I definitely think diacritics are the best way to go. It doesn't rock the boat two hard, but still gives necessary distinction. Plus, there is like ten diacritics for each vowel letter, so you would not have to change the underlying basic Latin spelling, while still distinguishing different vowels.
On the other hand, you wouldn't want English to be overflowing with them. I think it'd make sense for it to have, like, 3, maybe 4 diacritics tops. Many languages make do with less.
@@javierlatorre480 I strongly agree. Having the option to ignore the diacritics is very important. I'd go for a diacritic for long vowels, probably a macron (i = ɪ, ī = aɪ, u = ʌ, ū = u:), then a diacritic for gliding, probably an umlaut (must = mʌst, müsic = mjusɪk), and finally, like in Klein's vid, a schwa diacritic, probably a circle (åbout = əbaʊt, allo̊phōne = æləfoʊn, ālie̊n = eɪljən).
@@abarette_ Me personally I would try to have as many of those as possible be indicated either by the stress or by the surrounding environment (so silent E for the long vowels and the schwa stays unwritten), and the ones that just can't be represented that way be given diacritics.
@@javierlatorre480 honestly, I know absolutely nothing about stress because I'm ESL and my first language has no phonemic stress, so I don't tend to notice the difference, ever I'm not sure of how valuable it would be to write it down, though I know many languages (namely español) do this. Stress miiiight be very dialect-reliant, too.
@@abarette_ For English, surprisingly little. Stress is very consistent across English's dialects and is often very important in distinguishing words. It's also more noticeable in English because it directly affects the quality of the vowels, as opposed to Spanish whose vowels remain the same whether they're stressed or not.
things that are often forgotten in spelling reforms - other accents exist - making words etymologically related look so - making words easy and familiar to read - schwa and schwi challenges - the "eye" sound - the "book" sound - schwa - hard and soft g
digraphs i'm considering for book/foot vowel - ui (is in between u and i, would make wuimen and wimmen more related looking, but "suit" looks confusing) - iu (also because looks like u and i, but digraph doesn't exist in english, and it looks like "ew", so also confusing) - oo (is vowel in foot and soot and look, but oo is very much associated with the vowel in boot and toot and kook instead) - uu (it's related to the strut vowel, but is not the vowel in vacuum or continuum either) - uo (combination of above two, but confusing because of words like "duo") - u, next letter is doubled (probably most intuitive, lukk vs luck vs Luke, but makes wummen ambiguous between foot and strut vowels)
ok now i have two better ideas: one that makes sense and one that is weird - "a" , "e", "i", "o", "u", and "y" have short and long forms. what if that's the same for "oo"? just like all the rest of the short vowels, it's checked, while the long one is a diphthong. so "book" vs "kooke", woman is "woomman", look stays the same - "w" and "oo" have no minimal pairs, since w only occurs before a vowel while oo only occurs before a consonant. so we could spell book "bwk", woman "wwman", wool "wwl", and bush "bwsh". it looks much weirder and kinda like uwu but it is KIND of intuitive
Other things to comment too: - You have to remove all ambiguity the other one had and not to add more (Imagine making something worse bruh) - You have to make the reform look natural to the native speakers and don't think it's meant for another language. - You have to make the reform in a way that native speakers can see it and easily understand it or take a little bit of effort to read it perfectly (Conservative people are the ones that are more affected by this) (Personal mine) You don't need to make all words etymologically related to each-other, but to mix both phonetically and etymologically words, of course, this last ones for the less used ones. - You have to be able to Write it in a Keyboard (Very important in case you want to add all those nice looking diacritics you know?) - It has to be balanced in a way that you find the good spot between spoken's spelling: The closer the words are from what is spoken they are shorter, but they need more time to learn how to read it and words that are far from what is spoken tends to be larger, being difficult to also read because you don't have so much time to differentiate which is from the other (For example those funny videos trying to cut letters from the alphabet and trying to make words with less than 15 letters) - EXTRA - (In case you want to add a new script) - Letters have to be familiar to the ones from the old Script (Western). - Letters have to be easy to write (Hand). - There has to be at least more than 3 types of fonts so people can start writting with it on their keyboard. - The script needs a balance between the design of letters, in a way that letters doesn't look completely different from each other (Deseret) or too similiar so you can't easily determinate which one is (Shavian). - Respect the handwritting of native speakers around the ages. Making the script only have Print letters will remove all the fashion, style and speed of Cursive, and making it only have Cursive letters will make it difficult for people who can only write in print (Which is the major % sadly) - Cursive and Print versions will need to be closer to each other so people don't confuse them (For example what happens with English Cursive now with G, I, Q, S, T or Z and many more)
@@m4rloncha here's my prototype, using the north wind and the sun text: "*" indicates "in practice i'd make no change, because no one will change the most common words" The North Wind and the Sun wer* disputing which woz* the strong'er, when a traveller came along wrapp'd in a warm cloak. Thay* agree'd that the won* hoo* first succeed'd in making the traveller take his cloak off shood* be consider'd strong'er than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he cood*, but the more he blew the more clossely did the traveller fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immeediatly the traveller took off his cloak. And so the North Wind woz* obliged to confess that the Sun woz* the strong'er of the twoo.
@@m4rloncha and using "the chaos": Dearest creature in Cre'ation, Studdying Ingglish pronunciation, I will teache yoo* in my verse Sounds like corpse, _corps,_ horse and worse. It will keep you, Susy, bizzy, Make your head with heate gro dizzy; Tear in ie* your dress you'll teare. So shall I! Oh, heare my prayre, Pray, console your loving po'et, Make my coat look new, dear, so it? Just compare hart, beerd and herd, Dies and di'et, lord and word, S(w)ord and sward, retain and Brittan, (Minde the latter, how it's written!) Made has not the sound of bad(d)e, Seh-sed, pay-pay'd, lay'd, but plad.
