Ai havv hadd a kaindly fieling, a frendly fieling, a cuzzinly fieling towrd Simmplified Spelling, fram 'the beginning av 'the muvment thrie yierz agow [1886], butt nathing mor infleymd thann thatt.  It siemz tu mi thatt tu mierly propowz tu subbstitut wan inaddequacy for anadhr; a sort av patching and plugging pur owld dental relics with ciement aend gowld aend porcelin peyst; wat waz rilly nieded waz a nui sett av tieth.  Thaet izz tu sey, a Nu Alfabet.

Spanglish izz a proposal tu restore the lasst consisstent alfabet for English, the Saxon alfabet.

[Gus H. writes]  If we're coming up with a new way of writing, wouldn't it make sense to cater to the ones that would get most out of it? 'Foreign' users comprise today as many people as there are 'native' users. But if present trends continue, the 'foreign' users will be double that of the 'native' (by 2100). Also, as the 'natives' of other languages are presently outstripping English 'natives' in growth, wouldn't it make sense to try to convert some of these 'foreign' users to become 'native'?

What appeals to the world is a system based on the Latin conventions.  English is the only system using the Roman alphabet that does not use the Roman sound values.  This means changing some of the so called "long vowel" and diphthong spellings. pail=peyl
eyes=aiz, ice=ais, law=lao, out=aut.

The appeal of the new writing system has to be to both groups.  The spanglish system is to start people off with the system that was originally used for Anglo Saxon or Old English, an agumented Latin alphabet.  This is a highly consistent spelling system.  Later, for those who want to write in the traditoinal writing system, one can learn several other incompatible spelling conventions.  One only needs to learn four or five different ways to spell a syllable to cover 80% of the English spellings.  You still have to guess but the odds of getting it right with only 4 options is much better than when there are 20 options.  Nyikos [1988] claims that there are 1,120 different graphemes for the 40 phonemes of English.   In other words, each elementary sound is spelled 28 different ways.  [Coulmas, F. 1995]

Spanish is not perfect.  Ze, however, noted, "Az far az i no, thair ar 5 inconsistencies in Spanish and these concern spelling not reading.  "For the reader, there is no inconsisntency (i.e.,  a Spaniard can read any unknown word and he wont make any mistakes".  This is also true for Spanglish once the Saxon augmented Latin alphabet is memorized.  All words can be pronounced because all letters are associated with ony one sound.  There are, however, sometimes more than one way to spell a word.

What is this talk about restoring an alphabet.  Don't we already have an alphabet?
What is the difference between alphabetical and phonemic?

To the extent there is a one-to-one correspondence between written marks and spoken sounds, the writing system is said to be  alphabetic or phonemic.  The English writing system is often called alpha-morphemic because there is some compromise of the alphbetic principle based on the desire to have consistent plurals and past tenses.    However, with these two competing principles, the writing system could sill be over 80% alphabetic.  The English writing system is not even close. 

All languages are phonemic.  They enable communication by having meaningful clusters or sounds referred to as phonemes.  These categories or sound segments can be strung together in different ways to provide a way to talk about anything under the sun.  Writing systems could have a direct connection to meaning either through a convention [e.g., the number 4] or a picture [e.g., the number III]. For greater flexibility, they could encode speech.  The sound signs could refer to syllables or to smaller more abstract components such as consonants and vowels. The smallest unit of meaningful sound is called a phoneme.  The phoneme is meaningful in the sense that in some context, substituting one for another will change the meaning of a cluster of phonemes. Few phonemes are meaningful in isolation.

Phonemes are abstract in the way the color 'red' is abstract.  We can discriminate colors and phonemes but we cannot point at or isolate the concept - only an instance of it. Just as in the case of color, there may be clear cases of  "red" and borderline cases.  What counts as a clear case often depends on the context and contrast set.  Asked to pick the red ball from among a group of blue and green balls, a pinkish colored ball would be identified as redish.  Where as in a group of redish balls, the pinkish ball might be rejected as not being red enough. Similarly, in certain sentences, [mope /moup/] would be accepted as referencing [mop]. 
 

