Shavian alphabet
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I'm no expert, and I bet this has been explored, but I always felt that there's fantastic precedent in the world for using the Latin alphabet for writing sounds that occur in English; especially in the Scandinavian languages.
Eg the word "sauce", which consists of two identical consonants and a single vowel. Why not choose å for that vowel? Sås makes a lot of sense, and accidentally is also the Swedish word for "sauce" iirc. Or what about the two "th" sounds? Icelandic has got you covered: Instead of "this" and "thin", can't we write "ðis" and "þin"?
Note: this is not without precedent. The Norwegians totally overhauled their script until it was pretty much phonetic. This gave them fantastic benefits such as way fewer pupils struggling with dyslexia (at least, until learning Danish or English), and heartwarmingly lovely spellings of loan words such as "restaurang" and "stasjon".
It could be done.
Personally I think it's totally insane to use a phonetic script (as opposed to eg Chinese) but then not spell out the sounds. The Finns, Norwegians, Italians and Russians (and plenty others) got it right.
Why? Some ortografic adjustments wud do.
That's really just using slight modifications, using our own perception of what English sounds to us though. I expect it would look quite alien to the rest of the World, if the Brits started doing it based on their own sense of what written english should look like.
While spoken and written English differ quite a lot, I suspect that to be one of the reasons as to why English has been so successful as a a Global trade language (I'm deliberately ignoring the Brittish Empire here). If English hadn't been standardized, and all English-speaking countries had their own separate written English based on their local dialects, the situation would be quite different.
What a beautiful example!
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."
Seems like a decent approach for the English alphabet improvements.
Because å has a historical significance, using it would just be keeping with historical crud, use ø?/o/u instead.
In any case, you'd have to solve the same problems people already using IPA for English deal with. For one, you'd probably want the same spelling system to be used across all major English dialects, at least necessitating something like using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphoneme.
An example of a situation that shows the necessity of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2g50oo/working... (specifically the pronunciation of "bed", "bad" and "bid" in the GA and NZE dialects)
So for most speakers, different written symbols might be pronounced the same way (i.e. the map from symbol to sound is not injective, and furthermore the map changes depending on which dialect of English you speak).
Additionally, you probably can't simultaneously achieve the goals of
1. use only one character per phoneme
2. use only the 26 characters of the alphabet
If you insist on keeping property (2), some phonemes will be written using (say) two characters, but you'd have to make sure that there's no ambiguity (as there would be if there were three vowels written respectively "e", "i" and "ei").
'sauce' has three consonants in my accent and no 'a' sound; it's a homonym of 'source'. Likewise, in your proposal, would 'pås' be a homograph for 'pass' and 'pause'?
Homophone surely.
Even if each Anglophone country adopted its own alphabet, we'd still have to figure out what to do about words whose pronunciation varies, like (in America) "aunt", "route", "catch", "sure", "coupon", and "been".
The only trouble was with double letters (I eventually learned to add a pause/stutter, but for years they would trip me up).
"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl."
[0] https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-be...
(I'm sure I saw this as an email well before 2006 though).
[0]: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm
[1]: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz....
At this level, it really reads like archaic English spelling before things were really standardized.
But boy, do I have sympathy for anyone, native speaker or not, who has to deal with these bugs. They bring a lot of grief and embarrassment, with little return for all the heartache.
Sure, the new words they propose often get ignored, though "couriel" was proposed by the Québec organisation, not the French one, and it is absolutely used in Québec.
But the orthography changes that they propose are much more accepted, because they usually match phonetics instead of trying to change the course of the language. In the latest reforms in France quite a few accents got "corrected" (from é to è, like événement -> évènement), displaced (aiguë -> aigüe) and silent letters dropped (clef -> clé) and these changes have been widely accepted almost immediately. Quite a few were already in use before that anyway, although incorrectly. A few changes that are more controversial are not much used, and if they don't see actual use the Académie will drop them eventually. They just try to standardise the language, not turn it into something wholly different.
This is not a bug.
It is the very feature that has made English a world language.
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.gif
That Norman invasion was a big deal.
In reality, lexical analysis of Romanian shows that it has the following roots:
* pre-Indoeuropean (some words with unknown origins, just a handful, but still)
* proto-Indoeuropean (another small bunch of words)
* Dacian/Thracian (original Indoeuropeans to settle the region; another somewhat small contribution)
* Latin (40% but basically the core vocabulary)
* Slavic (30%, especially nouns, but rarely verbs)
* French (around 20%, imports from the late 18th century onward)
* German, Turkish, Hungarian, English, etc.
