Greg Mankiw speculates that a world language will emerge, it will be either English or Chinese, and smart money says English will win. The interesting thing to me is that is it hard to become literate in either of the front-runners. Chinese is of course notorious for its lack of a phonetic alphabet, but English spelling is dreadful compared to say, German.

In my spare moments, I’ve worked out a whole system of phonetic English spelling. Imagine:

1. Dropping all silent and unpronounced double letters.

2. Dropping q (replace with kw) and x (replace with ks or z). Replace c with either k or s, and pronounce c like ch.

3. Standardizing vowels so that a single letter indicates a “short” vowel, and a double letter indicates a “long” vowel. Specifically:

Sound

Old Spelling

New Spelling

short A

cat

cat

long A

hate

haat

short E

bet

bet

long E

beat

beet

short I

hit

hit

long I

write

riit

short O

Bob

Bob

long O

boat

boot

short U

up

up

long U

boot

buut

Unfortunately for my ego, it turns out that I’m just re-inventing the wheel. A little google searching revealed the Simplified Spelling Society and at least one complete system for improved spelling. The latter highlights a number of sins of omission of Kaplin’s Simplifiid Speling – like how am I going to spell “put”?

The main problem for both Chinese and English, however, is that this is a classic coordination game. Who goes first? Em Ii gooing tuu start bloging with simplifiid speling, muc les riiting ortiklz? When you put it this way, I think Chinese has an edge over English in the race to be the world language. Chinese spelling is so bad that they might actually pay the switching cost of a well-crafted phonetic alphabet. English, in contrast, is bad but livable, so I wouldn’t be surprised if English becomes a dead language before its spelling changes.