Every once in a while I sometimes think about remaking the English writing system, as is normal I’m sure😅, and I wonder what would be the most useful revision of punctuation or phonetic.

  • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Distinction between the consonant R and rhotic vowels, so being able to spell “ever” as “evŗ”

    Bringing back Þ and Đ and other old letters which represent sounds we still have.

    Assigning C the sha sound and J its french sound so that Ch can be built as Tc and the hard J can be Dj, so Callow instead of Shallow, Tceck instead of Check, Jenre instead of Genre, and Djerk instead of Jerk.

    Reassigning the names of letters to as much as coherently possible be grammatical function words so that single letters can be used as abbreviations for those grammar words, like Shavian did with T N Đ F and V for To, And, The, For, and Of.

    Letting people otherwise spell words as they speak them given the phonetic values of the alphabet and judging people’s writing ability on the meaning and content of their writing as opposed to their ability to adhere to spellings that solidified hundreds of years ago.

    Supporting publishing houses at a much more local scale to facilitate that spell as spoken reform in a more accommodating way.

    Supporting poets and other writers on the off chance one of them turns out to be a modern Shakespeare and we get an ass ton of new words to put to good use.

    • Darthjaffacake@lemmy.worldOPM
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      5 months ago

      I think it makes sense to have two letters for R and use them for onset and coda for a really good reason, dialectical compatibility is really high. In my dialect there are no coda R sounds but if it still represents schwa for me then I can spell everything the same as Americans or people with a different dialect in my country. It’s also pretty intuitive because spelling schwa with er is really common.

      • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        The schwa is honestly it’s own thing to me, I think it should have a letter as well, something like

        • A = All
        • Aŗ = Are
        • Æ = And
        • Ai = I
        • Aiŗ = Ire
        • E = End
        • Ei = They
        • Eiŗ = Air
        • È = A
        • Ŗ = Her
        • I = He
        • Iŗ = Ear
        • Ì = in
        • O = Oh
        • Oŗ = Or
        • Oi = Oil
        • Ou = Out
        • Ouŗ = Our
        • Ò = On
        • U = Oops
        • Ue = Look
        • Ù = Up

        It’s not perfect but you can see what I’m going for, Shortening the average length of a sentence both by opening up phonetic/by spoken word spelling, and then also by eliminating homophones in writing by using abbreviations for the more commonly used soundalikes. Observe,

        Ìt’s nòt pŗfekt, bùt Y kæn si wèt Ai’m goiŋ foŗ, coŗtìniŋ ð ævrìdj leŋþ v è sentens boþ bai opìniŋ ù fonetìk/bai spokìn wŗd speliŋ, æ ðen also bai ìlìmìneitiŋ hòmofonz ì raitiŋ bai yuziŋ èbrivieicènz f ð moŗ kòmènli yuzd soundèlaiks. Èbzŗv,