After 1450, the spelling became more or less fixed.  There was a partial vowel shift during the next 100 years.  The vowels in some began to be pronounced in 
a more closed manner. aan became on  [spelled onne] and then unn. aeny became eny.  Since these words were never respelled, this led to a serious code overlap where the same spelling had an old and a new pronunciation. Any attempt to fully rectify English spelling is going to end up respelling or repronouncing half of the words. In Saxon, a and e /@/ were simply extenders. read had a longer vowel than red. bied had a longer vowel than bid.

The group of glyphs or shapes might be called an ordered character set.  An alphabet is supposed to correspond to the simple [uncombined] sounds or phonemes  of speech.  An alphabetic character has both shape and a specific assigned sound. 

After the great vowel shift [circa 1400], only about 40% of this alphbet survived.  Many letters are not clearly associated with a particular sound.  Only 40% of the traditional spellings match the pronounciation guide in the dictionary. 

The cost of using alphabetical spelling may be too high.  All phonemic systems, including the one above, respell 60% of the words in the dictionary.  The cost of not using an alphabetic system is also high because it makes the achievement of  literacy more difficult.  Children who use the consistent alphabets of Italian, Spanish, an most other languages, become literate in half the time becdause there is only one tenth as much to learn.

Explaining English Spelling

The reform proposal is to readopt the Saxon alphabet and pronounce words as they are spelled.  In other words simply acknowledge that we are spelling an ancient dialect.  words such as read and believe do not have to be chanced to red and bileev.  Except for the  redundant e added to believe, they are correctly spelled and show the correct pronunciation. 

Words such a bead would have to rhyme with bed.  There is no logic here.  The former e or ea in some words started to be pronounced as an i: [ee]. bead spells be@d which today we pronounce bied [beed].  Haauu maany bedz daw  yawu hava awn yawur nekklas.  Spelling Pronunciation.  Trnascription: Hau meny biedz du yu hav on yur nekklas.  Respelling?  biedz mey bi thi only wan. The others are close enough to be understood when read aloud.

A spelling pronunciation [SP] reform differs from a phonemic reform.  Instead of referencing a particular dialect, the reference is to traditional spelling.  This kind of reform minimizes the number of words needing to be respelled by creating an artificial dialect that can be understood by all English speakers. 

Some have argued that you cant restore a sound based alphabet because English has too many dialects. The SP proposal gets around this objection.  Only words that cannot be understood when pronounced according to the Saxon alphabet are respelled.  The proposed reform brings pronunciation more in line with international pronunciaton and spelling more in line with international spelling. 
 

A Phonemic Alphabet for English The Saxon fonemic aelfabet for English A ago AA caar AE A. aent AI 'Y eye A.U aut B bad C city Ch ech D dab E el EY they F fife G gwd H hat I. ill I II eel J jaj K kik L litl M mam N NG nan O. pot O AO awe OW owe OY oyl P paip Q quik R* rir hr S sis Shsy shel T tot Thdh the U. W hwk U UU hup V vaet W* wow X ox Y*yu very Z zip ZyZh lizyur consonants-white, semivowels-gray, vowels-shaded Irregular traditionally spelled words are italicized, eye-ay, out-aut, fife-faif, good-gwd, leisure-lizyr, none-nan *vowels when not followed by a vowel - wwln=woolen

On the negative side, pronouncing words as they are spelled results in a strange dialect of English.  To some it sounds something like a Middle English dialect.  To others, it may sound like a foreigner trying to pronounce English words according to international conventions.  As many ESL teachers have remarked, ESL students speak as though the great vowel shift never happened.  For example: IDEA = ee-dey-ah rather than ai-dih-uh.  The ESL students may be right, there are probably some words we should repronounce rather than respell. International scientific words are the prime prospects. The word [scientific] itself should probably be repronounced [see-en-tific] rather than respelled saientific. 

