Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

We'd have to cover every word with accents. We'd have to have accents for "letter has no effect on sound," "these three letters actually represent this other letter," and "pretend you're French when you say this, but French with a severe head injury."

View on HN

There was some English guy that tried to create an English alphabet where each letter would correspond to exactly one sound, so around 44 letters in total. Kinda like Serbian Cyrillic.

I can't remember his name or the name of his project though.

That's doomed from the start. There's no way English speakers could deal with a written language with 19 different vowels.

And which dialect!?

Shavian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

Yeah, that's the one.

Not heard of this particular script before (although I see the answer was already posted), but it seems a bit redundant to have created an incompatible system when shorthand was in widespread use in the UK at the time, albeit mostly only used in a secretarial context.

Based on my very phonetically written native tounge, I think I could map most of the English language down to Hungarian letters (there are some exceptions in both directions)

Just for note, it would look something like this:

Bézd on máj veri fonetikalli vrittn nétív táng, áj (sz)ink áj kud mep…

(Sz is a single letter in hungarian in this context)

> We'd have to cover every word with accents.

Seems to work fine for Vietnamese.

If every word has accents, then don't all words have no accents? Solved!

Have you ever tried learning Vietnamese as a second language? Shit's hard!

But not because of the script.

> French with a severe head injury

There's a word for this: Quebecois

Reply on news.ycombinator.com