Any phonemic transcription system or pronunciation guide for English has to have a letter or letter combination for at least 11 of the 12 pure uncombined vowels and a way of referencing all of the combine vowels.

Most systems will miss a few which is OK as long as it is clear what is being combined with what.  The goal of a phonemic or alphabetic speech transcription system is to make spelling simple and predictable.

English obscures the the two free vowels in herder.  /h@@rd@r/

in each of the 18 vowel cells above.  Most systems will fill 16 of them. 

The simplest system will have digraphs rather than trigraphs in the 12 combined vowel cells.  English needs one more character, a schwa for instance, to make this possible.  Spanglish uses [a] for schwa which means that the Italian [a] becomes [aa] and the uniquely English vowel, the  aesh, becomes [ae] .  Tap on top of the tarpaper becomes taep on taap av tha taarpeipar.

To make the transcription more traditional, an e is substituted for A in two  locations, in [the] and before the r [er].  taap can also be expressed as topp in General American since there is no short [o] /awe/ in this dialect.

[o] represents both the long and short o.  When stressed it is expressed as ao.

SS differs from most alternative writing systems for English by having

1. a connection with  historical phonemic spelling
2. a way of consistently interpreting the saunds for each letter
3. a devolution path to the traditional writing system,  and 
4. an abbreviated form for rapid writing. 

With Latin as the starting point, one can introduce the irregularities in English spelling [more or less] in their historical order.  This is called a devolution because the resulting mix of several spelling systems and patterns is chaotic and difficult to learn.  It turns spelling into a linguistic guessing game.  Traditional spelling represents not only a loss of the alphabet and the close relationsihip between pronunciation and spelling but also a loss of consistency and an unnecessary increase in complexity. 

Saxon Spanglish is not necessarily a spelling reform.  It can be valuable as a transitory or initial teaching alphabet without insisting that it is the only way to spell.  Unlike previousl i.t.a.'s Ss is not something that has to be discarded.  It can be a useful parallel system providing insights into the complexities of English spelling as well as a pronounciation guide. 

As a  phonemic transcription system, Spanglish respells over 60% of the words in English.  All phonemic transcriptions of English do this. The SS respellings are not so drastic as to require a key.  As indicated by the sentence at the top of the page, any literate person can read Spanglish.  European who are learning English as a second language will find Spanglish easier than the traditional writing system because it preserves the international letter-sound conventions. 

Saxon Spanglish is based on the Tenth Century Saxon alfabet shown above.   This is an augmented Latin character set with the ASH or ae being the most conspicous addition.  Saxon had 12 vowels compared to Latin's 10. 

There were long and short versions of each vowel sound.  [But not the ones that primary school teachers have used since the 18th Century].  Saxon did not code the two sounds in herder.  Like German, the e doubled as a mid lax vowel [schwa].  The unstressed  a also doubled as a mid lax vowel as in [ago] and [sofa]. 

conventional spelling
 

COMMENTS
RE IPA DEC 29

I think the IPA approach and signs are flawed too, and have written
several messages on those flaws (e.g. the IPA tendency to avoid the
hacek series, the IPA tendency to represent the A of AGE by one sign,
instead of a digraph, etc.), but it is the best comprehensive system I
have personally seen.  It is meant to handle SO MANY language sounds
that it can't help being weak in many areas.  And of course there are
other systems which ARE much better than IPA for representing individual
languages, such as English (in its many varieties), but their strengths
in representing English sometimes make them weak in representing other
languages.  So we are stuck with IPA, whether we like it or not,
because, like Steve (with Spanish) and Madhukar (with Marathi), I think
that we must consider OTHER language spelling systems while we are
dealing with English spelling reform.  Perhaps this is why I tend to
favor the "continental" vowel system(s) over the "English" vowel
system(s) -- the former is SO widespread that it simply can't be
ignored.