The proposed reform results in at least three scripts or notations: a slightly modified traditional spelling (26 letters), a broad phonemic spelling (merged phonemes- 26 letters, 26 symbols) and a narrow phonemic spelling (26-33 letters, 34-40 symbols). The eight new symbols that can be used to extend the character set and reduce ambigity are all ASCII based [ae/a. 'a  'e  i.  o.  u.  'r  o'  'v ] and available in Latin 1[æ à  è  ì  ò  ù  'r  ó  û ]. Without marking, the sound of a in Spanglish is somewhere between the vowel inupandalms. ([uh] and [ah])

Spanglish looks something like English written in a Spanish orthography.  One could justifiably call it restored English alphabetic spelling or New Saxon because it is nearly identical to the system used when English speakers first adopted the Roman alphabet [circa 750 A.D.].

The great vowel distortion aka The Great Vowel Shift  [graphic]

Around 1400 (the end of the Middle English period), many words started to be pronounced in untraditional and  unalphabetic ways.  Linguists often call the change systematic and natural but not all words were affected.  Some words retained their traditional pronounciation while others changed.  AS hus had already been respelled hous by Norman French scribes. Around 1400 the pronunciation changed from /hu:s/  to /haus/ /hæ+ùs/   In SPanglic, house /haw-uus-'/ does not have to be respelled since its Saxon pronunciation is close enough.  Phonemic Saxon would spell the word the same as IPA, haus.

By the mid 9th century, England had a near perfect sound based spelling system known as West Saxon Standard. Old English (850-1060 AD) was written in a church Latin inspired alphabet in a way consistent with how it was pronounced in the 10th century. Anglo Saxon used grapheme-phoneme correspondences almost identical to those shown in the Spanglish vowel table. In the augmented Latin alphabet, each Roman letter was associated with a specific sound. The six vowel letters were associated with two sounds - the long and short version of the vowel. The letter [a] referenced the Roman /a/ sound [ah].  A new letter had to be added to reference the Saxon ash.  The ash [æ]* provided a way to reference the sound that differed from the Italian A. 

When England adopted the Roman alphabet (8th century), they also adopted the sounds associated with the letters.  To make a 5 vowel alphabet work with a language that had 12 vowels, the Latin alphabet was augmented.  The West Saxon standard (ca. 900 AD) added several runic letters for the missing sounds.   The West Saxon alphabet had 6 vowel letters, each letter had a long and short pronunciation as shown below:

The West Saxon Standard - Englisc   a æ e i o u 'r èr long ah * eh-ey eel awe-oh hoop her short ago æsh ej-edge ill awe* hook othèr accents à * è  ì ò ó ù à è

Why make such big changes as A=ah, I=eel, O=awe, U=ooze?  The main reason is that this set of correspondences allows learners to use spelling pronunciation.  Pronouncing all A's as ah produces understandable results.  The alt. of pronouncing Ha as Hay doesn't quite work.  Pronouncing all O's as awe unless in the terminal position also works better than other alternatives.

.
By the 10th century, English had a highly consistent spelling system known as the West Saxon standard. The sounds that corresponded to the letters A E I O U were ah, eh, ee, awe, oo.  If  these letter sound correspondences were fully restored, English could once again have a functioning alphabet. 

Spanglish does not look like Old English because English words are not pronounced the same as they were before the Norman conquest (1066 AD).  Spanglish, however, is built from the same basic set of grapheme-phoneme correspondences as Old English.  This is what is being restored.
 

Some Old English Spellings and Pronunciations Old Saxon OE & ME Pron. ME / Std Spelling dai die-/dai/ day /dei/ dæg da? day /dei/ wæd wæd? water /wotr/ wæpn wæpn weapon heeth heth-' heeth/hi:th/ sweete sway-t' sweet/swi:t/ see say/zay sea /si:/ ol ol all /ol/ good gode good /gud/ lawe lau-w' law /lo:/ August au=ah aug /o:g/ time team ti:m time /taim/ do doe dou do /du:/ to to  /taw?/ to /tu:/ is i:s ice /ais:/ pund pu:nd pound/pau/ hus hu:s house /au/ hlud lu:d loud /laud/ Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, R. Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford, 1985, L.S. Smith Zachrisson, R.E. Pronunciation of English Vowels, 1913; Ellis, A. 1880 aiff Soundfiles heeth

