This is a journey across languages along the bumpy road of speech and spelling with discoveries to save English from Babbles of Babel. Discordance of spelling and pronunciation caused much irritation among great authors. Spelling reforms of American English angered Mark Twain. He said that it is replacing one inadequacy with another. George Bernard Shaw noted the reform of English in USA and commented that USA and Great Britain are divided by one common language. Both of them pleaded for rational alphabet.   When the British left the country, billboards on trains and at bus stops of independent India proclaimed “Ongreji Hothao”, i.e., “Banish English.” About a decade later those billboards read, “Learn English and Earn More.” Now we wish to see on those billboards “Improve Alphabet and Save English,” save it from Babbles of Babel.   English is considered to be the simplest of all European languages due primarily to its simplified grammar. Similarly, Bengali may be considered as the easiest of all Indian languages. In simplicity Bengali excels English in having generally no gender, no plural forms of nouns and adjectives, and having no differentiation of he/she or his/her. In these aspects Bengali is very close to Chinese. The Buddhist pilgrims and scholars of China worked longer than a millennium in Nalanda and Tamralipti, two Bengali speaking towns of ancient India. Sanskrit roots and this Chinese association made Bengali both robust and lucid. Cooperation and competition with Farsi, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Hindustani strengthened it further. Then Bengali and English profited mutually and matured profoundly through 200 years of contest and concordance in and around Calcutta, the capital of British India.   Bengali and other Indian languages excelled also because of their better alphabets, Sanskrit-based - scientifically ordered and phonetically perfected. In contrast the Latin alphabet is weaker, less complete and phonetically less well defined. Europe needs an improved alphabet such as we have in India, especially to justify English spellings. The phonetically advanced letters of India require morphological improvements to put an end to the disturbing diversities.   If we join hands to create an alphabet compatible with the keyboard and based on the excellent phonetic system of Sanskrit with the addition of a sprinkling of the nekudots of Hebrew, we may achieve the grand solution suitable for both Europe and India. The rest of the world would also naturally profit, eliminating the need of meddling and fiddling such as Pin Yin or inflationary diacritics.   A phonetic alphabet may bring us blessings: spellings will be simple, pronunciations will be guided and meanings will be maintained. In other words, writing may then fulfill its purpose.   About Author - The author was born in Sylhet, British India. He started to wander as a displaced person since the partition of India. Model School, Sylhet; Priyanath School, Dhaka; Belur Vidyamandir, Howrah; Presidency College, Calcutta and Benares Hindu University were the major stations of his studies. In Benares he was exposed to all major languages of India. During his post-doctoral work in German universities he was confronted with different European languages. Strolling with “stateless” status he worked with research and teaching academies of India, Europe, Middle East and U.S.A. All these and an engagement in the World Health Organisation enabled him to be at home across the languages. He has published about a hundred essays on Genetics, Cell-Biology and Popular Science. His unique perspectives on languages are chronicled in the exceptional narrative Gems of Human Heritage: Our Scripts, reflecting robust ideas to obtain ideal alphabets.

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