell in 1946 wrote a 14-page
essay about problems with the English language and ways to improve it.
Many English words are harder
to spell or to say than they need to be. The alphabet has 26 letters (21
consonants and 5 vowels) but has more than 26 sounds that you need to say. The
5 vowels each make more than 1 different sound, and you need 2 vowels or 2
consonants to make some sounds such as ou, ch, sh, and th. Letters gh and ph make f sound or can make no sound as in though. Letter x makes 2 sounds (k and s)
and letter q does not have its own sound but makes sound kw with
letters qu. Many words put an e at the end to change an earlier
vowel sound, such as changing not to note. Other words also use ae,
ai, ay, ey, or eigh to make the long A sound, or ea, ee, or eo
to make E, or ie, uy,
ay, or igh to make I, oa, oe, eau,
or ough to make O, and yu, ue, ui, oo, or eau
to make the U sound.
Some other languages have more
letters, or fewer rules, or changed their spelling long ago to better match the
sound of words so you can say what you see. Many of my ancestors took 3
generations to slowly switch from German to English after moving to America
about 1850. They may have liked their old language more than the new. The Korean language used
since the 1900s has 24 letters using an alphabet that was invented about 500
years before its wide use. To spell words, the letters in each syllable form a
group with some letters below others instead of all being side by side as in
the Latin (Roman) letters that English uses. The 24 letters in Korean words may
be closer to the sounds they make than English letters and sounds.
Opportunities (to improve)
The 81% of people who use
other languages may want to start using English as a first or second language.
The Bible says that all people did use one language thousands of years in the
past: “Now the whole earth had one language and few words” (Genesis 11:1).
Almost all people on earth now use the Arab / Indian numbers 0, 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9
because Roman or other numbers were not as good for doing math. Almost all
computers use only the binary bits 0 and 1 and they can do math
much faster than people can using Arab numbers. Thus, most people may also use
one language in the future.
People can update and improve
the languages that we speak just like people improve the languages that
computer programs use. For example, the Fortran
Working Group often updates the computer language that I have used for 45
years. Fortran had big updates about every 10 years and small updates more
often, such as in 2023. Goals within the International Standards Organization
are to add new ways to code the language, remove a few old ways no longer
useful, and let computers all around the world use the same programs.
Using simpler subsets of
languages could help all of us better share ideas. Not all words are needed.
Among words that mean almost the same (synonyms), only the simplest one may be
needed. Using simpler subsets of commands also helped in computing. Around
1990, reduced instruction set computers (RISC)
made computing much faster and cheaper by using simpler chips that do simple
tasks instead of complex chips for complex tasks. Around 2010, graphical
processing units took this trend further by using simpler chips but using many
more of them in machine learning. A hard language with many words may take
longer to learn, both for computers and for people.
Each person may want to be
able to read and say the same words that the most other people use. That can
lead to almost 100% use of one language, which is called a natural monopoly. A
monopoly can be bad if all people must obey one person or company but can be
good if all people freely decide to use the same words. If 1 billion English
speakers each choose to make our language simpler, the 7 billion other people
on earth might also choose to learn our language so that we do not need to
learn their languages.
Several billion people now
send texts on their cell phones. To save time, most do not use all the rules
that formal languages use. If they can save 10 seconds of typing and their
friend or family member takes only 5 more seconds to get what they mean, they
have saved 5 total seconds per text. They quickly learn how to make their texts
simpler and faster. After typing one or two letters or finishing a word, you
will see a few words most likely to come next so that you can tap instead of
typing them. The computer could also suggest short words that your friend will
like instead of wasting space showing long, formal words on the screen. Someday
the computer will be almost as smart as you and your friends and use simpler
rules.
Threats (to its use)
People may use a new language
that combines the best words and ideas from many languages instead of using
only a subset of one language. For example, the League of Nations during the
1920s asked members to teach and use the Esperanto language that was
invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof in Poland. Use of Esperanto was against the
law in Russia, Germany, and Spain around the time of World War II to stop its
ideas. The idea is to let all people talk to each other with ease. Today about
2 million people can speak Esperanto.
