Inventing my own writing system for English, VJScript
vkethana.com
vkethana.com
> 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
[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.
You would never choose either of those.
/gɹæm/
I'm confused
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.)
I bet you're one of those people who think their sole purpose in life is to be correct, and care not one iota for getting on with people. I imagine that's working out absolutely amazing for you.
True. It's no wonder that many alphabetical writing systems are morpho-phonologic (English, French, Korean, Czech, etc.) instead if being phonetic, since they still works well evolving slower than the spoken language. Actually I can't think of any phonetic writing systems, most are phonemic at best.
On a related note, writing accents is usually a bad idea. I remember reading Asimov's "Foundation" when I was a teenager in Australia. One of the characters is a lord and speaks like this: "Ah, Hahdin. You ah looking foah us, no doubt?" Because of course everyone in the future is American and everyone who's not American speaks with a comical (and completely unreadable) accent. Trying to read that dialogue makes me feel like I'm having a stroke.
Also, thanks to you and all the other commenters for the detailed feedback and for engaging with the post
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/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
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.
( And persian ی would I guess show as y )
There was such a font too, it was called Czar. I used it in Windows 95/98.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
Didn’t even have the guts to eliminate the most useless letter in the entire English alphabet — the C.
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.
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.
The standard way to represent /tʃ/ in one letter is "č".
Incidentally, there's a reason the IPA for the sound is /tʃ/. It's two sounds pronounced together, in a manner essentially identical to the /kt/ at the end of the word "act", or the /ts/ at the end of the word "cats".
The parallel is not perfect - in particular, affricates are generally understood as being a single sound, while coarticulated stops are generally thought of as being two sounds in sequence, even where they show all the phonological independence you'd expect of a single phoneme. (Compare e.g. Greek "Ctesias".)
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.
If you want to completely change the orthography of these words to better match the adopted English pronoucations of these words, I'm all for it! I'll get the shampain and the kapaqeno! But you don't get to
No, “direct adoption of foreign words into English” is, in fact, English, as are transliterations adopted into English. (I mean, it's literally ominnthe description.)
If they weren't, the ~1/3 of English vocabulary resulting from the wholesale importing of French after the Norman conquest would be not-English.
But, sure, the rule about “qu” applies to “English” if you adopt a definition of what is “English” that excludes most of the actual language.
Always happy to supply bright ideas to eviscerate English orthography!
7 bits are enough for everyone.
"Ø", then, seems like the best choice. (Also, it's the coolest looking diacritic form of "O")
Should I encode my passwords to memory like this?