David -  kelley@hama-med.ac.jp

Saxon Spanglish
in a netshell

Lis yur lizyur vehycal hir.  Stopp raiding yur baicycal [bicicleta] tu werk.  Aur reytz aar azz low azz enyhwer inn [yn] tha city.  hwot iz aol tha camowshan abaut

I am trying to come up with the most compact possible way to present an orthography.
The SSS is under the impression that it takes 12 pages to do this. Perhaps 2 pages would be sufficient if the orthographer would provide two correspondence tables. One for the vowels, and one for the entire alphabet.  Here I have tried to truncate 42 sounds into
a 40 cell matrix.  It almost works.

I have messed up the chart by adding an alternate way of representing the sound.  Thus we can spell the ash sound as baet or batt.  The it sound as itt or yt.  The hook sound as shwd or shudd.  The pot sound as pott to distinguish it from the sound in "cost" which could also be written [caost].  In spanglish the o is normally somewhere between awe and a short owe sound.  To be less ambiguous, some kind of digraph must be used since this is an ascii notation.

The problem comes when the notation contains a few gimmicks or new ways of doing things.  This presentation uses the after-dot notation to indicate that the consonant is doubled if you want to clearly show the intended sound.  Spanglish is complex because it has an abbreviated form that is less than totally phonemic.  And, of course, the idea of spelling pronunciation seems to be impossible to explain.

This particular orthography has one version that reuses four consonants to supplement the vowel inventory. This is not as impossible as it may first seem.  It is positional in the sense that a most semivowels are not vowels  unless they are followed by a consonant.  Thus the V in bvt is a vowel [b^t] while the v in vatt is a consonant.  waach is a consonant while the w bwk is a vowel.  The arragement "when" is impossible pronounce but "hwen" can be pronounced either way.  The vowel pronunciation would be preferred and consistent with the rule.

There my be an initial tendency to pronounce yt as yit rather than it.  Of course ejypt looks and sounds right. The y is only a consonant at the start of a syllable, it is a vowel in the terminal position as in very. There would have to be another rule here because [very] would normally be spelled veri. So in the termianl position the y becomes an unstressed /i:/ rather than a short i. 

"Tha il meid hym yl."  "Serch aend yu mey faind [f'ynd].  Yu havv mai sympaethy[i]. 
 

Bob and family,
Seasons Greetings.
Have a great new year!
Here is a link to one of my web pages.I am working on a book on writing 
systems.Hotsuma is one of over a dozen different systemsthat I plan to 
include. 
I am trying to write the book at a 6th grade level which is a 
challenge. I can't even write something at a middle school teacher level
Two of the codes that I decipher and convert intoa code for English are 
Mayan and quipu. 
I am not sure how far I can push the envelopeand keep their interest. 
Some of this takes a little time to digest. Compared to Hieroglyphicsand 
Mayan, Hotsuma is easy. 

URL for the Hotsuma Syllabary page
Regards,  Steve
 sbett@lycos.com

Taam rote: 

 > Iem naat sher hou thu kaantinnentool verzhin werks, but Eenglish iz thu werldz Number 1 laengwij, soe ie ussuem it iz priemairee fer pikeeng voul speleengz.  Haet tue sae it but thu naem "saundspel" iz aleeyin tue GA Eenglish.  Hou wood wun rekunssiel it withh "sauna:"-TO.  Ie sugjjest that enee funnetik speleeng bee Eenglish baesd withh addishinz frum uther laengwijiz wair Eenglish duz naat hav u speleeng fer u sound.  Thus "saundspel" shood bee "soundspel". 

The problem is that thair is a vowel sound /a/, wich truespel cant reprezent. It is the first part of the diftong /ai/ az in (night, thailand). So u can spel IE, but it dusnt corespond tu the sum of I + E, it is the sum of /a/ + very short /i/ (wich IPA reprezents with J /aj/, becus moast languages reprezent the Y-sound of YES or LAY with J). 

Same for /au/: english or truespel OU is not the sum of O + U, it is the sum of /a/ + /u/. 