So, you were saying? :) Even if you disregard the minor contributions, there's 2 prehistoric origins (pre-Indoeuropean and proto-Indoeuropean), 2 ancient origins (Dacian and Latin), 1 major medieval influence (Slavic) and 1 major modern influence (French).
The European continent had waaaay more invasions than the British Isles, don't forget that ;)
This is fairly unusual within Europe, but not so much in Asia -- Thai and Burmese have large numbers of loans that I don't think were respelled. And then there's Japanese.
Further, words such as 'like' and 'um' play an important role in speech.
Like as a filler makes speech harder to understand.
I urge you to look into the study of language, languages are fascinating and many things are not intuitive.
The term "native speaker" is ill-defined enough that there's no reason a native speaker can't make grammatical errors in speech. For instance, a child is a native speaker, but children make plenty of grammatical errors. Even adults misuse who / whom and was / were all the time.
If this isn't grammar, what is?
What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be in different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets you read quickly. Unfortunately that would likely be the case for any English spelling reform effort.
I subsequently lost most of my (NZ English) transliterations too, if I remember correctly.
Losing the ability to read quickly is its big Achilles heel of Shavian and Quikscript.
This can be mitigated somewhat as you get used to spelling things mostly the same way and reading your own spellings, but when you have to read someone else's writing it's back to sounding out the words in your head, which will slow down reading speed to a crawl compared to reading traditional English orthography.
Still getting the hang of reading it, but that's to be expected with any new writing system.
What did really impress me is that when you read poetry in Shavian / Quikscript, you can SEE the rhymes as repeating visual patterns, because what sounds the same, looks the same.
This isn't Shavian, but Quikscript, its successor.
For various reasons I've decided not to include the original :)
Welcome to phonetic languages :))))
Sorry for making fun of your comment, but as a speaker of a (fully?) phonetic language, it sounded like discovering something basic :)
For speakers of phonetic language, English rhyming is a mess. You get used to it, but "through" and "flu", really? :P
English used to be a lot more phonetic that it is now, but a lot of pronunciations changed in the past thousand years, not to mention English's propensity to follow other languages down dark alleys, knock them over the heads, steal their words, and pronounce _them_ differently.
I love English, but it's a mess.
Curiously, it seems to be easier to see rhymes when first learning to read a new phonetic system, because I still see the shapes (see the sounds!) instead of perceiving the words directly.
Identical shapes are "grouped" together visually, in the same way as when I look at some Japanese text (I can't read Japanese), the identical symbols "jump" out of the page.
"To provide field testing of the new alphabet [Shavian], Read organized a lengthy public testing phase of Shavian by some 500 users from around the world who spoke different dialects of English. Once he had analyzed the results of those tests, Read decided to revise Shavian to incorporate a number of changes to improve the alphabet and make it both easier and faster to write. He called the revised alphabet "Quikscript"..."[1]
The main advantage of Shavian is that it is part of unicode while Quikscript isn't. I'm not sure why that's the case. I'd have expected it to be the other way around.
Such efforts wud hav the benefit of beeng immeedeeatly obveeus to existeeng speekurs
Only if there is a single "correct" (or canonical) way to spell each word.
If every speaker uses a phonetic alphabet to spell their words the way they speak them then there will be no problem reading them back phonetically.
Now, understanding these phonetically spelled words might be a problem for some readers, but that's no different from the problem in understanding they'd have when they heard someone speak in a different accent.
I can see this being useful for specific cases but not as a general practice.
One problem with English spelling lies in tradition, with many pronunciation changes not being followed in spelling -- it used to have quite a phonetic spelling: if you read today's English phonetically it will be quite similar to Middle English. Another problem are inconsistencies added just for the sake of it: e.g. "queen" was originally spelled "cwene" (it's an Anglo-Saxon word) but the spelling was changed according to rules of French orthography used by Norman scribes.
English could adopt phonetic variant of Latin alphabet quite easily -- there is a clearly defined set of phonemes it's using -- but it probably won't because there it is too widely spread across a large number of countries (it's an official language in 59 countries, twice as many as the second language, French, at 29 [0]), and there is no central standardisation body whose decisions might be accepted by all of them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_numbe...
A more serious problem, I think, is how the pronunciation of a single word element varies between words even for a single speaker of the standard language. How would a reformed English spelling cope with the vowels in "photograph" and "photography", for example? Perhaps there's a neat solution, but I don't know what it is. At least I'm fairly sure that phonemic transcript isn't it.
