Izzy as Pie

by Dạ̃bḃlÿ Dũṫch S̊.
X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies

I recently stumbled across yet another spelling reform proposal, called PIE, or “Phonetically Intuitive English”. At first glance it looks like some English text got drunk in a Vietnamese print shop, and woke up the next day with some not very well thought out tattoos and piercings. I mean, let’s face it, the last thing English needs is diarrheal diacritics. You know, hemorrhaging jots and tittles is probably okay for languages that don’t need them for punctuation, but we’ve got standards over here.

My conclusion is that if this is intuitive, or child-friendly, or learner-friendly, I am Miss Universe.¹ I mean, let’s face it, beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder; there’s good looking, and then there’s just plain ugly.

However, I also realized that this PIE is every bit as intuitive as the other PIE—Proto-Indo-European! The spelling of real PIE is in fact very intuitive. Any child on earth, even a child who’s never seen any written language before, could look at something like *h₂eǵ- and pronounce it correctly down to the smallest detail. I mean, let’s face it, PIE is essentially just breathy Pig Latin, and any 6-year-old can master that in half an hour.

Those guys over at the Original English Movement may be on to something, but, I mean, let’s face it, they haven’t pushed the idea to its logical extreme—rather than reform English, why not reform all the Indo-European languages at once, and roll them all back to the much more intuitive PIE! I’ve even come up with a slogan for our new campaign: “PIE: So easy, it’s usable at the zero-grade level.”

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