If you were to replace english in the current world, the best candidate, in my opinion, would be spanish.
If you look at list of the most spoken languages you end up with english, mandarin, hindi and spanish, out of those spanish does not require learning a new alphabet.
Spanish is mostly phonetic, there are exceptions here and there with how consonants are pronounced here and there, but vowels are phonetic, you can read text without wondering how something is pronounced.
English has taken so much from latin that it actually looks a bit like a romance language despite having germanic roots, but this does mean that there’s a lot of overlap in vocabulary where english words and spanish words are mostly the same.
Of course is spanish isn’t perfect, but creating a new language that covers everyone’s usecase would just lead to lower adoption so I think it’s the one that has the best shot while solving some glaring issues from english.
It’s a good shout, especially given how large the current speaker base is. Obvi, the alphabet thing cuts both ways — we’re still pushing our alphabet onto hindi, mandarin speakers &c — but that’s unavoidable.
If you were to replace english in the current world, the best candidate, in my opinion, would be spanish.
If you look at list of the most spoken languages you end up with english, mandarin, hindi and spanish, out of those spanish does not require learning a new alphabet.
Spanish is mostly phonetic, there are exceptions here and there with how consonants are pronounced here and there, but vowels are phonetic, you can read text without wondering how something is pronounced.
English has taken so much from latin that it actually looks a bit like a romance language despite having germanic roots, but this does mean that there’s a lot of overlap in vocabulary where english words and spanish words are mostly the same.
Of course is spanish isn’t perfect, but creating a new language that covers everyone’s usecase would just lead to lower adoption so I think it’s the one that has the best shot while solving some glaring issues from english.
It’s a good shout, especially given how large the current speaker base is. Obvi, the alphabet thing cuts both ways — we’re still pushing our alphabet onto hindi, mandarin speakers &c — but that’s unavoidable.