In Dutch, long vowels that turn into short vowels make things like meer/meren (single/plural). In German, you would have Land/Länder (single/plural as well). French also does it with say, régler/règlement (verb/substantive).
English does it too in some cases, with say wife/wives. So it could very well be something like photögraph/phötagröphy. I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Making learning a language where the vowel sounds are the important one a freakin’ nightmare for Anglophones.
That only works with the unstressed vowels [1], so we have "phətogrəphy" because "to" is a full stress and "phy" is a half stress.
[1] Except in NZ English, where the ɪ-sound ("i" as in "if") and schwa (ə) are pronounced the same.
Sunk cost.
The Shavian alphabet is attacking this from the wrong end though. For one thing, we already have a phonetic alphabet. There is no point in inventing another. The main issue though is that you want your alphabet be stable against vowel pronounciation changes. Vowel pronounciation changes quickly and carries little semantic meaning. If you try and encode that in your alphabet it's going to need an update as you move from city to city.
The abjad (consonant alphabet) approach of just leaving the vowels as an exercise to the reader may seem a little extreme. It has the distinct advantage of staying stable over centuries though.
The word mostly in here is easily an overstatement... have you ever seen how semi-illiterate write Spanish? If you do, you will understand that there are lots of ambiguities in Spanish orthography. Almost any word can be written in many different ways and be read nearly the same. Moreover, the same symbol is often used for different sounds (but not for different phonemes). For example, the "n" in "cangrejo" and "no", or the two "d" in "dado".
Dialects within the country and in Cyprus use the "Istanbul" Turkish for formal communication, so there exists only one "correct" way to spell each word. But of course, for casual talk and texting, each dialect writes certain words the way they pronounce them.
\* One cool corollary of the WYRIWYP rule is that there's only one correct spelling of any given sequence of sounds. If you take some native Turkish speakers and have them listen to a made-up word, 99% of them will come up with the same spelling independently of each other.
Many other languages haven't been written for long enough for these divergences to take place, or have had spelling reforms in the meantime.
Here's a blog post that's unrelated, but you can see a little bit of my shorthand writing in the first photo.
https://www.friendlyskies.net/intj/modeling-and-detecting
I started with Ford Shorthand (.com) and then added onto it from there. Anyway, can definitely recommend.
I learned Quikscript in less than a week. From what I've heard, most shorthands take months or years to learn.
In my case, I have added my own extensions to Ford, such as representations of words and phrases, and have added on some conventions from Gregg as well.
IMO the distinction some draw between "shorthand" and "script" for example can make it needlessly difficult for beginners to get started.
There are plenty of individual English words whose spellings were deliberately changed by some person for one reason or another. Perhaps the only major change affecting a large number of words promulgated by a single person was Noah Webster's reform of American English that created most of the differences between American English and British English. There's a book called Does spelling matter? which has a lot of information about English spelling and historical reform proposals (though the book is perhaps not entirely reliable: there are some weird non-sequiturs in it that made me suspicious).
Lojban baseline was completed in 1997 so I think it's too early to tell whether that effort was completely wasted. Esperanto has had its chance but never really reached its goals I assume. But Lojban or something it might evolve into could be the language of the future.
Also, the wider adoption of Pitman (and Gregg) is an advantage only if you want others to be able to read what you wrote. If you prefer privacy (for, say, your personal journal), then the rarer Shavian or Quikscript are better choices -- though, of course, for more security you should use a code or cipher.
Looking at the glyphs really makes me appreciate the fact that traditional, "evolved" alphabets are naturally quite redundant --- it adds an important layer of error-resistance.
Go check out something like a copy of Dune (https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_fir...) and turn it on its side (or even flip it over). It's not really an issue to immediately recognize what the right way up is. If nothing else, a single proper noun will give the entire game up.
It's not like Shavian is unique in that different orientations of the text can resemble proper letterforms. Many scripts have that and they're just fine.
The only place where I struggle with this is a few of the vowels, particularly around A sounds. That's because they're all short glyphs.
A much bigger obstacle is that I don't actually know how to spell most words phonetically. I've always had an excellent memory for characters, so I pretty much learned to read by memorizing whole words. So when I go to write a word like "today" and I struggle to choose between "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑱" and something silly like "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑧𐑘" (because there is supposed to be a Y there dangit!).
[1]: https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/_a_chris...