Instead of retaining the old correspondence table, the English speaking world has retained many archaic spellings. By doing so, the relationship between spelling and pronunciation has been all but lost. English went from being over 90% phonemic to being less than 40% phonemic. [proof].  The ability to spell a word is directly related to its phonemic accuracy - especially for children during the first 4 years of schooling. [K. Spencer]

Restoring the alphabet makes spelling-pronunciation possible.  Instead of 20 sounds per vowel letter there would be only two.  Spelling pronunciation does not exactly duplicate any particular dialect. In some cases the dialect sounds like  Middle English because this is the way frequently used  words are spelled. It may  slightly distort the pronunciation of some words, [for example -- ox becomes awks ] but the distortion or mispronunciation is rarely so great as to prevent understanding. [To indicate the short o, the word would have to be spelled oxx or okks].  Many historical spellings are from Middle English.  When these words are not respelled,  their spelling pronunciation approximates Middle English. [time /ti:m' / is pronounced team]

There are some historical spellings that do not make sense or that would make more sense if misleading letter[s] were removed. For example, [gh] is no longer pronounced in any contemporary dialect of English.  Thus, the spelling pronunciation of <through> would be nearly unintelligible.  The spelling pronunciation of [thru], however, exactly duplicates current pronunciation. 

There are 12 pure vowel phonemes in present day English. A complete alphabet would need 12 vowel letters. In addition to the 12 uncombined sounds, there are at least 12 vowel combinations. Using the Saxon, the combination of sounds is represented by the combination of letters.  ai = ah + ee [the vowel in eye]

There are three Spanglish proposals.  The  Spanglish spelling pronunciation proposal is an alternative to the phonemic Spanglish.   Informal Spanglish hasup to two sounds associated each letter. 

Spelling pronunciation substitutes new letters in traditional spellings [TS] only when a traditionally spelled word cannot be understood when pronounced according to the Saxon alphabet. This approach has some fuzzy edges or boundaries since the degree to which a spelling pronunciation of a word can be understood in context varies. For example:  be [orig. beh/bay] is now pronounced bi but the original pre-vowel shift or Middle English pronunciation can still be understood.
 
 

Saxon-Spanglish  Pronunciation Symbols [26 fonograemz] \a\ as a and u in abut alt.\'u\ as ü in üp & ürn alt. \'i\ in unit yun'it \'e\ as e in kitten kitn \r\ ur/er in further frthr \ae\ as a in ash  aesh \ey\ as a in ace & they \aa\ as o in mop, want \au\ as ou in out* aut alt.\ou\ aw-oo in out \e\ as e in bet  \i\ as ea in easy & frito \g\ as g in go  \i\ as i in hit  \ai\ as i-e in ice ais \j\ as j in job /dzh/ \ng\ as ng in sing siq \o\ as [aw] in cost, all  \ao\ \aring\ for law  lao \ow\ as o in go', low  \ei\ & \ä\ for vein, ace \oi\ as oy in boy \ch\ as ch in chin  \sh\ as sh in ship  \th\ as th in thin q \th'\ as th in the d \u\ as oo in food fud \w\ & \u.\ as oo in foot \y\ as y in yet & very \zy\ as si in vision dictionary spanglish Distance Educator *ou [aw=oo] can also be used for /au/.  *ow cannot.  town has to be respelled as taun - Otherwise it would rhyme with towing. is vizy-an easier to understand than vizhan.

An alphabet is a consistent set of relations between the way a word is pronounced and the way it is spelled. In other words, in an alphabetic system, words that rhyme are spelled the same. Spanglish does a much better job of attaining this alphabetic ideal than TO. 

Across all English dialects, there are two ways to vocalize the word DAY.  The vocalic sound in DAY can therefore be spelled two ways ay /ai/ or ey /ei/  [ah-ee or eh-ee].  Both Spanish and English orthographies prefer a y in the terminal position to mark a syllable boundary . Since the pronunciation of the traditional spelling, DAY /dah-ee/, is understandable, Spanglish does not require respelling.  The only time the respelling of [day] would be required in a broad romic notation would be in a dictionary pronunciation guide where the objective was to represent a particular dialect such as General American [GA]. day /dey/ [GA]  /day/ dah-ee Aust.