I'm just cumming from New Zealand. Thair was a place calld OMAPERE, a maori name, wich is pronounced /oma'pere/. The wite kiwis pronounce it /ou'maepiri/. Truespel wood spel that OEMMAPIRI, but thats the rong, very english pronunciation. Evrybody in the world can pronounce OMAPERE exept english nativ speekers. 

On the uther hand, wen truespel trys tu reprezent the rite pronunciation, it wood be AUMAAPPERE, but it is deffinitly not perfect, since it is a short AA, but oanly wun A is anuther sound in truespel. U cood try with U, AUMUPPERE, and thats neer enuf, but stil it is not the same (or wood u say that an AA is a long U?). 

[sb] I have always pronounced maori as May Or EE.  ather than muhauri, where is the stress.

The same for the word MAORI, wich is pronounced /'maori/. It is an /a/ + an /o/. U cant uze oanly A in truespel for that /a/ becuz truespel A stands for english short A. So if u uze U, and AU for /o/, u hav MUAURI, but this cood be also pronounce short U + short A + short U. Or, worse u cood uze long AA tu reprezent the first A: MAAAURI, but then again it can be short A + soft AA (father) + short U. 

So, eeven if i think that u heer things nobody else heers, truespel cood be a fairly good sistem tu reprezent english, especially if u wun day reccognize that thair is a sound calld short O, wich is uzed by the brits and the rest of the world 

(short O is wun of the moast common sounds in moast languages of the world, wether u ignor it or not), 

and wich is neither an AA nor an AU. But truespel and enny english based sistem cant be uzed tu sho the pronunciation of uther languages or "od" english dialects. It is like uzing a bottle opener tu cut vegetables. 

ze 
 

Consonants 
The standard English consonant system is traditionally considered to comprise 17 obstruents (6 plosives, 2 affricates and 9 fricatives) and 7 sonorants (3 nasals, 2 liquids and 2 semivowel glides). 

With the exception of the fricative /h/, the obstruents are usually classified in pairs as "voiceless and "voiced", although the presence or absence of periodicity in the signal resulting from laryngeal vibration is not a reliable feature distinguishing the two classes. They are better considered "fortis" (strong) and "lenis" (weak), with duration of constriction and intensity of the noise component signalling the distinction. 

The six plosives are p b t d k g: 

 Symbol  Word   Transcription
 p  pin   pIn
 b  bin   bIn
 t  tin   tIn
 d  din   dIn
 k  kin   kIn
 g  give   gIv

The "lenis" stops are most reliably voiced intervocalically; aspiration duration following the release in the fortis stops varies considerably with context, being practically absent following /s/, and varying with degree of stress syllable-initially. 
The two phonemic affricates are tS and dZ: 

 tS  chin   tSIn
 dZ  gin   dZIn

As with the lenis stop consonants, /dZ/ is most reliably voiced between vowels. 
There are nine fricatives, f v T D s z S Z h: 

 f  fin   fIn
 v  vim   vIm
 T  thin   TIn
 D  this   DIs
 s  sin   sIn
 z  zing   zIN
 S  shin   SIn
 Z  measure   "meZ@
 h  hit   hIt

Intervocalically the lenis fricatives are usually fully voiced, and they are often weakened to approximants (fricationless continuants) in unstressed position. 
The sonorants are three nasals m n N, two liquids r l, and two sonorant glides w j: 

 m  mock   mQk
 n  knock   nQk
 N  thing   TIN
 r  wrong   rQN
 l  long   lQN
 w  wasp   wQsp
 j  yacht   jQt

Vowels 
The English vowels fall into two classes, traditionally known as "short" and "long" but, owing to the contextual effect on duration of following "fortis" and "lenis" consonants (traditional "long" vowels preceding fortis consonants can be shorter than "short" vowels preceding lenis consonants), they are better described as "checked" (not occurring in a stressed syllable without a following consonant) and "free". 
The checked vowels are I e { Q V U: 

