> all keywords should be obviously pronounceable

I hear you. Internally, I always pronounced "var" as rhymes with "care", but then a colleague pronounced it "var" as rhymes with "car". I think the same guy pronounced "char" like char-broiled, whereas I had thought of it like "care". And he would say "jay-SON" for json, which I pronounced like Jason.

How would you feel about a notation that is not meant to be pronounced at all?

+Employee {

}

where + indicates a class definition.

:Rename() where : indicates a class method.

~DoStuff() where ~ indicates a static function