This is cool, and I agree that English urgently needs a better script. However, design goal #3 (distinct from the Latin alphabet) makes it clear that this is just a toy, or a proof of concept if you may. If you consciously design a script to be as alien as possible to the target audience (English speakers), then you simply don't <i>want</i> adoption.<p>I'm no expert, and I bet this has been explored, but I always felt that there's fantastic precedent in the world for using the Latin alphabet for writing sounds that occur in English; especially in the Scandinavian languages.<p>Eg the word "sauce", which consists of two identical consonants and a single vowel. Why not choose å for that vowel? Sås makes a lot of sense, and accidentally is also the Swedish word for "sauce" iirc. Or what about the two "th" sounds? Icelandic has got you covered: Instead of "this" and "thin", can't we write "ðis" and "þin"?<p>Note: this is not without precedent. The Norwegians totally overhauled their script until it was pretty much phonetic. This gave them fantastic benefits such as way fewer pupils struggling with dyslexia (at least, until learning Danish or English), and heartwarmingly lovely spellings of loan words such as "restaurang" and "stasjon".<p>It could be done.<p>Personally I think it's totally insane to use a phonetic script (as opposed to eg Chinese) but then not spell out the sounds. The Finns, Norwegians, Italians and Russians (and plenty others) got it right.
It reminds me of this joke [0]:<p>"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.<p>As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".<p>In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.<p>In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.<p>By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".<p>During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.<p>Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.<p>If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl."<p>[0] <a href="https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-becomes-german/" rel="nofollow">https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-be...</a><p>(I'm sure I saw this as an email well before 2006 though).
George Bernard Shaw often railed against the inconsistencies of English. Its grammar and spelling are unbelievably inconsistent and a constant headache even to native speakers. I love English and think it’s a very expressive language. I used to be an incredibly good speller (AutoCorrect has made that less important). I have a superb grasp of its grammar as both a speaker and a writer.<p>But boy, do I have sympathy for anyone, native speaker or not, who has to deal with these bugs. They bring a lot of grief and embarrassment, with little return for all the heartache.
I learned the Shavian alphabet a few years ago, and gradually built up a list of transliterations as I read a few ebooks partially converted over (read a bit, add some more words, repeat). I had to make the font characters too (for Deja Vu, but I didn't contribute them back as mine seemed a bit amateurish).<p>What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be in different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets you read quickly. Unfortunately that would likely be the case for any English spelling reform effort.<p>I subsequently lost most of my (NZ English) transliterations too, if I remember correctly.
I prefer Quikscript:<p><i>"To provide field testing of the new alphabet [Shavian], Read organized a lengthy public testing phase of Shavian by some 500 users from around the world who spoke different dialects of English. Once he had analyzed the results of those tests, Read decided to revise Shavian to incorporate a number of changes to improve the alphabet and make it both easier and faster to write. He called the revised alphabet "Quikscript"..."</i>[1]<p>The main advantage of Shavian is that it is part of unicode while Quikscript isn't. I'm not sure why that's the case. I'd have expected it to be the other way around.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickscript" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickscript</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript/</a>
As much as I think English needs spelling reform, I don't think a brand new alphabet is the answer. In particular, the Shavian alphabet would be a nightmare for people like me who had trouble with reversed letters as a child. (My mother was particularly amused when I once wrote "rubberband" as rudderdanb.) Symmetry between the voiced and unvoiced letters is cool in theory but a disaster for dyslexics like me.
To go in completely the opposite direction, Ithkuil (ithkuil.net) is a constructed language whose script encodes semantic meaning rather than phonetic. A written word may be pronounced in several qualitatively different ways, as long as they have the same meaning.
It would be far easier to make existing English spelling more phonetic using the existing alphabet.<p>Such efforts wud hav the benefit of beeng immeedeeatly obveeus to existeeng speekurs
I'm afraid that phonetic alphabets are useless for English because pronunciation is not stable [1] and because it has a lot of local variants. I suspect that English will fossilise its current orthography and turn words into logograms composed of Latin letters, similar to Chinese.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678" rel="nofollow">https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678</a>
The point has been made that different people pronounce English differently. I don't think that's an insurmountable obstacle: if you made a sort of union of RP and standard American pronunciation, probably the rest of the English-speaking world would be happy to use a spelling system based on that, if they were willing to accept any change at all, that is.<p>A more serious problem, I think, is how the pronunciation of a single word element varies between words even for a single speaker of the standard language. How would a reformed English spelling cope with the vowels in "photograph" and "photography", for example? Perhaps there's a neat solution, but I don't know what it is. At least I'm fairly sure that phonemic transcript isn't it.
The biggest drawback of a new alphabet is that we burn word shapes into our brain (we don’t read words by letter unless they are unfamiliar), so we would have to get used to a bunch of new shapes (a major disadvantage) even if pronouncing unfamiliar words was easier (a minor benefit).<p>Sunk cost.
Deseret Alphabet attempt from the 19th century
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet</a>
As spoken language evolves we have to eventually adapt the written language. The alternative is written English. That beast managed to incorporate a whole body of words from another language without adapting the spelling of those words. It ended in the tears you get every year afresh when you try to teach kids the broken state that is English orthography.<p>The Shavian alphabet is attacking this from the wrong end though. For one thing, we already have a phonetic alphabet. There is no point in inventing another. The main issue though is that you want your alphabet be stable against vowel pronounciation changes. Vowel pronounciation changes quickly and carries little semantic meaning. If you try and encode that in your alphabet it's going to need an update as you move from city to city.<p>The abjad (consonant alphabet) approach of just leaving the vowels as an exercise to the reader may seem a little extreme. It has the distinct advantage of staying stable over centuries though.
Are there any examples of people trying to make a change to the English language and being successful? It seems to me that most of the changes occur naturally rather than by directed effort.
Seems a strange criteria that it should be <i>at least</i> 40 letters - to me it seems like the goal should be to use as few letters as possible while still achieving its other goals?
It's not immediately obvious what the benefit is over Pitman script, which is mentioned in the article. It seems like Pitman is faster to write because the characters are simpler, and afaik Pitman had a wider adoption, I've never heard of the Shavian alphabet before.
Since we are talking about the lost cause of English spelling reform here is my contribution to the long list [0].<p>0. <a href="https://www.cutspel.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.cutspel.com</a>
Wow, they made a deliberate effort to design glyphs that all look exactly the same. Every single letter written in cursive would be indistinguishable from 5-6 others.