 I  pit   pIt
 e  pet   pet
 {  pat   p{t
 Q  pot   pQt
 V  cut   kVt
 U  put   pUt

There is a short central vowel, normally unstressed: 
 @  another   @"nVD@

The free vowels comprise monophthongs and diphthongs, although no hard and fast line can be drawn between these categories. They can be placed in three groups according to their final quality: i: eI aI OI, u: @U aU, 3: A: O: I@ e@ U@. They are exemplified as follows: 
 i:  ease   i:z
 eI  raise   reIz
 aI  rise   raIz
 OI  noise   nOIz

 u:  lose   lu:z
 @U  nose   n@Uz
 aU  rouse   raUz

 3:  furs   f3:z
 A:  stars   stA:z
 O:  cause   kO:z
 I@  fears   fI@z
 e@  stairs   ste@z
 U@  cures   kjU@z

The vowels /i:/ and /u:/ in unstressed syllables vary in their pronunciation between a close [i]/[u] and a more open [I]/[U]. Therefore it is suggested that /i/ and /u/ be used as indeterminacy symbols. 
 i  happy   "h{pi
 u  into   "Intu

NG
English may not have any words beginniq with 'ng', but other languages do. 
Ngaio  ['qaio'  in IanSpel] is is a Maori word, the name of a common NZ tree. 
Almost all Kiwis just say 'Naio' 

Tom said: Be vague in fonetic spelling.  Battle for dominance.  English is a fonetic disaster area.  Entlish is to be the basis of any new fonetic spelling system.  In English, the i must represent the sound in it.
 

From: "jimk" jimk@forcomm.net 
10 Jan 2001 22:47:51 -0500 

Steve, We still have a bit of trouble communicating. I suspect it really started back when Johnson's crowd thought they had the English writing problem solved for all time by standardizing spelling on writing authority rather than on pronunciation. It was a huge step forward. 

The Dictionary showed (usually) only 1 correct way to write a word. The literary establishment had firm control. End of all arguments, except....the *write like you speak* people wouldn't go away. They became English linguists, keepers of the spoken language. The TO experts were right (no 2 people speak exacly the same way and lots of *English-speaking* groups have a hard time understanding each other), so English linguists have been studying pronunciation ever since without coming to an agreement on which speech habits will form the basis for a better writing system. 

What should new spelling do better than TO
There is a simle list
Closer to pronunciation

They can't even agree on a simple list of what such a writing system should do better than TO. Now I maintain that, even though no one could express it at the time, a third solution to the problem of bringing the written language in standard synchrony was dimly recognized by Webster, perhaps Franklin, and maybe many others as well. They just didn't have the concept thought out and so did not have a word for it. They said the writing should match the speech sounds, but they argued as if everyone was saying about the same sounds when the actual fact was the opposite. Ever since, spelling reformers have tried to make words match sounds and spent most of their energy trying to convince everyone else that the sounds to be reproduced must be their own (or their choice, at any rate.) In the 1800s, someone named Kruszewsky is supposed to have invented the term *phoneme* to cover a concept that he had expounded. I do not have the paper and it wouldn't help if I did. Right at the start, linguists took over and defined phonemes as sounds though (sometimes) adding cryptically that they are not real (can you imagine a sound without a speaker and listener?), but ARE sounds none-the-less. Immediately, the original dilemma rears its ugly head. Every linguists can make a sound and claim it IS the phoneme by speaking words containing that sound. No definition, no standard; every one free to make his own claim. 

Phonetics in the Jones tradition are based on culture free sounds. 

That is exactly where soundspel is stuck today; whose speech habits rule? The useful concept of abstract phonemes (mental, no need to mention sounds) is that they get into the brain as the ideas a child develops hearing various versions of phonemic sounds until he KNOWS that a word in his mind consists of a very specific sequence of those ideas, every time he hears a reasonable approximation of that particular sound sequence, he decodes it into the corresponding (commonly shared) phoneme sequence in his brain and thinks that word. Every time he wants to speak that word, he encodes it into that specific phoneme sequence, and his speech organs are directed to issue his particular version of the corresponding phonemic sound stream. 

