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COMMENTS
Dear Steve and Valerie,
Yes, I think that teaching young people that English can be represented
graphically by an infinite number of writing systems (alphabetic,
semi-alphabetic, syllabic, logographic, etc.) is extremely important, as
far as spelling reform is concerned. Young people start out so flexible
in their viewpoints, and so we have to catch them before they become
hardened adults, who can't be taught very much without a whip and a
chair.
As a matter of fact, for the last four years I have created some
(moderately interesting) New Year's cards for my email friends and
relatives. And this year's card does indeed incorprate a few New
Hotsuma signs. The card is done and I am waiting to send it a little
later in the month. But if you (Steve or Valerie or others) are
interested, I can send you a copy. I always use a classic Asian art
motif as the focus, and add and/or change a few things to my own taste.
The file I sent with the Gettysburg address in New Hotsuma had some
errors, so I am attaching a pretty much error-free version. For some of
the newer members of SaundSpel, this system probably seems pretty silly,
but in the past, I have shown how English can be represented in Chinese,
Inca quipu knots, colors, and in the oldest form of Korean hangul. I
always have fun with linguistics, so I hope you will pardon me, if I
don't seem very serious about spelling reform. Of course I am, but in
my own way (as we all have differing appraoches to that issue).
David
Letters and Associated
Sounds
|
Letter
|
lst
sound
|
2nd
sound
|
3rd
saund
|
overlaps
|
combinations
|
R-comb.
|
|
a
|
/a:/ alms
|
'a /'/
up
|
ae ash at
|
ae, 'a, ei, o
|
ai, au, aw
|
ar are
|
|
e
|
e /e
/
elbow
|
'e, 'er
/'/
|
ei/ey
|
'r 'a
|
ei ew eu eau
|
/er/ eric,
air
|
|
i
|
/I/ bit, ill
|
/i:/ beat,
eel
|
/ai/
my mice
|
schwa-schwi
|
ia iu via few
|
ir /ir/ ear
|
|
o
|
awe: all cost
|
owe: oat bow
|
haat hot
|
au, ou, aa
|
ow, oa
|
or ow'r
|
|
u
|
guru pool
|
put book
|
up
cut / L
/
|
u, ^, 3: w
|
ou, iu, eu
|
ur tour
|
| w v |
|
/u/ hook |
/^/ up cup |
|
|
|
| y |
unstressed
/ i:/ |
'y = ai in fl'y |
|
|
|
|
|
b
|
/b/ bib
|
/v/
|
/p/
|
debt
|
bl, bq, br
|
b'rg berg
|
|
c
|
/k/
|
/s/ circl
|
ch /tsh/
cello
|
k, s, ch, sh
|
ci, ce, ca, co
|
c'rd curd
|
|
d
|
/d/
|
/dh/
|
t
|
dh
|
da de di du
|
d'r'abl
|
|
f
|
/f/
|
/v/
|
--
|
v
|
fif of ofn
|
f'r
|
With three sounds per vowel letter, the notation is still manageable as
long as there are no code overlaps. We want the sound code or script
to be streamlined and short. The first sound does not refer to frequency
but to a default pronunciation that could be understood by all. ahp
can still be understood as up. ahx [ox] can almost be understood
as ax. caer however is not car.
New
Section
Definitions - draft see
alfa-gloss
for something more polished
syllabary
alphabet
phoneme
in linguistics, the
smallest unit of speech distinguishing one word (or
word element) from
another. For example, sound [t] in "cat"
separates that word
from "cab," "cap," and "can." Variants which are
understood as instances
of a particular phoneme are called allophones.
It is possible to
understand people speaking different dialects because
we can ignore the
phonetic distinctions and acoustical variations and
concentrate on the
phonemic similarities.
Most languages get
by with less than 30 phonemes. English has 35
uncombined phonemes
but around 50 important sound categories evenly
divided between vowels
and consonants. In a perfect alphabet, there would be a
one to one correspondnece
between phonemes of speech and distinctive
visible marks. A
writing system based on such a code would
be referred to as
phonemic or alphabetic.
Different views regarding
the concept of phoneme
The Prague school
is best known for its work on phonology.
Unlike the American
phonologists, Trubetskoy and his followers
did not take the
phoneme to be the minimal unit of analysis.
Instead, they defined
phonemes as sets of distinctive features.
For example, in English,
/b/ differs from /p/ in the same way that
/d/ differs from
/t/ and /g/ from...
