Battle of Vukovar

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Just use English.

You mean like this:
Beet-kah zah Voo-kaw-vahr nee-yay say daw-gaw-dee-lah!
Damn, that's even worse than the current Croatian writing system.

Or do you mean giving up Croatian language in favour of English? Why English?
Is there anybody else here who thinks it would be better if English hadn't replaced Latin as the language of international communication? While Latin isn't completely politically neutral (it has its descendants that are alive today, it's easier for Italians or Romanians to learn Latin than it is for Croatians or Germans), it's quite a bit more neutral than English is, since it's no man's native language. And Latin is, unlike English, frozen in time: if you speak Latin, you don't need any special education to read 2000 years old texts (the same is true, although to a much lesser extent, for Greek). That's also why, in Latin, words are pronounced exactly as they are written (and Latin alphabet was specifically made for Latin, not adapted to it, as it is to English and Croatian). That's not quite true for Croatian, and is completely false for English (in English, if you speak as you spell, you likely won't even be understood). Latin also doesn't have sounds that are difficult to pronounce (with the possible exceptions of the "gn" in "agnus" and "sc" in "scientia", but those complications only exist in traditional pronunciation, not in classical pronunciation), and English does. I don't know about you, but to me "three", "free" and "tree" sound the same, and so do "pan" and "pen". Latin grammar appears to be harder than English grammar at first, because of the declensions and the conjugations. However, once you get deeper into the language, you see that it really isn't. When you write complex sentences in English, you need to put the words in the right order or you risk not being understood. The same is not true for Croatian or Latin, which have declension and conjugation systems. And quite often, in English, it's impossible to make the words fit the order, so you need to insert new words (it, to, do, that, then, than, there...), which don't mean much, just to fill the gaps created by the grammar rules. I think that Latin, when everything is taken into account, is actually easier than English. I have studied Latin for two years in high-school, then I haven't written in it or spoken it for three years. And now I've written an essay about vegetarianism in it (you can read it at the bottom of this web-page), an essay about anarchism (you can read it at the bottom of this web-page), a short essay about atheism (you can read it at the bottom of this web-page), and I had an on-line discussion about Vukovar (I've linked to it in this thread). Tell me you can do that with English without having seriously studied it!
Of course, Esperanto is even better suited for being an international language, it was specifically designed for that. It has only two cases and only one declension for nouns and one for adjectives, and the verbs are similarly all conjugated the same way. That's probably just enough morphology to prevent confusion in long sentences, but not enough to be intimidating to new learners or to be difficult to remember. And words being pronounced exactly as they are written was one of its design goals.

Students of Latin have something in common with necrophiliacs: they both enjoy a dead tongue.

Boru