I'm sorry this simple concept seems so complicated and that I have repeated it so many times. But I feel it is the only way I can answer your claim that Merriam-Webster has produced a phonemic dictionary. If it is a pronunciation guide that reproduces the guide in their recent dictionaries, then it is not a dictionary. Pronunciation guides always represent a range of sounds (the schwa, not a specific phoneme, is probably the symbol most frequently used) and often give foreign phonemes and references to regional speech ambiguities that do not represent phoneme differences. 

Pronunciation guides are a good place to start, but to turn a pronunciation guide into a useful phonemic dictionary (of the quality of M-W's 10th Collegiate) requires a great deal of additional research in the community to be covered and competent scholarly work to whip the data into useful shape. JimK (see below)

Jime writes AKSES has the number of phonemes needed to permit Merriam-Webster to convert their TO dictionary to a phonemic version. --- jimk jimk@forcomm.net Jim, Merriam-Webster already has a phonemic version. It is called the pronunciation guide. See above, the pronunciations cannot be simply copied in as entry words. Many can, but many require considerable data gathering and reviewuation before deciding which phonemes properly represent the commonly held phoneme sequence for a word. The on line Merriam Webster dictonary uses a non-IPA notation that is almost identical to keyboard unifon. This is different from their printed pronunciation guides and the complication of representing pronunciation rather than phoneme content perhaps is exacerbated by the limitations of the medium. I have found no need to refer to this source. One minor difference is the use of c instead of & for schwa. A-ei, E=ee, I=ie, O=oe, U=oo. The only problem with this phonemic notation is that it respells at least 60% of the traditional words. For most people, it looks funny. 

Any true phonemic representation (most easily accessible to children) will look funny to a TO-trained reader. Any *respelled* text that does NOT look funny is guaranteed to be just as hard or harder to learn than TO. Even with the greatest attention to picking the character set that gives the most compatible match with as many TO spelling as possible, TO is so inconsistent that 50 % of the words, at least, *look strange.* Perhaps 25 to 30 % will look *very strange.* "Dc zU had an Ap, an El, and an Oranj strIpd tIgcr." I guess that this says: *Dhu zoo had an aep, an eel, and an orenj striept tieger.* It illustrates that a dictionary used for teaching reading and writing to children and as a guide to careful and clear speech and writing for adults should not contain schwa notation in entry words. They should be made up of the phonemes most commonly used by careful speakers to create them in speech. Thus /u/ in *the* and /er/ as the final vowel in *tiger.* People natually enough change their speech habits to avoid sounding stilted in informal situations. Gus, 

Good idea. We could build a multi notation converter by simply accessing different lookup tables. I don't think that anyone has come up with a phonemic system that works across languages. You can see the problem that Tom gets into when he tries to use his ears to transcribe phonemes in truespel. John Well's SAMPA site is the closest to achieving this. The kind of converters we have right now are not rule based. They are simply lookup tables. To convert, you simply lookup in one notation, e.g., TO and substitute the associated spelling: [look,lwk]. Thus, it is no harder to do this for an unsystematic spelling system such as cut spelling as for a systematic one. There is no easy way to build a conversion table for 50,000 words. I can send you the TO words, but you will have to indicate the rectified spelling for all of them. Have you checked out Stephen Bird's on line converter? It works for cut spelling and for ALC fonentic. It will soon work for Truespel I would like to get my hands on a more sophisticated engine such as the one that If we had the list of 50,000 in a phonemic spelling, then we could easily generate other spellings by search and replace. If & is schwa, replace with a in Spanglish. &merik& bedcomes amerika. The existing a's would first have to be converted to ae. There would be no easy way of doubling the consonant to show this sound. Regards, Steve 