Features
Each of the phonemes
that appears in the lexicon of a language
may be classified
in terms of a set of phonetic properties, or
features. Phoneticians
and linguists have been trying to develop a
set of features that
is sufficient to classify the phonemes in each
of the languages
of the world. A set of features of this kind would
constitute the...
Distinctive features
As a result of studying
the phonemic contrasts within a number of
languages, Roman
Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle
concluded in 1951
that segmental phonemes could be
characterized in
terms of 12 distinctive features. All of the features
were binary, in the
sense that a phoneme either had, or did not
have, the phonetic
attributes of the...
allophone
one of the phonetically
distinct variants of a phoneme. The
occurrence of one
allophone rather than another is usually
determined by its
position in the word (initial, final, medial, etc.)
or by its phonetic
environment. Speakers of a language often have
difficulty in hearing
the phonetic differences between allophones
of the same...
Phonetic transcription
There are many different
kinds of phonetic transcription. In some
circumstances a phonetic
symbol can be simply an abbreviation
for a phonetic description.
The symbol [s] may then be regarded
as exactly equivalent
to the phrase "voiceless, alveolar, fricative."
Writing
form of human communication
by means of a set of visible marks
that are related,
by convention, to some particular structural level
of language.
Historical (diachronic) linguistics
All languages change
in the course of time. Written records make
it clear that 15th-century
English is quite noticeably different from
20th-century English,
as is 15th-century French or German from
modern French or
German.
Types of writing systems
A writing system,
technically referred to as a script or
orthography, consists
of a set of visible marks, forms, or
structures called
characters or graphs that are related to some
structure in the
linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character
represents a meaningful
unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the
orthography is called
a...
COMMENTS
Wun uv the dumbest things about our letters is the name for jee.
You heard me right.
Call it Guu in honour of the mess that is English
spelling then we'll
be on our way to simple spellings like "Juj",
"Jerman", and "Forjery".
Highly literal spelling isn't the whole solution though.
George Bernard Shaw's
alphabet, I say, has too many letters, and they're
too indistinct. I'll
show you a better idea in a graphic medium.
You'll be able to
use them suuner once I explain the pattern behind my
glyphs of a font.
My glyphs form a series, like Shavian,
graphically relating related sounds.
Let me start with re-ordering the alphabet, like Benjamin Frankin
did, and what led
me to a radical font. Except for the vowels, the
alphabet is in nearly
a random order. That's about all that I'm keeping --
the order of the vowels.
The consonants are more easily organized -- in a
table, not a line.
We hav four labial (lip-made) consonants, four dentals,
(Zee and eS excepted),
four palatals, and four glottals (if you count two
consonants that aren't
English). Why not giv the Jermans a letter for the
sound in "Buch"? And
the skots a letter for "Loch". And while we're at it,
if you make that sound
into a voiced consonant, you get the vibrato-R or
hissing Guu (A Spanish
or Italian sound).
Those are the clear-cut consonants -- the ones that carry no tone.
(Okay, the voiced
hissings carry tone, and reason is to make five
exceptions to the
rule -- to group them with konsonants that don't carry
tone). The Ar and
eL carry tone, so defining them as consonants is almost
arbirary. In a table,
the clear consonants look like this:
G
T P l
L e a l
i e l o
p t a t
s h t t
e i
s
_____________
Voiced Hiss
V Dh Z Zh Gh
Whisperd Hiss
F Th S Sh Kh
Voice Stop
B D J G
Whisperd Stop
P T Ch K
Seven digraphs, for now. Chinese Pinyin (Romanized Chinese) was
supposed to use /Zh/
to represent the sound in "Asia", "Prestige", and
"Vojislav". Maybe
you noticed that the French hiss or slur the Jaa in
"Jour". Jaa and Zhee
are both voiced konsonants. Turning your voice box
off will giv you two
other consonants, one a stop, the other a hiss.
The Dee is a voist Tee, and a difference is between the t-h in
"the" and the one
in "path", so naturally /Dh/ is a speling for the voiced
variant of /Th/. Dh
is to Th as D is to T.
Sum people would look at a chart like the one above to understand
what I mean. If you
take your time and konsentrate, you'll learn that
every wun of the tabled
konsonants is vertikly juxtapoozed with its
klosest relativ.
Whisper one, and you get the other.
Voice the other and you end where you started.
For a total of thirty-seven letters, four more than the Russians
use, that's 18 consonants,
excluding three nasals, eL, aR, Yeh, Waw,
eleven VOWELS (10
long, 10 short, plus sh'va), and one consonant that
seems to stand alone
-- Hi.
--BrewJay Litwyn.
 .... alef-bird
3500 b.c. Egypt
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Old
Hotsuma script 
