in the last century, english has solidified its place as the standard language for human communication on earth. while other languages certainly have large bases of speakers — mandarin, spanish, french, arabic, hindi, etc — no other language comes close to the universality of english across the species as a whole.
which emphasizes even more aggressively how bad english is in many ways.
english is a non-standardized evolutionary language, a brutal mashup between old versions of german and french filtered through the lens of an uneducated and uninterested public over centuries and battered by spelling awkwardness and hyperdialectization for its entire existence.
english being upgraded is long overdue.
the first step, of course, is to fix its outdated latin-esque writing system where letters have myriad possible pronunciations and pronunciations can be represented in seemingly-unlimited variations of letters. i have already addressed that with the creation of a flexible phonetic script that works for english, though.
the other problem is the unnecessary complexity of english in terms of its grammar. english has several features other common languages do not, outdated and needless additions that can be stripped away to make english more functional as a universal tool for communication.
three of these immediately come to mind — a multiplicity of pronouns, verb conjugation and pluralization.
the first is relatively simple. english has two first-person pronouns (i/me and we/us), which certainly appears to be the right amount. it has one second-person pronoun (you), also a completely sensible quantity. in the third-person, however, english has many — it, they/them, she/her, he/him.
there is no need for gender to be part of every grammatical sentence and we already know this intuitively in english. when a noun is used, even a name, no gender is attached to it in the sentence. as such, requiring there to be gender attached to pronouns whose nouns can work in the same sentences without gender is complexity for no purpose. it doesn’t change the sentence structure or meaning in an intentional way but causes frequent confusion and miscommunication.
the solution to the pronoun problem is to eliminate the extraneous pronouns. we are then left with i, we, you and it. there is no reason to have both subject and object forms of these pronouns because english is a subject-verb-object language so word-order always dictates which is subject and which is object so this is also unnecessary complexity.
“he gave us your book.” -> “it gave we you book.”
the second is a much more complex issue but the solution is relatively intuitive. the reason for verb conjugation is generally tense — when an action happens in a sentence. other languages like mandarin have solved this by adding helper words and simplifying verbs and this is certainly a good strategy. english can learn from that and use a different solution, however.
building on the existing structure of english verbs but stripping away all the unnecessary verb forms, sticking only with the dictionary versions, we can add single-sound endings to verbs to indicate tense and form. we can take common sounds already in english for conjugation and apply them as suffixes on dictionary-form verbs instead, making learning conjugation unnecessary.
present — (none)
past — d (from -ed suffix)
future — l (from will auxiliary)
progressive — n (from -ing suffix)
perfect — v (from have auxiliary)
conditional — f (from if conditional)
these could then be chained to form complex tenses. a functional order would be (perfect)(progressive)(future)(past)(conditional).
the frequent example in textbooks is “i read a book” so we can use that to demonstrate the possibilities.
simple present & conditional
“i read a book.” -> “i read a book.”
“i would read a book.” -> “i read’f a book.”
present progressive & conditional
“i am reading a book.” -> “i read’g a book.”
“i would be reading a book.” -> “i read’gf a book.”
present perfect & conditional
“i have read a book.” -> “i read’v a book.”
“i would have read a book.” -> “i read’vf a book.”
present perfect progressive & conditional
“i have been reading a book.” -> “i read’vn a book.”
“i would have been reading a book.” -> “i read’vnf a book.”
simple past
“i read a book.” -> “i read’d a book.”
past progressive
“i was reading a book.” -> “i read’nd a book.”
past perfect
“i had read a book.” -> “i read’vd a book.”
past perfect progressive
“i had been reading a book.” -> “i read’vnd a book.”
simple future
“i will read a book.” -> “i read’l a book.”
future progressive
“i will be reading a book.” -> “i read’nl a book.”
future perfect
“i will have read a book.” -> “i read’vl a book.”
future perfect progressive
“i will have been reading a book.” -> “i read’vnl a book.”
in this way, all verb conjugation becomes a historical idea in english and the most confusing (and often-misused) part of the language is eliminated. i have read very few popular novels or even academic works written in this century without at least a small number of tense and conjugation errors. this would erase those potential mistakes and make learning verbs a matter of a few hours. learn one simple pattern and every verb follows it.
the past tense of read? “read’d”. past tense of go? “go’d”. past tense of think? “think’d”.
the final simplification english desperately needs is to eliminate pluralization. number is an awkward grammatical idiosyncrasy in english that implies that the difference between 1 and 2 is of vital importance but the difference between 2 and 1000000 is irrelevant. this, of course, makes no sense but it has been codified in language for thousands of years. that would also make the use of articles unnecessary, deleting “a” and “the”. “that” or “this” could be repurposed to serve the function of a definite article much as in many other languages, turning “i read a book” into “i read book” and “i read the book” into “i read that book”.