Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

This is cool, and I agree that English urgently needs a better script. However, design goal #3 (distinct from the Latin alphabet) makes it clear that this is just a toy, or a proof of concept if you may. If you consciously design a script to be as alien as possible to the target audience (English speakers), then you simply don't want adoption.

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.

Eth and thorn used to be used in English anyway. They were removed to make printing easier (the 'old timey' 'ye' for the is because of a practice of printing thorn as y).

> I agree that English urgently needs a better script.

Why? Some ortografic adjustments wud do.

Fråm a Nårdik pørspæktiv its nåt riily ænyÞing batt än ædjustment. I assume the same could be applied for German speakers, although their range of local additions to the Latin alphabet differs somewhat from ours.

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.

Fram e Djurmen purßpektev, ets e bet kahmplekäted.

Precisely! :D

> Fråm a Nårdik pørspæktiv its nåt riily ænyÞing batt än ædjustment.

What a beautiful example!

Mark Twain: A 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."

Pretty good but still some inconsistencies in the end. Long and short wovels should be differentiated properly too. We -> wii, not wi.

If you just want to annotate sounds, it seems like your goals overlap a lot with some uses IPA is designed for. Wiktionary gives /sɑs/ as one pronunciation of sauce.

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").

Restricting yourself to the basic Latin alphabet is a nice feature and digraphs work fine IMO. You could easily solve the this/thin problem by spelling them "dhis" and "thin".

Yeah, totally doable. In Romanian we have a few extra letters but in apps that don't have support for them people just use digraphs: ș is sh, ț is tz (same sounds as I'm English for those digraphs). There's 2 vowels for which unfortunately there's no "standard" digraph, but even those should be doable, something like ă being aw and î being iw (we'd abolish the duplicate letter â, it's a waste of space, anyway, IMO).

Seems like a decent approach for the English alphabet improvements.

It seems pretty common to just type the extra letters in Romanian as their most visually similar Latin character. I've never seen anyone writing Romanian with digraphs when they're sending text messages, for example. "Bună dimineața" just becomes "buna dimineata". As someone learning Romanian, it makes it a challenge - I still learn the word and its pronunciation. Conversely, in German, digraphs seem to be commonly used and understood.

Sh and tz are used, but considered "uncool". For ă, â, î everyone just uses a and i. We're just less orderly than the Germans :p

"Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it." -- Erik Naggum

> 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

'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'?

> it's a homonym of 'source'

Homophone surely.

One possibility would be to write each lexical set differently. This wouldn't be too difficult within America -- we already spell "marry", "merry", and "Mary" differently, for example. But extending this to British English might be difficult, because nonrhoticity has restructured the vowel system and Americans would have to learn to indicate the trap-bath split by rote.

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".

Ай доўнт ꚋинк ит ўуд бий вери папюлър туў пръпоўз ръйтинг Инглиш ин Сърилик ин ԅъ кърънт пълитикъл клаймът, бът...

The way I would memorize English spelling as a child would be to just say the word as though it were in a Slavic language (say all the letters as they are).

The only trouble was with double letters (I eventually learned to add a pause/stutter, but for years they would trip me up).

> Why not choose å for that vowel?

Because å has a historical significance, using it would just be keeping with historical crud, use ø?/o/u instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com