13 ms·
Inventing my own writing system for English, VJScript
- oidar 2y agoYou should look at different shorthand methods. This is very close to how teeline is written.
- actionfromafar 2y agoAre there for instance "cyrillic" fonts which (ab)use mappings to show as many letters as possible as latin letters, so for instance "трактор" would show as "traktor" but where letters which have no non-ambiguous latin representation would show as the original cyrillic letter? ( And persian ی would I guess show as y )
- Muromec 2y agoJust learn Cyrillic. It’s easy and takes less time than figuring out font hacks
- tdeck 2y agoThere was a Cyrillic code page (remember code pages?) designed so that most letters would be at the same code point as corresponding Latin letters, just with the high bit set: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI8-R https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI8-R
- bonzini 2y agoAnd with uppercase and lowercase exchanged! There was such a font too, it was called Czar. I used it in Windows 95/98.
- vkethana 2y agoprobably doable with a chrome extension + search and replace
- neverokay 2y agoHmmmmmmmmmmmm. Should I encode my passwords to memory like this?
- nhellman 2y agoAren't there symbols missing for the mid central vowels which are common in English? I.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel. How do you write e.g. "learn" or "bird"? It seems to be needed in the first "This is a sentence..." example as well. Right now it uses U for the lone "a" and I for the second syllable in "sentEnce". But U represents /ʌ/ (as in but) and I represents /ɪ/ (as in bit), but a symbol for /ə/ would be a better fit for these two, right?
- dragonwriter 2y agoThe given symbols match the way the vowels represented are pronounced in at least some dialects/accents of English; one problem with trying to do a new phonetically-accurate writing system for English is that English has lots of dialects and accents, and pronunciation (even relatively—like which parts of words match which parts of other words) isn't consistent between them.
- vkethana 2y agoThanks for pointing out these mistakes - I added the schwa back into the vowel inventory (forgot to include in the original post) - added clarification for how to write the “ir” in “bird” or “firm”
- jonathankoren 2y agoI lost interest as soon as they decided to use digraphs. If you’re going to change spelling, stop uses a letter for more than one sound. Didn’t even have the guts to eliminate the most useless letter in the entire English alphabet — the C.
- noduerme 2y agoIf you got rid of c, you'd need a new letter for "ch".
- jonathankoren 2y agoNo. You need a letter for “ch” regardless. You can just reuse the Q for that. It’s pretty much useless as well. Can’t be used by itself because it’s always in “qu”, and that’s just “kw”
- dragonwriter 2y ago> You can just reuse the Q for that. It’s pretty much useless as well. Can’t be used by itself because it’s always in “qu”. It’s... not. English has words with “q” where: (1) it is followed by a different vowel than “u”, and ones where (2) it is followed by a consonant, and ones where (3) it is the final letter in the word.
- naikrovek 2y agoYou’re right. It’s funny how people who know English the least are the most confident about the changes that need to be made. English is how it is because of how English has grown and evolved over the centuries. There are a lot of languages which have influenced English, and we mixed all of those inherited words and their pluralizations into a single language. Additionally, “sight words” seems to be the most prominent way to teach children how to read today, which is not great for the future, because learning sight words (learning whole words by sight and memorizing them) rather than learning sounds phonetically does not prepare students of English to tackle new words they see in the future. I was taught phonics in school and I hated those classes but I learned how to read and how to spell because of them. Anyway, if you learn via phonics, at least for me, somehow, English words and their pronunciation make a lot more sense and you notice all the consistency instead of all the inconsistency.
- bozey07 2y agojan Misali has a great video on why most spelling reforms are bad[0][1] and this one falls for a very very common fallacy - spelling makes more sense when it "maps" to "pronunciation". > VJScript fixes these issues [...] no silent letters, and one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. You cannot do this. It's impossible, because not everybody speaks English the same. How do I spell "hour" in VJScript? Do I write down the h, or not? How about "potato", or "tomato"? Or "Graham" - is it pronounced Grayham or Gray'm? You have to either choose one, and forfeit every claim you've made to VJScript's accurate representation of speech, or pretend every other dialect of English doesn't exist. Neither are particularly constructive given the typical goal of a language reform is to get everybody on the same page. [0] https://youtu.be/TEsqY4MH40s https://youtu.be/TEsqY4MH40s [1] And a cathartic rant on people moaning about English orthography. I'm sorry if this sounds a bit brash. Linguistics inspires that in me.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Or "Graham" - is it pronounced Grayham or Gray'm? You would never choose either of those. /gɹæm/
- amenhotep 2y agoNo, I'm afraid we're talking about English, not American.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoMaybe we could vote. ;D
- switch007 2y agoIf that IPA is grey-um, that's the British pronunciation I'm confused
- thaumasiotes 2y agoAre you? You seem to have correctly noted that (1) the ash is a symbol from the IPA; (2) you don't know what it means; and (3) if it meant the FACE vowel, the conversation wouldn't make any sense. Since you already know how it's being used, it would be the work of a few seconds to look up the IPA value, but, as you might guess from the name "ash", it represents the TRAP vowel, the same thing it represents in the orthography of Old English. (And Norwegian, apparently, but I would put good money on the IPA usage deriving from Old English.)