--- Gus gushs@gte.net wrote: Steve, I had a further idea. Besides going from the 'note' version to 'standard' English, what about a converter that also converts 'standard' to any version of your choice. In that way if you prefer to read in Spanglish, Truespell, AKSES, Iqliz or Eglsh (or even a foreign language - tho here we have grammatical problems with some, especially German's sentence structure, and also Japanese with the latter's 'honorifics'), you can do so. Then, switching from that version to 'standard', and back again to that version, a lot of misunderstanding can be cleared up. (But who's going to invent this converter?) Gus Gus wrote: Steve, You're right. There could be a converter if the notes were made on a computer. But the notes I've taken were handwritten. Even these could someday be converted tho by scanned recognition, if done legibly enough. And if not, by reading from the notes and telling the computer what was said. (But who is going to do any of this?) Gus 

Steve Bett wrote: Gvs, Yu aar rait, ther aar sevral veyraiytiz av spidraiting. They aol ignor short vaulz. Sam yuz the english vaul saundz, athrz yuzd continental valyuz. exampl U ar rIt, Dr ar svrl vriatEz v spEdrAtng. Itt izz very haard tu faind enything on shorthaend tudey. I think that rapid writing is something that should be explored because before anyone will buy into a code, it has to fill some need. I would think that we could build a converter for English that would convert rapid notes into standard English. Regards, Steve

--- Gus gushs@gte.net wrote: Steve, I'm not really advocating Eglsh. (I much prefer Iqliz.) It's just that that's where I think we're headed. People use bits and pieces everywhere. When I attended classes or lectures I used pieces when taking notes (it's ideal for that, in that you can write almost as fast as the speaker can talk). You mention speed writing, a means I'm not familiar with, unless you mean a type of ABC shorthand, of which there are many varieties. Eglsh isn't any of these. Eglsh uses 'standard' English spelling (not sounds as ABC or regular shorthand does, tho sound is definitely considered) as its guide, with no deviation (if possible). It just leaves out redundant and incorrectly pronounced vowels (especially those in the middle of a word) and consonants plus using more adequately the features on the American keyboard. Where this can't be done, or would be confusing, it reverts to the 'standard' spelling. Thus in using Eglsh as a medium of communication, existing 'standard' writing need not be discarded or made obsolete. Its use also, should make it easier for students to learn English, as English's ideograms would be shorter and easier to memorize. Sounds of various varieties (London UK vs Scots vs Irish vs New Yorker vs Southern US vs Australian vs India vs African vs Ebonics) would need less consideration - as the writing can still be understood - which is really what (written) communication's about. (To be adequate and honest, Truespel, Akses and others similar, would need configurations for all these varieties, if they are to do what they claim to do - reflect true sounds in their writing - which would tend to tear English apart, more than already, with the British and American varieties of spelling.) This is why I said earlier: 'I think we're all spinning our wheels' with our favorite methods (me too - with Iqliz). Among the shortcuts used in Eglsh are the following: a = a or an, b = be, c = can, d = do, f = for, g = go, h = who (alternately he also, if clear), i = I, l = will, m = am, n = in or no, o = of, r = are or or, s = as, is or us, t = to or too (two = 2), u = you. (Duplicates are spelled out in identified 'standard' if the results would be confusing.) 

Steve Bett wrote: Gus, I wonder if it would be any easier for you to get across you ideas if you clearly built on something like cut spelling. Just say that you leave out the vowel when after cutting the remaining vowels might be confusing. who -- ho -- h him --him -- hm as in speedwriting her -- her -- hr [it helps to leave out the e because it could otherwise be pronounced as "hair" heh+r] whom -- hom? --- hum? hum--hm or h'm Please give me about ten more good examples. 

Chris Upward was always saying that CS was not speed writing, it just worked out that way. 

