You're hardly a tortured/misunderstood genius if you haven't devised a phonetic alphabet if your native tongue's is far from being so. Mine is far more than just an alphabet, though. I've been away from my blog for a week because for the first time in my life, I actually got the flu. By the time I'd recovered, I realized how much time I'd wasted and I worked quite enthusiastically on improving my phonetic alphabet and translating it so that it would actually work on computers. Here are some of my preliminary results.
Aa Áá Bb Dd Ee Éé Ff Gg Hh Ii Íí Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Óó Pp Rr Ss Tt Uu Úú Vv Ww Yy Ýý Zz Ðð Þþ Šš Cc Žž
I was delighted to find that many fonts supported characters such as Ýý, Ðð, Þþ, and Šš, especially my favorite, Helvetica Neue. The dictionary cover is a design I put quickly together for fun that turned out quite nicely.
(Edit) Replaced the original 7 pages with a revised, updated version with 8 pages.
Nick, a thoughtful and ambitious undertaking and your opening sentence nails it. May I offer an observation? (Hearing "Yes", I proceed.) I am always distressed by letterforms that incorporate diacritics, "accent marks". In handwriting, they hamper the flow; in typing on a computer, they really hamper the flow as I struggle to remember what key combination produces the one I need. And they don't look neat on the page, thought they do look exotic.
ReplyDeleteOf course, to devise enough integrated letterforms to cover 1-to-1 the sounds of English or most other languages (I wish I had grown up in Spain or one of their ex-colonies.) would be an much bigger problem for computers and typewriters, though trivial in handwriting.
I like how well equipped you are to do this, what with your knowledge of several languages and the principles and the limitations of computers and other practical considerations. Have you any plans to work with the ideas of Lojban (nee Loglan), q.v.? Might as well go whole hog, eh?
A laudable effort. Have Fun!
== Michael Höhne
Yeah, those are valid concerns. My original phonetic alphabet did use some characters that would confuse it more, digitally. But I did have it so only the 5 vowels had any accent marks on them. I tried an extremely basic version of this which required no new symbols and no accent marks at all, though! New "letters" were merely created with pairs. Soft th became ff, hard th became tt, long e became ii. It worked alright, but I think the excessive repetition is just as bad in a different way.
DeleteMy plan for the scope of this project is to keep it to alphabet, spelling, and replacing words with those with English roots when possible, whether by using calques or whatever. I'm envisioning it as something that could actually be forced upon Americans by the government in multiple steps. ;D
I can see in 100 years people fondly recalling those stickers they stuck on their keys…everybody got a free set so that their physical keyboard could look like the updated keyboard layout. With the increased number of letters, and accent marks as well, things would have to change a little. I would make sure that to type a mark would be as simple as adding an apostrophe, except you just type the mark before the base letter.
This is very much in progress. I'm beginning to doubt if the letter j is needed, and therefore, if that could be removed as a consonant and replace the y character so as to remove the need for ý.
I managed to get rid of two characters with accents, í and ý, by figuring out I didn't need j and w any more—the letters stay, but with different sounds.
DeleteBy Jove! Nick, I think you cracked it! But I would miss my latin and greek derived words sorely, like alphabet. I prefer werdbùk to dictionary though - for obvious reasons. I remember searching high and low (and in vain) through the character sets on my 1980s Mac for the thorn and the eth when I was putting new labels on a map of Iceland I'd drawn. In fact, your new phonetics is very easy to read, though wouldn't some important nuances might be lost with homophones? But I guess that's a reason to ditch them as they come up and replace them with a different sounding synonym. You'll have found by now that this precise intent was behind the the post-revolutionary Russian orthography and attendant written forms. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, my guess is that more regions will revert to former tongues, if they haven't already. The glue that held the language together, from Moscow to Petropavlovsk, was an unyielding 'administration' of course. As a learning too though, yours is a huge improvement on the ITA I was weaned on, I can still remember the exercise books after 47 years. This is how I learned to read.
ReplyDeleteIf the switch to this alphabet was actually made, I think the second stage, replacing words with Anglo-Saxon ones, would be encouraged but not really necessary. New children in the schools would be taught them, but nobody would tell old people to change and it really could be just a matter of time slowly changing things. That way if enough people put up a fight, it might never happen.
DeleteI have an interesting method to tell the difference between homophones…there, their, they're…presents an interesting problem with the new alphabet. Introduce a set of non-spoken characters that have the meanings of ordinal numbers to distinguish first, second, third, etc. meanings of the word. The usefulness of this is in question.
Regional dialects would still exist, I'm just not sure how they would be taught yet using the same alphabet. (British English I'm sure would have its own separate one, with Scotland fighting it)
Something interesting I learned a while ago was that in the USSR the government didn't really force people to abandon their languages. In fact, certain ones were approved (Georgian, Estonian, etc) to be equal to Russian in their own SSR. They even had their own universities. All of the other languages were scaled by importance in being taught at various levels (grade school only, grade + secondary school) and then Russian being used in Universities. This is why most of the former languages have sprung back quickly. (Lenin at the beginning supported minorities strongly and even Finnish and German minorities had their languages fully approved in their SSRs, Karelia and Volga German.)
In creating the spellings, I have to ignore my own accent. There are sounds that I don't differentiate between that genuinely ought to remain distinct, but often don't in everyday hurried speech. (or else there would be a lot more "u" showing up)
DeleteI decided to keep "alfábet" after all…it was a better word for it and plus, it sounds nice.
Deleteyý ár ýun klevur gáí.
ReplyDeleteDid I spell that right?
It has been determined by the clever guy that the whooshy "oo" sound that we know and love as the "w" is distinct from "ý" in "wun" because with "ý" it would sound like "oo-un". The "é" is pretty much a purpose-designed letter for the "er" sound. You're very close, and I think nobody would have any trouble understanding what you wrote. Nobody at all.
DeleteWell, the alphabet was revised and w deemed superfluous. Therefore ý has been replaced with w and your spelling is therefore correct, even though it doesn't look like it.
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