- drivingmenuts 2y agoWhy not just use IPA? It has the advantage of being a fairly agreed-upon model, with an existing alphabet that works well with existing type forms.
- inkyoto 2y agoGradual divergence of spelling and pronunciation is an inherent flaw of writing systems based on an alphabet or abiguda. Pronunciation inevitably evolves, especially over extended stretches of time causing a drift in the spelling. The IPA would succumb to the same fate and perhaps would make the problem even worse due to being too precise by virtue of encoding the finest deviations in phonetic qualities of sounds that are irrelevant to the semantic meaning of words the sounds encode. Varying solutions have been employed to deal with the problem: 1) keep the historical spelling and accept the pronunciation drift (English, Icelandic, French etc), 2) purge the obsolete spelling to keep it up to date with the current pronunciation, 3) a varying balance of 1 and 2. Logographic writing systems are the only ones that are immune to the spelling-pronunciation problem as they decouple one from another and continue to convey the semantic meaning of words the logographic system encodes (Chinese, Ancient Egyptian – with caveats). It preserves the historical knowledge at the expense of the future phonetic quality being unrelated to the historical one. This is why we can never be sure how exactly Ancient Egyptian and Chinese languages sounded.
- vkethana 2y agoOne reason why IPA isn't a good choice is that etymological spellings are very important, and IPA doesn't really preserve those. For example, French "biographie" (BYOO-graffey) sounds very different from English "biography". But because these archaic spellings are preserved, it becomes easier for English speakers to learn French and vice versa. IPA is also a little trickier to adjust to because it has letters not found in English. Someone who's never seen IPA before would have a hard time guessing how to read dʒ or tʃ. (Granted, the point of IPA is scholarly accuracy and not ease of learning so this is an understandable choice the creators made.) Another thing to consider is that adding new letters creates a lot of overhead for new learners even if it reduces the total # of characters in the alphabet. Ideally someone who has never seen VJScript can scan over a sentence written in it and guess/understand most of it.
- CoBE10 2y agoWe've come the full circle with writing letters above words. Reminds me of old medieval Slavic texts: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Miroslavs_Gospel.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Miroslav... https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_02363/?st=gallery https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_02363/?st=gallery
- Sparrowhawk21 2y agoCurious as to why the Indic long and short 'i' matras (diacritics) are used. The placement of short 'i' (to the left of its consonant) is hardly intuitive to English speakers.
- compsciphd 2y agoHebrew is already written like that. A language of all consonants with diacritic marks (nikud/nikudot) to connote vowels. Though in practice unless you're a religious person reading out a printed hebrew bible (scribal parchment ones don't have them) or prayer books or a child in Israel who is learning to read, you don't normally use them (i.e. most things won't print them and use an expanded consonant form where letters when paired in certain ways connote the vowels) unless there would be confusion to understanding the word without the vowels (as a simple example, without vowels, the word key and programmer would be indistinguishable, as spelled the same way).
- wizzwizz4 2y agoWhy are you using <span>s with classes instead of using the <ruby> tags?
- Cheetah26 2y agoFor anyone who likes this sort of thing I'd recommend checking out the Shavian alphabet[1][2]. Similar goals with some very cool choices for matching letters to their sound. It also kinda handles accent variations with a few extra letters. [1] https://www.shavian.info/ https://www.shavian.info/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
- forgotpwd16 2y agoIf we're dropping Latin alphabet, Tengwar is another option. It's vocalized abjad (a better term perhaps will be abugida or alphasyllabary) and vowels are written with diacritics.
- georgewsinger 2y agoDo you have any sense as to whether Tengwar is any more or less compact/concise than Shavian?
- hnlmorg 2y agoBut and comma (u and a) have completely different sounds in English. And boot and book (oo) have the same sound in the north of England, albeit they do sounds differently in the south. I don’t really see how this writing system will work when it’s “alphabet” is already different depending on your accent.
- dvh 2y agoDis iz hau ingliš wud probably bí writn in máj lengwidž. Handrid prsent rídbl.
- cardanome 2y agoThe problem is that there is not one correct pronunciation of English but myriads of dialects. While some Languages do have a standard like High-German, for English there isn't one that feels neutral and that most English speakers would agree one. Received Pronunciation? Yeah, that is going to piss off a lot of people. Try to create some form of "accent free" American English? Maybe go back to using Transatlantic accent? That one was one fun! If you want a close relationship between your writing system and the pronunciation you ever either have to pick or create a standard of pronunciation or allow for words to be written depending on the dialect. Both options suck very much. I think that it is fine for there to not be a complete 1 to 1 relationship between writing and speaking. It is also nice when the way a word is written gives you clues about it's history and the culture it is coming from. Also pronunciation is constantly shifting. So you need to do regular spelling reforms. Meaning older text becomes harder to read for future generations and you add a lot of churn as things need to be constantly be updated for the new spelling. In short, there is not easy way to fix English orthography. It is all about trade-offs.