--- Gus gushs@gte.net wrote: Valerie, In Eglsh you don't spell who as ho (as you would in Cut Spelng). You spell it h. (Eglsh matches sound better by limiting the use of vowels - the biggest cause of English's written problems, & you sure do save space - 40+%.) Whom is spelled hm (as is him - you tell the difference by the context). There are 13 rules, which I'll be putting up on my site, Iqliz.com, one of these days. You might visit it & let me know what you think of the Eglsh you see there. (Tho I prefer Iqliz 3, Eglsh is destined to be far more popular - it's already being used in pieces, here and there - as I've done in official documents - because you can mix it in with 'standard' spelling.) Gus Valerie_Yule@fc.ausom.net.au wrote: Gus writes: As I said before, there has to be something in it that they want. And today - that is the saving of time. That is why cutting out surplus letrs is a good place to start. (But if the cutting makes words hard to read or understand, than the letrs ar not surplus. e.g. no 'hom' or 'ho' for 'whom' or 'who'.) vy 

Hmmm ... should you say something like "We suggest that the US government
must cease its financial/social/educational/political backing of the
enormous destructive power of conventional spelling - and turn these mighty
sums and resources instead to promoting a spelling based upon sound
science"?
>Parents of infants would learn AKSES text while helping them
> learn phoneme/phonemic characters rather than the alphabet.  They would read
> AKSES children's books to their preschoolers.

People in the UK said that about i.t.a. - very few publishers, though, ever
produced children's books in i.t.a. (and most of those publishers produced
only one or two books, as a sort of experiment) - effectively ensuring (from
what I hear) that i.t.a.-using children had little or nothing to read
outside of school: not (I think) an outcome that Jim would wish for
AKSES-using children.
    Assuming that Jim succeeds in persuading the USA government to avoid a
similar deprivation (by re-directing towards AKSES publication the vast sums
it now spends in support of conventional-spelling literacy), the question
arises of how the government can best do this. Legally and morally, can and
should the government pay publishers to release all their new children's
books in AKSES spelling alone ... and/or to re-print all their existing
children's literature (everything from Mother Goose to Harry Potter) in
AKSES spelling alone? Such a requirement, according to at least one lawyer
(my husband, with whom I have discussed this), may seriously violate the
First Amendment.
    So how, specifically, does Jim want the government to back AKSES? What
specific plan has he devised?
> [Americans] are suckers for something
> that is new and trendy or sexy ...  A phonemic
> writing system could easily be sold ... as a way to keep
> up with the neighbors ... .
 

Saxon Spanglish
in a netshell

Lis yur lizyur vehycal hir.  Stopp raiding yur baicycal [bicicleta] tu werk.  Aur reytz aar azz low azz enyhwer inn [yn] tha city.  hwot iz aol tha camowshan abaut

I am trying to come up with the most compact possible way to present an orthography.
The SSS is under the impression that it takes 12 pages to do this. Perhaps 2 pages would be sufficient if the orthographer would provide two correspondence tables. One for the vowels, and one for the entire alphabet.  Here I have tried to truncate 42 sounds into
a 40 cell matrix.  It almost works. 

I have messed up the chart by adding an alternate way of representing the sound.  Thus we can spell the ash sound as baet or batt.  The it sound as itt or yt.  The hook sound as shwd or shudd.  The pot sound as pott to distinguish it from the sound in "cost" which could also be written [caost].  In spanglish the o is normally somewhere between awe and a short owe sound.  To be less ambiguous, some kind of digraph must be used since this is an ascii notation.

The problem comes when the notation contains a few gimmicks or new ways of doing things.  This presentation uses the after-dot notation to indicate that the consonant is doubled if you want to clearly show the intended sound.  Spanglish is complex because it has an abbreviated form that is less than totally phonemic.  And, of course, the idea of spelling pronunciation seems to be impossible to explain.

This particular orthography has one version that reuses four consonants to supplement the vowel inventory. This is not as impossible as it may first seem.  It is positional in the sense that a most semivowels are not vowels  unless they are followed by a consonant.  Thus the V in bvt is a vowel [b^t] while the v in vatt is a consonant.  waach is a consonant while the w bwk is a vowel.  The arragement "when" is impossible pronounce but "hwen" can be pronounced either way.  The vowel pronunciation would be preferred and consistent with the rule.

