World English

World English is a careful revision of English that keeps what works and regularizes what doesn't. It strips out the irregular verbs, the memorized plurals, the three articles, and the spelling that fights its own pronunciation — the historical residue that makes English one of the harder languages to learn well — while staying readable to anyone who already knows it. The guiding principle is simple: how a word is written should tell you how it is said.

I started it because English became the world's shared language by accident of history, not by design, and hundreds of millions of people pay for that accident every time they try to learn it. World English is an open design and research project asking a question worth answering: how simple could English be while remaining recognizably English?

• 200 irregular verbs regularized down to zero
• A single "be" for every person
• One article — just "the"
• Regular plurals, always by adding "-s"
• Phonetic, dialect-neutral spelling — how a word is written tells you how it is said