Another example is Swahili that mixed
Arab with African words, then changed to Latin instead of Arab letters, and is
now used by about 100 million people in East Africa. About 300 million people
in Southeast Asia now speak the Malay language that
changed slowly over thousands of years and in about 1700 also changed to Latin
letters instead of using its own letters. Learning a language is easier if you
can see and say the words using the same letters as your own language.
English got its Latin letters
and many words from Roman people who came to Britain about 50 BC. English also
got many of its words from German people who came after about 450 and French
people when they ruled after 1066. The English language was mixed long ago and
has about 25-30% each of Latin, Germanic, and French words plus some words from
other languages. Some other new language with a newer mix may be better than
English if the new language uses simpler words and rules than the old language.
Many people may believe that
God wants people to use many languages. The Bible says that when all people
used the same language, they had too much success. After they made a very tall
tower in Babel, God said “Come, let us go down and there confuse their
language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7). To
learn history, some people will still need to read words from languages used in
the past even if most people speak English and few use other languages in the
future.
A computer can now translate
almost any language to another. A movie can show the words that actors speak in
any major language or let you hear the actors seem to speak your language while
you watch them act. Artificial intelligence could make new movies in any
language with no real actors. The ease to translate will give people less need
to learn any other language. They could even watch a movie or speak to a
computer in a language that no other person has learned or remembers.
People who learn English may
be told that they need to learn the hard words also. To pass the test of
English as a foreign language (TOEFL), students must learn all the rules of
English instead of using some rules from their own languages that make more sense.
Thus, English may change slower than it should. Spelling bees ask students to
spell any of the 476,000 words from Webster's Third New International
Dictionary. Many of those words are useless because nobody else uses them or
needs to spell them. A better test would be to ask students to read hard
English sentences or words and see who could quickly reduce those into the
best, short, simple English.
Most computers will check if
words you spell or sentences you type obey the rules of the language. That lets
you type faster and still make all words and sentences obey the rules if you
fix the errors that the computer finds. But the computer will also tell you to
obey old rules that a language does not need and that make the languages hard
for others to learn. Spell checkers may keep our languages from changing and
thus limit our goal to improve our languages.
Advice
I got my own 1977 Webster’s
New Collegiate Dictionary in 1978 on my first day at college. It has
>150,000 words on 1,365 pages. While writing this I wondered how many of
those words I use. To get an almost random sample of 372 English words, I
divided the book into 8 sections and checked all words on every 171st
page (but did not check page 1 or the last page 1,365). Of the 372 words on
those pages, I had some idea about what 44% mean, I had used about 33% of the
words at least once during my 64 years of life, and I used about 11% of the
words during the most recent year (2024), but only 0.3% (1 word of the 372)
from those pages are in this report. The 3,400 words in this report average 4.3
letters long with a standard deviation of 2.0 letters. This report has 1,000
unique words that were used an average of 3.4 times.
The dictionary has many words
from special fields that I never studied but a few specialists may use them
often. My English this year would need a dictionary with only 16,000 words and
150 pages. My English may be 9 times easier to learn than full English and
would save 89% on paper to print the very short dictionary of words that I use.
This advice
came from Ronald Reagan’s early experience of talking about sports events on
the radio to people he could not see: “I learned the fundamental rule of public
speaking, whether on the radio, on television, or to a live crowd. Talk to your
audience, not over their heads or through them. Don’t try to talk in a special
language of broadcasting or even politics, just use normal, everyday words.”
Plans
My goal is to speak English as
a second language. In grade school, high school, college, and graduate school I
had no other language classes, only English. I try to use only the English
words that you learn first, and I use the rules of other languages if they make
more sense than English. For example, in about 1983 Mohamed Sadek from Egypt
said to me “Paul, you have got me so confused” and he put the accent on the
third syllable of confused. I decided that confused should have 3
syllables like decided instead of saying confuesd
with only 2 syllables like most English speakers. That day I decided to use
easy English, short words, no tricky rules, and say words more like you spell
them. We had a good talk. Even if I got him so confused, Mohamed helped make my
English better and simpler. Thank you, Mohamed.
