I redesigned English | Tugulab Blog.

She taked the childs to see the mouses.

If that sentence made you wince, notice what actually happened: the sentence follows the rules of English perfectly. Past tense is -ed. Plurals are -s. Every small child learning English produces sentences exactly like it, and every one of them gets corrected — not because they broke a rule, but because English doesn't follow its own rules.

I spent the last months cataloguing everything English forces learners to memorize, and then I designed a revision that removes it. It's called World English. You can read it without ever learning it — and to prove that, the second half of this post is written in it.

The case against English

English is the default language of the internet, science, aviation, and business. Around 1.5 billion people are learning it right now. It holds that position by accident of history, not by merit of design — and as a piece of design, it is remarkable mostly for how much of it is arbitrary:

~200 irregular verbs in everyday use (400–600 counting variants). Worse: the ~50 that carry the bulk of daily usage are the most common verbs in the language. The irregularity is concentrated exactly where a beginner starts.
The verb "be" alone has 8 forms — am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being — for one meaning.
Spelling froze around 1475–1630, when the printing press locked it in mid-way through the Great Vowel Shift. Result: roughly 25% of common words contain a spelling you cannot derive from sound, and ough alone has 8–9 pronunciations.
Articles are the single hardest feature for many learners. "The" is the most frequent word in written English (~6–7% of all words), yet corpus studies of Japanese learners found article accuracy never reaches the conventional 80–90% "acquired" threshold — at any proficiency level. Some researchers argue advanced learners still use articles almost randomly.
~60–70 prepositions, assigned mostly by idiom. You arrive at a place but in a country. Things happen on Monday, in July, at 3 o'clock. There is no rule; there is a list.

None of this complexity does communicative work. It is historical residue — and the bill for it is paid by learners, forever. Linguist Larry Selinker estimated that about 95% of second-language learners never reach native-like competence. We treat that as a fact about learners. It's at least as much a fact about the language.

What I did about it

World English keeps English's core and deletes the exceptions. The priorities, in order: ease (regular, predictable), then clarity (hard to misread), and last entertainment (nuance, idiom, flourish — deliberately traded away). One constraint bounds everything: it must stay legible as English. An evolution, not a cipher.

Two design principles do most of the work. Subtract before you add — the first tool is removing irregularity, not inventing grammar. And one rule, no exception lists — a feature is only done when a beginner can apply it without a table of special cases.

Some headline results:

Every verb is regular. Past tense is -ed, always: go → goed, take → taked, see → seed. ~200 irregular verbs → 0.
"Be" drops from 8 forms to 3: be, beed, being.
Every plural is regular: childs, foots, mouses. And the third-person -s is gone: she go, he try.
One article. The for things the listener already knows; nothing otherwise. The a/an/the/zero decision tree — the one learners never master — disappears.
Three tenses, no perfect. "I have lived here ten years" → I live here for ten years. A plain time word (already, since, still) does the perfect's job.
No do-support. "Do you like it?" → You like it? "I don't like it" → I not like it.

The whole grammar fits on one page. Every rule links to a spec that records the learner problem it solves, the trade-off it accepts, and the alternatives it rejected. There's an interactive translator that converts standard English to World English and back, and the rules are enforced mechanically: a linter sweeps the specs' own examples for abolished forms, because the first design pass produced contradictions that only a machine caught.

What I'm not claiming

Let me save the thread some time.

Nobody is going to switch. The network effects that made English dominant also make it unreformable — a century of prior art (Basic English, the spelling-reform movements, Esperanto's whole existence) is a graveyard, and I've documented it rather than pretended otherwise. World English also gives up real things: nuance, register, idiom, the literary shimmer of irregularity. That's not collateral damage; it's the stated price.

This is a research and design effort, not a campaign. The question it asks is narrow and, I think, genuinely interesting: how simple could English be while still being English? The answer turns out to be: dramatically simpler, with surprisingly little loss. The interesting part isn't the proposal — it's the map. When you regularize a language on paper, you find out exactly where the difficulty lives, and how little of it earns its keep.

One more thing before the switch. To a native speaker, World English reads as wrong — taked triggers something almost physical. But "wrong" here just means unfamiliar to the people who already paid the memorization cost. You paid it so long ago you can't remember paying. A billion and a half people are paying it right now.

The rest of this post is written in World English

Nobody teached you this language. Read on anyway.

You not need lessons, because you already read World English. That be the point. The language be subset of the English that you know, plus small set of regular forms that you can decode on first sight. You readed "teached" without help, because the rule be visible inside the word.

Every verb in this section be regular. I writed these paragraphs with the same rule that the childs use when they say "taked": one past tense, always -ed. The childs apply the real rule. The adults memorized the exceptions, and then they called the exceptions "correct".

The article system shrinked to one rule. You use "the" for the things that the reader already know, and nothing for new things. I seed dog — one dog, new to the story. The dog barked — the same dog, the dog that you now know. Standard English have three articles and one decision tree that learners never master. World English have one word and one question: the reader know this thing already?

The perfect tense not exist here. Time words do the work: I already finished. I live here since 2019. Questions and negation not need "do": You like this? Maybe you not like it. Both forms be shorter than the standard forms, and both be clear.

Now the honest part. This section maybe feel wrong to you. Your brain flag "taked" and "childs" as errors, because you spended years on the exceptions. But ask: wrong for who? The forms that feel natural to you be exactly the forms that 1.5 billion learners must memorize one by one, with no rule to help them. Altho this text feel strange, you understanded every word of it, at full speed, with zero training. No natural language can offer that trade.

I not think that the world will adopt World English. I think that the map have value on its own: it show where the difficulty of English live, and it show that most of that difficulty do no work.

If you want to attack this project, please attack the rules, not the premise. Every rule have spec with the problem, the trade-off, and the rejected alternatives. Pick one rule and tell me where it break — that be the most useful comment that you can leave.

You can try the translator, read the whole grammar on one page, or read the research and the code. All of it be open source.

She taked the childs to see the mouses. The child that sayed it first beed right.