I Hate the Letter F
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Take for example Pacific Ocean. Every damn c in that two word is pronounced differently. Worst part, you could replace it with other letters (Pazifik Oshean). It’s redundant.
C is just a nightmare…
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.
Later they have understood that writing with different letters minor variations in pronunciation of the same phoneme is useless, so they began to use C in almost all cases where previously either K or C or Q were used, but K and Q have survived for some niche uses.
The next complication has arisen in the Middle Ages, when in many European languages the pronunciation of C before E and I has been changed and instead of being the same as K it has become like the pronunciation of either English "s" or English "sh" or English "ch" or English "ts".
Because English has borrowed many words from a lot of languages, keeping their spelling, it has gathered all these pronunciations, so as you have pointed, all these different pronunciations are possible in English and it is unpredictable which of them must be used in a given word.
For non German speaker, both words start with „ch“, one is commonly pronounced softly like „shemie“ while the other one is pronounced like a „k“ - similar to the English choreography. Even in English „chemistry“ is pronounced similar with „k“.
Learn Sanskrit. Use its script to write English.
There’s a vocalist who can sing in any language. She rewrites the lyrics in Sanskrit and then has perfect pronunciation.
Will update with a link when I find it.
It has a larger consonant inventory than any other natural language that I've ever seen, which is impressive, but that doesn't make it phonologically universal.
Some things that American English has that Sanskrit doesn't include /ð/, /θ/, [ɹ] as a realization of /r/, and contrastive /v/ and /w/ (like "vein", the body part, versus "wain", the old word for a wagon; or "vine", the plant, and "wine", the beverage made from it).
I'm unclear on the effects of the vowel gradations, so I don't know whether they approximate other languages' vowel inventories well.
It also looks like Sanskrit doesn't have any uvular, pharyngeal, or glottal consonants, and no velar or post-velar fricatives. For example, I don't see that it could represent Hebrew חָכָם 'wise, smart' (pronounced /χa'χam/).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%97%D7%9B%D7%9D#Hebrew
I could see that Sanskrit might have been the best single choice for transcribing a wide range of unrelated languages at some point in history, but now that we have IPA, we can make lots of distinctions that Sanskrit doesn't.
We'd make a small preamble to define new names for things like DEFUN, Lisp's operator to define new functions. No F's needed to do that either. We can do this by taking advantage of read-time evaluation.
First we get references to the symbols DEFMACRO and DEFUN.
(eval-when (:compile-toplevel :load-toplevel :execute)
(setq de*un (intern (map 'string 'code-char '(68 69 70 85 78))))
(setq de*macro (intern (map 'string 'code-char '(68 69 70 77 65 67 82 79)))))
Now, to make life-without-F easy, we define new names for DEFMACRO (mac) and DEFUN (proc) without actually lexically referring to the F-infected symbols:
(#.de*macro mac (&body r) `(,de*macro ,@r))
(mac proc (&body r) `(,de*un ,@r))
(proc *ib (n)
(cond
((= 0 n) 0)
((= 1 n) 1)
(t (+ (*ib (- n 1)) (*ib (- n 2))))))
> (print (*ib 10))
55I haven't seen any non-lisp languages that give you that kind of power, for better or worse.
And somehow, my reply managed to avoid using that letter ...
How about searching for all symbols with the letters DEMACRO that are 8 letters long? We could do that too.
The technique works so long as you can uniquely determine the symbol through some combination of standard Lisp functions that don't contain F. Lisp has a big library, so it's not tough.
"70" isn't a number that is associated to F in any common person's understanding, and the pronunciation of the number "70" in English has no objectionable F sounds, so I don't agree it's cheating. :)
rimshot
The if/elseif keywords are off the table, but you still have both explicit looping constructs and function declarations:
while x ... end
each x y z in w ... end
on name x y do ... end
Most of the query forms (select, extract, and update expressions) would be OK, but they all need a "from" clause to specify the source table, so no dice.
What you're left with is still very much Turing-Complete, but much less ergonomic.
“Mapping from source file (other than a UTF-8 source file)(since C++23) characters to the basic character set(until C++23)translation character set(since C++23) during translation phase 1 is implementation-defined, so an implementation is required to document how the basic source characters are represented in source files.”*
⇒ pre C++23, you could have a C++ compiler that used an Unicode “Pile of poo” (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17407-frowning-poo.pdf) instead of the letter F.
if (x) { y; } → while (x) { y; break; }
for (a; b; c) { d; } → a; while (b) { d; c; }I think I could write an arbitrarily complex program without major issue.
What's convoluted about it? A `for` is about as simple as syntactic sugar gets.
for( a; b; c ) {
}
a;
while( b ) {
c;
}
ihatetheletterf.h:
#define cond if
#define loop for
#define otherwise default
#define untrue false
#define real float
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
int a = 1;
switch(a) case 1: puts("there's always this");
}
per x in y:
In a crowded room, listen for the "s" sounds and you will see what I mean.
Keyboards since the 17th century don’t include thorn, so as long as I am not using an Icelandic keyboard I don’t have to worry.
The letter F was originally the letter "waw" of the North-Semitic alphabet, then of the Phoenician alphabet derived from it.
In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter "waw" looked like a Y.
When some Greeks have derived the Greek alphabet, they have created two distinct letters from the letter "waw", the letter that was later named digamma, which retained the position in the alphabet of the Phoenician "waw", and the letter that was later named upsilon, which was appended immediately at the end of the alphabet, after the last of the Phoenician letters.
For unknown reasons, upsilon has kept the form Y, while the top of digamma has been rotated, becoming F.
The letter digamma has continued to be pronounced like in Phoenician, where it was used to write the consonant a.k.a. semivowel form of U (which in English is normally written as W). The letter upsilon was used to write the vowel form of U.
So the Greeks have created two letter variants of the original "waw", written as F and Y, to distinguish the consonant and vowel uses of U, like English has created W to be distinct from U, for the same purpose.
The letter E comes from the Phoenician "he", where it had a similar form, but it was reflected. The reason why the Greeks have reflected E is likely to be the change of the direction of writing from right-to-left to left-to-right. So it is in the Greek alphabet where E and F began to look similar.
Most Greek dialects have lost the semivowel U, therefore also the letter digamma, but that had not happened yet in the dialect from which the Etruscans and the Latins have taken the alphabet, so it still had F.
Latin had a consonant not present in Greek, that which now is written F. Because there was some resemblance between Latin F and semivowel U, both being labial, the Latins have chosen F to write this consonant. Moreover in Latin the form of Y has been simplified to V. Also Latin had both semivowel U and vowel U, but they have chosen to write both of them as V. The letter U has appeared only in the Middle Ages, initially only as the small letter "u", which was the small variant of "V", the forms "v" and "U" have been added later, together with the different pronunciations attached to the letters. Some centuries after the first variants of the Latin alphabet, the letter Y has been appended to it, because by that time the Greeks no longer pronounced it as U, but it had become a front rounded vowel, like German U-umlaut or French U or Danish Y.
Therefore the current Latin alphabet has 5 letters derived from Phoenician "waw": F, U, V, W and Y.