In many programming languages, phrases are shortened to reduce the time taken to write programs. “var” instead of “variable”, “int” instead of integer, etc. This makes writing code much faster, but what if this was applied to the whole of the English language?
If programmers were to have the power to change how words are spelt and pronounced, what would change? Is every word shortened to three or four letters? Would leet speak become dominant? How practical would it be, how much more productive would the (English speaking) population be?
As for other languages, I’m not sure how well it would work. A majority of programming languages are based on English, and many other languages have restrictions that make it more difficult to change the spellings like this (e.g. gendered words, alphabet-less character sets). English, on the other hand, is infamous for having more exceptions than there are rules.
Yes, of course I’m talking about spoken language. Of course if English were written in kanji we would need fewer characters to express the same information, but it wouldn’t change the spoken language at all.
(I remember learning the following graphical user interface design rule: switch your application to Spanish or Portuguese to check whether UI messages still fit in the boxes you’ve put them in. Spanish and Portuguese are the common languages that need the most characters per unit of information.)