Real alphabet for English?

http://bearfabrique.org/EnglishAlphabet/English_Alphabet.htm ^

[varmintman]

The whole world knows that English spelling is a sick joke. If English is to be the international language of business and commerce, then a rational alphabet and a rational system of spelling need to be devised for it, and the present hodgepodge system needs to be jettissoned altogether. The inordinate amount of time spent by foreigners and English speaking children alike learning our present system of spelling would be better of spent on more reasonable goals.

A reasonable system of spelling for English would be based on the following ideas:

• It should to the extent possible use letters which English speaking people are already familiar with rather than new or strange symbols.
• In cases in which a letter has more than one possible pronounciation, accent marks should be used to differentiate the cases (rather than divising new characters).
• It should be based on the real-world assumption that text is primarily created with keyboards, and not with goose feathers and ink as was the case when our present system of writing was devised.
• It should be supported by software which fills in proper accent marks automatically with context. That is easily within present technological capabilities.
• It should include no doubled letters other than possibly for some borrowed word within which a vowel sound is doubled.
• It should be utterly unambiguous and 100% phonetic. That means that if you hear a word spoken you know how to spell it and, if you see a word written, you know how to pronounce it other than for the question of which syllable if any is stressed.

The following should serve as an example of what is needed.....

[Valpal1]

why is there a ‘ck’ spelling when the sound is pure ‘k’.

'ck' is used after a single vowel with a short sound, a,e,i,o,u

The ph spelling tells you that the word has a Greek origin or root.

The real problem is that real phonics is no longer taught and most people have no clue about the deeply layered history of Engish as a language.

I recommend the Writing Road to Reading or Spalding Method for a more complete understanding of the English phonograms.

[dfwgator]

The Decabet

http://vimeo.com/66638573

[Secret Agent Man]

sorry, zot the idea.

[Windflier]

"The whole world knows that English spelling is a sick joke."

Another liberal twit, showing his utter disdain and hatred for one of the key foundation blocks of western culture.

Well, Mr. Fabrique. I think you're a sick joke. How do you like that?

[sauron]

The European Union commissioners

ROTLMAO! Brilliant!

[OneWingedShark]

Japanese is very complicated, not as crazy as Chinese with their phonebook-level alphabet..... Korean is simpler than both

I'll agree Korean is pretty simple, but the Japanese syllabary is pretty simple itself:

1. Ye, Yi, and Wu don't occur in native Japanese, so don't have characters;
2. Wi(ゐ) and We(ゑ) are only used in old Japanese;
3. and n(ん) is the only 'stand-alone' consonant and can only end words.

The last three tables are similar-sound transforms by adding ゙◌  or ゚◌  to change the 'voice' of the consonant-part of the syllable, or produce hybrid sounds — kyo(きょ) = ki(き) + yo(よ).

[alexander_busek]

The closest you can get to a simpler sounding/spelled language is Spanish or Latin.

Quite untrue. German spelling is virtually phonetic. Russian also comes very close.

Regards,

[Olog-hai]

Problem with syllabaries is that you end up with excessive symbols (Japanese phonetic “kana” have over 50 symbols, and you don’t get away with not having digraphs); you have the problem of terminal consonants, especially when your syllabograms always end with a vowel sound.

[Nifster]

Not this again. In the 70s some ‘smart guy’ was pushing his system

[Olog-hai]

German still has a ways to go with some of the vowel digraphs (ei and eu could perhaps be replaced with ï and ë respectively?) as well as find new uses for redundant c and v, not to mention trigraphs (sch) and tetragraphs (tsch). There’s also the “Sie” conundrum.

[OneWingedShark]

Japanese phonetic “kana” have over 50 symbols

Nope, the Gojūon (kana table) translates literally as "fifty sounds" because there's the ten consonants times the five vowels.
Five of those combinations don't exist, there's the stand-alone 'n' and two voicing markers for a total of:
50 - 5 + 1 + 2 = 45 + 3 = 48.

So, less than fifty. (There's two forms: hiragana and katakana, but that's kind of like upper and lower case, so I'm not counting that.)

you have the problem of terminal consonants,

Granted; though the Japanese pronunciation is a very soft/nonexistant vowel-sound on -u ends. So "desu" would be pronounced 'des'.

you don’t get away with not having digraphs

True, but there aren't any surprises in the digraphs. (ex: no p + h —> f or t + h —> th [rather than t'hu].)

[eclecticEel]

Well, kana spellings are always obvious; if you can pronounce it you can spell it without fail. Trying to transliterate from languages that feature terminal consonants causes a problem, but then the alphabet wasn’t originally designed to allow for that.

[faithhopecharity]

Some languages work with less letters. Less letters to learn. Less letters to remember. Less letters to cause spelling mistrakes. Let’s drop the letter “O”. Will improve our English (and immensely improve our politics).

[Olog-hai]

Our current set of characters are actually simplified forms of what used to be pictographs. Biggest example is “A”, derived ultimately from Phoenician “aleph”, which means an ox; the current form of the capital letter is actually upside down so you can’t really see the horns of the ox until you turn it 180 degrees.

[Olog-hai]

People like Benjamin Franklin sought to find a more phonetic way to write English. That was mainly because the “modern” spellings were actually going away from being phonetic.

[Olog-hai]

All past poetry is treated as “quaint”, even Shakespeare, which is early modern English. Poetry in general is considered “quaint” unless of course it’s an element in stuff like “hip-hop”, which tends to use its own dumbed-down “phonetic” spellinz.

[Olog-hai]

It was originally fifty symbols, until certain of them were rendered obsolete (in hiragana, “yi”, “ye” and “wu”; a few more in katakana). And we still have some lenition changes (where hiragana “ha” turns into “wa” when used as a particle; “wo” being pronounced “o”). The dakuten and handakuten diacritics expand the sounds.

When it comes to katakana and the Ainu language, they have those small terminal kana that represent terminal consonants. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using dakuten and handakuten with katakana in certain cases to represent non-Japanese vocal sounds (e.g. a dakuten with “ra” to more closely be pronounced like English or Chinese “la”).

[OneWingedShark]

When it comes to katakana and the Ainu language, they have those small terminal kana that represent terminal consonants. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using dakuten and handakuten with katakana in certain cases to represent non-Japanese vocal sounds (e.g. a dakuten with “ra” to more closely be pronounced like English or Chinese “la”).

Interesting idea. I do wonder if it'd catch on.

It was originally fifty symbols, until certain of them were rendered obsolete (in hiragana, “yi”, “ye” and “wu”; a few more in katakana).

It'd kinda be nice if they went back to the fifty... for uniformity's sake.
I do like that, linguistically speaking, there's only like two or so irregular verbs. [At least common ones; I only took 4 years in college.]

[MasterGunner01]

English is NOT broken. It does NOT need fixing. If the Euros want to be cool, then do Ebonics to be with it and hip. (sarcasm off)

[Vroomfondel]

No “mnemonic” or “pneumatic”? Frank Drebbin would be so disappointed.