Alman: German, Simplified

English in the Future

Directors at Daimler Benz and Chrysler have announced an agreement to adopt English as the preferred language for communications, rather than German, which was another possibility.

As part of the negotiations, directors at Chrysler conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and have accepted a five-year phase-in plan. In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Also, the hard "c" will be replased with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputers have one less letter.

There will be growing kompany enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.

In the third year, DaimlerKhrysler akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible.

DaimlerKhrysler will enkourage the removal of double letters, whish have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps sush as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" by "v".

During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be droped from vords kontaining "o", and similar shanges vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis, and employes vil find it ezi to kommunikat viz eash ozer.

Ov kors al supliers vil be expekted to us zis for all busines komunikation via DaimlerKhrysler.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

(an old joke)

To native me, Alman sounds like an US American talking German. Unsurprising, if we look at the originator of the proposal.

I've been repeating this to anybody unwilling to listen: What appears like needless complexity in a language may improve the latency and stability in understanding a message. Redundancies are a feature of language, not just baggage.

Certainly, whether the German declination of articles and pronouns is worth it is very much up for debate. But looking at this example, Alman drops a lot of flexibility in how sentences can be arranged, and where nouns may be omitted. Imagine losing relative pronouns in English. That would slow down native speakers but make learning English easier. Good tradeoff? Of course not!

I like the website, although it wasn't the easiest to read on my iPhone 11. I don't speak German, but if I were to speak like this I imagine it would be understandable but maybe I would sound like a little kid or something - that's the toughest thing with conlanging interlangs, they make tons of sense but natural languages carry a lot of tone and nuance in their grammar.

This site is unreadable on phone. The quote block takes up 80% of the viewport and does not scroll with the page.