If a word is not spelled like
it sounds, you can just not use it, say it like you spell it, spell it like you
say it, or spell a hard word more simply. The word I is easy to spell
and the word U is also easier than the word you which has no o
sound in it. In the future, the letter m could sound the same as me
instead of em so we do not confuse it with the
letter en. Then, U could refer to
yourself as M (me) just like the words U and I. Letter W
could be called we instead of double-u or double-v used in
several languages. We say the letter h as aich
in English but it is ha in German, a much better choice. Those are small
gains but could make English a little easier for U in the future.
Some words have
the same sound as another word but not the same spelling or meaning. Examples
are these words we use very much: to, too, and two. In
easy English I say also instead of too except when too is
used as in too much where the meaning differs. For 2 we could say
two with the w and long o sound as it is spelled instead
of sounding the same as to. That could make this sentence less
confusing: Count from negative two to two today and ask Tutu to too
today.
Other examples
are there, their, and they’re that all sound the same but
all have bad spelling. Three better spellings would be thare,
thair, or thaer.
The word they’re is easy to fix by instead saying they are (or thay are). We should not each try to change
English by choosing a better spelling. Instead, a formal group should agree on
the best changes to improve each language, like the formal changes to global
computer languages. In most computer languages new words and commands are added
but the old words and commands are still ok to use. Human language can improve
in the same way. The old sentences will still make sense, the new rules can be
used, but all people do not need to change the way they spell or speak on the
same day.
The words blight,
bright, fight, flight, height, light, might, night, plight, right, sight,
slight, tight, and tonight use extra gh
letters but other words bite, cite, kite, mite, quite, rite, site, write,
and white end with e to make the long I sound. English
could be easier to learn with new words blite, brite,
fite, flite, hite, lite, nite, plite, tite,
and tonite. Current speakers could learn
to spell those words in only minute or two and use them in a simple sentence
such as “The starlite is quite brite tonite as Dwight White grabs a bite at the site of a fite and holds tite to his kite
at the hite of its flite.”
The extra h
after w in words when, where, why, what, while, which, and who
could be removed except that the w is extra in who and we
could spell that hoo instead. The extra l
is not needed in could, should, and would. The word of is
used much and could be spelled uv. Saying of
like off could confuse current English speakers.
I stopped using
the words can’t, hadn’t, haven’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t, didn’t, don’t, and
won’t at least 10 years ago. Instead, I say can
not, had not, have not, should not, must not, did not, do not,
and will not because the important word is always not which you
may not hear if I say n’t. I always plainly
say not instead of softly saying n’t so
you always hear the not, the meaning is clear, and English is simpler.
Many years ago, I also stopped using many French words that are part of
English. French words with extra letters on the end that make no sound or
letters that combine into different sounds do not fit well into the rules of
plain English.
Instead of
learning another language, you could help make English easier. I had no classes
ever in any other language but got a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1986.
In high school I had to choose either a foreign language or agriculture and I
took agriculture for 4 years. My undergraduate and graduate degrees at
University of Illinois and Iowa State did not require any foreign language. I
saw no value, only a waste of time, to learn words that I would never use or
need. Instead, I learned not to say words that are not needed.
If you already speak English,
use only words that are short or easy, that have only one meaning, that sound
like you spell them, or are like words that mean the same thing in other
languages. I have done that since 1983. If you are learning English, ask an
English speaker to read your words or talk to you and say which words make
sense or do not make sense. Both of you will learn how to make English better.
My mother liked to help people learn English by reading their stories in their
own words and talking with them about their writing. You can also read their
stories in Chapter 7 of The Right To Migrate.
English is not simple, but we can all help make it easier.
References
List
of languages by total number of speakers
The
Future of English? (britishcouncil.jp)
The History of
the Alphabets — The Latin Alphabet | How OCR Works (how-ocr-works.com)
Reduced
instruction set computer - Wikipedia
Politics
and the English Language - George Orwell - 1946
https://syllablecounter.net/1-syllable-words
Ronald
Reagan: The Great Communicator. 1995
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