Notice that in Spanglish each letter is pronounced and the same notation is used for both quasi traditional spelling and for phonemic spelling.  Except for H, there are no silent letters in Spanish or Spanglish.

The notation used to explain sounds to the non-linguist is called Menu-Spel because it is frequently used to explain the pronunciation of foreign words on Menus [e.g. day=dah-ee].  [ah-ee] is not the most frequent way that /i:/ is spelled in English but its pronunciation to English readers is obvioius.  In earlier times [ee] referred to the French e in resume' and nee'. Today, this is rarely alternate pronunciations.

Mark Twain wrote:
I.have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly feeling toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the movement three years ago [1896], but nothing more inflamed than that. It seemed to me to merely propose to substitute one inadequacy for another; a sort of patching and plugging poor old dental relics with cement and gold and porcelain paste; what was really needed was a new set of teeth. That is to say, a.NEW ALPHABET.  [ See G.B. Shaw on same subject ]  [Twain]

The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught. In this it is like all other alphabets except one--the phonographic. This is the only competent alphabet in the world. It can spell and correctly pronounce any word in our language.

Twain is right in one respect, the reform has to start with the alphabet.  It probably doesnt have to be a completely phonographic alphabet although this is certainly possible. A phonographic alphabaet would have to have 40 or more characters and such augmentations of the characters set have not been popular in the past.  One can approach the ideal with a 26 letter alphabet with a few digraphs.  There do not  have to be new digraphs just the consistent application of the old ones [ch, sh, th].

Ellis' Glossic and New Spelling came out a few years after Twain penned this comment.  The critique still applies.  New Spelling is not alphabetic unless one considers its digraphs to be new letters.  In Spanglish, all letters including those in digraphs are pronounced.  [h]  and letters following an apostrophe can be considered exceptions. [h] is the marker the distinguished c from ch sounds and s from sh sounds.   The apostrophe changes all vowels to schwa:  'a, 'e, and 'u are all  pronounced [uh].  [ae] is another exception because it refers to the sound in ash which is midway between ah and eh rather than a blend of these two sounds. 

To distinguish long and short sounds, a. i. o. and u. can be used for the checked or short vowels.  o. is somewhere between a short version of aa and awe.  In Britain it is a short awe, in the U.S. it is a short aa.  [see the Romanji table] c'AN urban  could also be 'urb'an or 'erb'an [See Is stress phonemic?  r'ecord rec'ord]
A Phonemic Alphabet for English
a fonemic aelfabet for english

A ago	AA caar	AE A. aent	AI 'Y eye	A.U aut	B bad	C city	Ch ech
D dab	E el	EY they	F fife	G gwd	H hat	I. ill	I II eel
J jaj	K kik	L litl	M mam	N NG nan	O. pot	O AO awe	OW owe
OY oyl	P paip	Q quik	R* rir hr	S sis	Shsy shel	T tot	ThDh the
U. W hwk	U UU hup	V vaet	W* wow	X ox	Y*yu very	Z zip	ZyZh lizyur

consonants-white, semivowels-gray, vowels-shaded, long vowels-rose
Mispelled traditional words are italicized, eye-ay, out-aut, fife-faif, good-gwd

REFERENCES

• bibliography

• http://www.truespel.com
• Spelling Links:  http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/sitemap-l.html
• Bad arguments against spelling reform   -  Barnsdale
• A brief history of English spelling from D.G. Skragg (1974)
• Phoneme inventory article - How many phonemes in English?
• wordlist - Old English Dictionary  http://www.mun.ca/Ansaxdat/vocab/wordlist.html

• http://www.egroups.com/files/saundspel - after registering, click on Saxon-Spanglish
• members.fortunecity/rapidrytr/saxon-spanglish.htm   with two Graphics - hard to get to

SAUND SPELING
Saxon Spanglish is a spelling pronunciation guide based on the restoration of the historic Saxon alphabet which serves as an initial teaching alphabet. It provides a simple diaphonic way to transcribe the saunds of English speech using the familiar keyboard letters - aka the ASCII character set..
 
 

 Visit these related pages on applied linguistics and rationalized spelling

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Unigraf spelling ring	Subscribe to saundspel Powered by www.egroups.com		int'l spelling day