4 ms·

Interesting that there aren’t alphabets and spellings based on these fundamental phonemes. Couldn’t things be simplified quite a bit by doing this?

jahewson 7y ago
Oh but there are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
petecox 7y ago
A common alphabet for Africa has been proposed for sounds not represented by the basic Latin alphabet of colonial languages such as French and English. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet
jdmichal 7y ago
Which version of English shall we use in this simplification? While English could probably withstand some changes to orthography, there are also advantages to the spelling being somewhat disjoint from the exact pronunciation.
lottin 7y ago
Not necessarily because pronunciation varies substantially across dialects and often also according to prosodic stress and phonetic context. For instance, the word "what" can be pronounced as /wɒt/ /wɒʔ/ /hwɒt/ /wʌt/ /hwʌt/ /wɑːt/ /hwɑːt/ and a few more...
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Drifts also occur in time as well as space. Chaucer's early Middle English or Shakespeare's later Middle English are still mostly readable to a modern English reader, but a lot of the pronunciations have shifted almost entirely. There's a sort of archival benefit to the divorce between writing and pronunciation, the slower pace in which written forms drift versus spoken forms. (Which would also seem to hint why it's somewhat of a natural language outcome of speech being somewhat more ephemeral and prone to drifting than written text that outlasts it in libraries and schools.)
SllX 7y ago
When I was a teenager I remade the English alphabet taking freely from the ghost of English past and other Western European languages. Ended up with, if I recall, about 47-53 distinct “letters”, although it was a flat hierarchy so a, æ, e, and è were all distinct letters from one another for sorting and reference purposes. Part of my motivation was to reduce the character count of individual words by combining digraphs and trigraphs into a single letter… so I could fit more on the Twitter. Secondary was to have one letter to one sound, although I don’t think I covered every sound in English. When I soured on Twitter, I also lost interest in my modified alphabet, but my main takeaways: remaking the English alphabet from scratch can be done in about an afternoon, including a reference word list to act as a guide for new spellings. Your main problem is the only one that will be literate in your new alphabet is you, not an insurmountable problem in itself, but it’s probably not worth re-educating society for something you put together in an afternoon. If you want to see a more successful manifestation of an alphabet put together in a way you suggest, try Hangul. It’s flexible enough to adapt to other languages as well.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  # Plan for the improvement of English spelling. For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    For those who don’t recognize it: That text is rather famous, and was written in 1971 by M. J. Shields¹. It has since been frequently mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who only wrote about a similar topic in 1899². 1) http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.... 2) https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chapter11.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...
Sharlin 7y ago
Well, there are languages that are almost 100% phonetic and regular, like Finnish. Finnish "a" equals IPA [a] and so on.

jahewson 7y ago

Oh but there are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

petecox 7y ago

A common alphabet for Africa has been proposed for sounds not represented by the basic Latin alphabet of colonial languages such as French and English. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet

jdmichal 7y ago

Which version of English shall we use in this simplification? While English could probably withstand some changes to orthography, there are also advantages to the spelling being somewhat disjoint from the exact pronunciation.

lottin 7y ago

Not necessarily because pronunciation varies substantially across dialects and often also according to prosodic stress and phonetic context. For instance, the word "what" can be pronounced as /wɒt/ /wɒʔ/ /hwɒt/ /wʌt/ /hwʌt/ /wɑːt/ /hwɑːt/ and a few more...

WorldMaker 7y ago
Drifts also occur in time as well as space. Chaucer's early Middle English or Shakespeare's later Middle English are still mostly readable to a modern English reader, but a lot of the pronunciations have shifted almost entirely. There's a sort of archival benefit to the divorce between writing and pronunciation, the slower pace in which written forms drift versus spoken forms. (Which would also seem to hint why it's somewhat of a natural language outcome of speech being somewhat more ephemeral and prone to drifting than written text that outlasts it in libraries and schools.)

SllX 7y ago

When I was a teenager I remade the English alphabet taking freely from the ghost of English past and other Western European languages. Ended up with, if I recall, about 47-53 distinct “letters”, although it was a flat hierarchy so a, æ, e, and è were all distinct letters from one another for sorting and reference purposes. Part of my motivation was to reduce the character count of individual words by combining digraphs and trigraphs into a single letter… so I could fit more on the Twitter. Secondary was to have one letter to one sound, although I don’t think I covered every sound in English. When I soured on Twitter, I also lost interest in my modified alphabet, but my main takeaways: remaking the English alphabet from scratch can be done in about an afternoon, including a reference word list to act as a guide for new spellings. Your main problem is the only one that will be literate in your new alphabet is you, not an insurmountable problem in itself, but it’s probably not worth re-educating society for something you put together in an afternoon. If you want to see a more successful manifestation of an alphabet put together in a way you suggest, try Hangul. It’s flexible enough to adapt to other languages as well.

dotancohen 7y ago
# Plan for the improvement of English spelling. For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
- teddyh 7y ago
  For those who don’t recognize it: That text is rather famous, and was written in 1971 by M. J. Shields¹. It has since been frequently mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who only wrote about a similar topic in 1899². 1) http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.... 2) https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chapter11.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...

Sharlin 7y ago

Well, there are languages that are almost 100% phonetic and regular, like Finnish. Finnish "a" equals IPA [a] and so on.