I’ve lamented something similar. I irrelevantly desired:
‘c’ to make the “sh” sound
‘x’ to make the “ch” sound
Banish ‘q’. Just replace “qu” with “kw”.
Remove “extra” sounds from letters:
‘s’ never makes the ‘z’ sound. If you want a ‘z’ sound, use ‘z’.
Likewise ‘g’ never makes the ‘j’ sound.
So “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs” becomes “The kwik brown foks jumps over the lazy dogz.” And “Choose wisely” becomes “Xooze wizely”.
(I also wondered about replacing the “th” sound with a single letter such as the banished ‘q’, but it usually makes everything look illegible & awful.)
But in playing with this, I realized that there’s still pointless redundancy. Why not convert “choose” to “xuz”, and “wisely” to “waizly”? Isn’t that better, despite it looking kind of terrible?
This later evolved into wondering why we don’t just universally use the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) everywhere. I mean, how are we going to deal with the 12ish vowel sounds English forces to fit into five written letters? Wouldn’t the IPA just be… better? Clearer?
But it slowly dawned on me: No. No, it wouldn’t.
Consider “butter”. In my native dialect it’s pronounced “BUH-dr”. In some English dialects it’s “BUH-tah”. I’m not sure where it’s from, but I’ve sometimes heard people from some region pronounce it “BA-dah”.
So the same word gets an IPA spelling that’s totally differently depending on which dialect you’re spelling it from.
If I remember right, this was an old problem in English. It wasn’t until the printing press that English spelling got standardized.
So presumably the pronunciation of “butter” in some dialect really was something like “BOO-ter” — much like in German!
So I think part of what we’re looking at here is a tradeoff between…
…having spelling match pronunciation versus…
…using the same spelling for the same word even across different dialects.
To the extent you go with the latter strategy, spelling is basically guaranteed to make less and less sense over time as language transforms.
(Fun related fact: This is what the hat accent in French is for. At some point the French went through a centralized spelling reform but wanted to encode in the written language that some letter (usually ‘s’) had been dropped in the past. For instance, “to be” in French is “être”, which has the same etymological root as Spanish “estar”.)
Same. Basically this is just for fun. I don’t think I made that very clear originally, so added some text about it. I thought it would be obvious but I think people are taking this more seriously than I meant it.
I think there’s two things that are fun to think about here. One is how would we reform English spelling in an idealized way that would work across dialects. The other is to think about “realistic” changes that you can just barely believe could happen under the right circumstances.
Aha! I hadn’t noticed the ch = tsh thing before. Very cool! I can totally feel it in my mouth. And yeah, I can’t make the sound without doing the double letter thing. Huh!
And yeah, lots of letters have this vocal/non flip. Like d is vocalized t, z is vocalized s, etc. Sometimes I wondered about having some kind of “And this is vocalized” accent mark to sort of free up letters.
Heh. To make it all easy to type, I guess one could just use capitalization for vocalization. Skipping the letters that only make sense vocalized of course (like ‘n’ and vowels).
In English, most unvoiced consonants whose voiced counterparts are in-repertoire non-allophones are aspirated and their voiced counterparts non-aspirated, which seems to make most of the difference in some brief experiments with whispering. Fricatives are the hardest and seem to rely on subtle articulatory differences instead, but this isn’t a blinded test, so…
I’ve lamented something similar. I irrelevantly desired:
‘c’ to make the “sh” sound
‘x’ to make the “ch” sound
Banish ‘q’. Just replace “qu” with “kw”.
Remove “extra” sounds from letters:
‘s’ never makes the ‘z’ sound. If you want a ‘z’ sound, use ‘z’.
Likewise ‘g’ never makes the ‘j’ sound.
So “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs” becomes “The kwik brown foks jumps over the lazy dogz.” And “Choose wisely” becomes “Xooze wizely”.
(I also wondered about replacing the “th” sound with a single letter such as the banished ‘q’, but it usually makes everything look illegible & awful.)
But in playing with this, I realized that there’s still pointless redundancy. Why not convert “choose” to “xuz”, and “wisely” to “waizly”? Isn’t that better, despite it looking kind of terrible?
This later evolved into wondering why we don’t just universally use the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) everywhere. I mean, how are we going to deal with the 12ish vowel sounds English forces to fit into five written letters? Wouldn’t the IPA just be… better? Clearer?
But it slowly dawned on me: No. No, it wouldn’t.
Consider “butter”. In my native dialect it’s pronounced “BUH-dr”. In some English dialects it’s “BUH-tah”. I’m not sure where it’s from, but I’ve sometimes heard people from some region pronounce it “BA-dah”.
So the same word gets an IPA spelling that’s totally differently depending on which dialect you’re spelling it from.
If I remember right, this was an old problem in English. It wasn’t until the printing press that English spelling got standardized.
So presumably the pronunciation of “butter” in some dialect really was something like “BOO-ter” — much like in German!
And that silly “k” in front of “knight”, “knife”, and “knoll” really was once pronounced. We just dropped it eventually in each case (apparently because England’s French-speaking conquerors couldn’t handle it?).
So I think part of what we’re looking at here is a tradeoff between…
…having spelling match pronunciation versus…
…using the same spelling for the same word even across different dialects.
To the extent you go with the latter strategy, spelling is basically guaranteed to make less and less sense over time as language transforms.
(Fun related fact: This is what the hat accent in French is for. At some point the French went through a centralized spelling reform but wanted to encode in the written language that some letter (usually ‘s’) had been dropped in the past. For instance, “to be” in French is “être”, which has the same etymological root as Spanish “estar”.)
All of which is to say:
I super relate…
…and I think this project is doomed.
Same. Basically this is just for fun. I don’t think I made that very clear originally, so added some text about it. I thought it would be obvious but I think people are taking this more seriously than I meant it.
I think there’s two things that are fun to think about here. One is how would we reform English spelling in an idealized way that would work across dialects. The other is to think about “realistic” changes that you can just barely believe could happen under the right circumstances.
Ah, yep. That totally makes sense!
Sorry to sprinkle a bit much serious sauce into your play stew.
The ch sound is a combination of t + sh, and likewise the ‘j’ in “just” makes a combination of d + zh (the voiced sh).
‘th’ has a voiced (“this”) and unvoiced (“with”) version that would require different letters.
For vowels, I had seven base vowel sounds (pat, pet, pit, pot, putt, put, and peat), and the others were combinations of these.
Aha! I hadn’t noticed the ch = tsh thing before. Very cool! I can totally feel it in my mouth. And yeah, I can’t make the sound without doing the double letter thing. Huh!
And yeah, lots of letters have this vocal/non flip. Like d is vocalized t, z is vocalized s, etc. Sometimes I wondered about having some kind of “And this is vocalized” accent mark to sort of free up letters.
Heh. To make it all easy to type, I guess one could just use capitalization for vocalization. Skipping the letters that only make sense vocalized of course (like ‘n’ and vowels).
then eFrithiNG luks afl.
:-D
Fun fact: When whispering, everything is unvoiced and you have to figure out from context which sounds are meant to be voiced.
In English, most unvoiced consonants whose voiced counterparts are in-repertoire non-allophones are aspirated and their voiced counterparts non-aspirated, which seems to make most of the difference in some brief experiments with whispering. Fricatives are the hardest and seem to rely on subtle articulatory differences instead, but this isn’t a blinded test, so…