During out time in Upstate New York visiting my mom and extended family I had an idea not unrelated to ideas I have had concerning how we count in English.
Consider that every letter in the English alphabet is spoken with one syllable. Ay, bee, see, dee, ee, eff, gee, aych, eye, and so on. With one exception.
Double-yoo. Three syllables.
My proposal is to change how we speak the letter w to one syllable – perhaps something like way. So that when we give out web addresses we no longer slog through double-yoo double-yoo double-yoo dot yahoo dot com. Instead just way way way dot yahoo dot com.
It gets better.
Have you noticed how often in English when we spell a word people have to ask “Wait – did you say em or en? See or zee?” Too many letters in English are too close in pronunciation that – especially over the phone – we are not sure. (This is why the military comes up with those whiskey-foxtrot-tango systems. No ambiguity at all.)
And those crazy Canucks and Brits and Aussies and the rest say zed instead of zee – which is why they never get confused over the phone. At least between c and z. You can laugh (and Weird Al pokes at this in his song “Canadian Idiot”) – but it makes sense. I wonder if we resist changing over because of that pesky “ABC Song”.
So why stop at way for w? Why not look at all the ambiguous letter-pairs and change one so that there is no more ambiguity?
Instead of bee and pee perhaps bee and pay. (I believe one finds this frequently in how foreign languages say their alphabets.) Instead of the always confusing em or en we get em and nay. And so on.
Coming up – why we need to do this with how we count numbers.