There my be an initial tendency to pronounce yt as yit rather than it.  Of course ejypt looks and sounds right. The y is only a consonant at the start of a syllable, it is a vowel in the terminal position as in very. There would have to be another rule here because [very] would normally be spelled veri. So in the termianl position the y becomes an unstressed /i:/ rather than a short i. 

"Tha il meid hym yl."  "Serch aend yu mey faind [f'ynd].  Yu havv mai sympaethy[i]. 

Re Jim's remark that in Spanish schools, no one ... ever ask[s] "How do you spell __?"

Ze remarked that Spanish has only 5 inconsistencies with respect to spelling and no inconsistencies with resprect to reading.  H, LL/y, V/b, C/s, G/j

I wonder whether this applies in cases (fairly frequent in Spanish) where
one sound has more than one letter indicating it: e.g.:
       /y/ indicated by "y" but also by "ll" -  llama
       /s/ indicated by "s" but also by "c" "z" -  coracon
       /b/ indicated by "b" but also by "v" - [word where b is usually v]
       /kh/ indicated by "j" but also by "g" -  gymnasio
       /a/ indicated by "a" but also by "ha" -  hasta luego
       /e/ indicated by "e" but also by "he" - 
       /i/ indicated by "i" but also by "hi" -  hildago
etc., etc., etc.

I have seen more than one uneducated native speaker of Spanish spell "yo"
(I) as "llo" - spell "llegar" (arrive) as "yegar" - and spell "huevos"
(eggs) as "uevos" or even "uebos" - and have heard from them and others
that, yes, you do have to learn which letter to use when ...

... in fact, the current standard spelling of the word "yerba" (grass, herb)
came from a long-ago phonemic-but-not-conventional spelling of the
then-conventional spelling, "hierba" - "hierba" and "yerba" sound identical.

And all this doesn't even take into account the various dialects which
differ from standard phonology - e.g., many Latin American Spanish-speakers
don't have /s/ and/or /d/ in the middle/at the ends of words, so a word like
"pescado" (fish) - transparently phonemic to a "standard" speaker" becomes
in the speech of these people /pekao/ instead of /peskado/ ... and,
predictably, if uneducated they will often write it more-or-less as they say
it: "pescao" or "pecado" (yes, homophonous with the word for "sin"!) or
"pecao." 

And, of course, speakers of /s/-less varieties pronounce the plural of "pescado" and many other words the same as the singular, with the only audible differences happening *outside* the noun:

[The /a/ I meen is the A in spanish CASA, the A of italian CASA, etc] 
But yoo didn't menshn Yorks or Kiwi father which iz probabli kloesr to sum on yor list than RP fathr.

ZFA

Yor unneseseri lektuer on the need for universl english speling (Y agree) sujests yoo ar miksing speling and pronunsiaeshn. Uezing IVAA koeds (q.v.), ZFA duznt distingwish between a and A, i and I, u and U. ZFA mixes digrafs and difthongs - to uez anothr Maori exampl, tutae is pronounsd IPA tutae, not tutæ. My referenss sae that RP eye /aI/ duznt start with the saem vowel az owl /AU/

Bert Einstein sed "Evrithing shood be maed as simpl az posibl, but no simplr" It seems tu me that ZFA is too simpl to alou sensibl diskushn on pronunsiaeshn. Furthr doun the trak, reformrs ar going to hav to thrash out the kompromyzs between sum suksesrs to Soundspel and Nuespel et alia, and we wil need to advans beyond kurent SSS Mickey Mouse Phonetics. And Y stil beleev that when push kums to shuv, RP wil be left in the dust.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

Counting only once, how many F's do you see in the sentence above? ___

Now try it again in lower case

Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years.

How many F's do you count this time?

ANSWER: 6 < click here and read the answer at the bottom of the screen
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