From NY, can confirm that the digraphs "aw/au/al" have a completely separate sound from that in father. Keep the resistance strong unmerged cot-caught bros ✊
An underrated spelling reform idea that I rarely see implemented is indicating stress. Stress in English is largely unpredictable. While it wasn't during Old English, which pretty much always followed the Germanic stress rule of stressing the first syllable of the root word, it became unpredictable after the huge influx of loanwords from other languages. In addition, some native words ended up shifting their stress (like how eleven was originally stressed on the first syllable, and not the second.) The solution is then to indicate stress, preferably with an acute or grave accent. Of course, if other diacritics are used (like for long vowels), this means that stressed vowels with diacritics would be written with double diacritics, which I personally hate the aesthetic of. The solution is to have different diacritics to represent short stressed vowels, long unstressed vowels, and long stressed vowels. A solution I like is to use is a grave for short stress, an acute for long vowels, and a circumflex for stressed long vowels since the circumflex looks like a combination of the two. In general, stress is either completely left out of spelling reform proposals, or they explicitly say they don't include it. To be fair, it's not super important, but it is phonemic like distinguishing récord and recórd, and stress also varies between dialects sometimes. That being said, I still think that indicating stress should be taken more seriously in spelling reform ideas.
The problem is the Latin alphabet doesn't fit English. The only way to fix it is a new alphabet designed for modern English. At that point, you might as well have a letter for every sound in the language and adopt the concepts used in Korean Hangul, using individual letters to build a character representing a syllable. Both concepts would shorten the length of written communication. But I don't see people adopting this any more than they would adopt diacritics. People are too stuck in what they are used to and don't want to use the extra energy to learn new things when they already spend so much energy on surviving.
Idk if there are any other Vlogging Thru History fans on here but this is a great channel and I implore any VTH fans here to recommend he do a review of this channel, it would be awesome to see it get the bump up in exposure that it deserves and VTH is great at highlighting small channels like this and getting more eyes on their work and more subs to their channel
Helper letters would be a lot more typing friendly than diacritics. Ones that don’t have a sound 🔈 themselves but instead do the same consistent modifying diacritics like the umlaut does. Plus you can have just one ☝️ letter to deal with all the rare miscellaneous phonemes by sticking it with others.
Most people really tend to get lost in the phonetics of the whole thing, forgetting that a big factor in a successful spelling reform is legibility, particularly for people who were using the previous system. Completely overhauling English in an attempt to have one letter per sound and one sound per letter will ALWAYS result in an even messier clutter than English already has, one which doesn't even have the existing upsides of the current orthography, since they keep taking JUST the sounds and none of the grammar. The best thing that can be done for an English spelling reform in my opinion is to track English's phonological history back to Middle English, where spellings were just beginning to crystallise, and iron out any inconsistencies in the spelling along the way. This way you have a system that not only resembles current Modern English, but that can be used by the largest amount of dialects possible as every split and change is accounted for. It'd also get rid of homographs, which are in my opinion the most annoying part of English orthography.
for schwa I more or less copied the homework of Romanian and French, for the letter e, "e" is pronounced as a schwa unless otherwise specified with a grave mark for the lower e sound "ɛ" or an accute to represent the higher e sound "e", iirc there are slight exceptions though. then other than e representing the schwa the letters u, o, and a can all also represent the schwa but only if they have a breve above them. "ŭ" "ŏ" "ă", in romanian the only letter with breve is "a". It's been a while since I looked at my reform but I do remember those parts, they generally allow a greater resemblance to the original word without being too difficult either. For dipthongs I think I either used digraphs or a macron, so "ay" would be I with macron "ī" "ey" would be a with macron "ā", and "au" would be spelled as au, stuff like that. For the dzh sound, I either use the digraph dj and g with dot above for the "soft g" iirc. The dental fricatives I use either the "th" and "dh" digraphs, or I use the letters thorn and eth. Overall it's something I haven't touched in a while because realistically the only spelling reform that can actually come to fruition is for non-standard spelling to become popular, like how people spell "you" as "u", or "though" as "tho", a complete overhaul is unlikely to be accepted because quite frankly english speakers don't want to be forced to do anything, but will gladly accept something if they like it, which is highly subjective. Who knows, maybe somebody manages to create a reform so amazingly good that english speakers can't keep their hands off it, but until then I think just treating it as experimentation and light implementation is the best route to making sustained change over time. One reform idea I have been thinking of using is to use the letter yogh actually, it did in *some* areas get used to represent the "gh" sound that we used to have, kinda like the ch sound in loch or the ch sound in the german language. Basically, my idea is to implement yogh wherever the gh digraph is, that way we don't even need to think of the letter g when looking at it, it would also provide a letter to take the place of gh where otherwise dropping it might make it look too small and mess with the really really fragile spelling system we already have. Examples, Liȝt, Niȝt, Friȝt, thoȝ, thruȝ, couȝ, it isn't the prettiest tbh, I think it should probably only be used sparingly but could be an interesting usage, I think that if anything gh at the end of words if unpronounced should just be dropped, and then if pronounced we'll know it's pronounced as "f" like in cough or tough, couȝ touȝ, although that would present issue with words like lift, and stuff if people think that ȝ should always be pronounced as /f/. I think that "gh" needs to get sorted somehow tho. But anyways, if we drop the "gh" ending when unpronounced, use yogh to represent /f/ if it is, and before the end of the word don't pronounce it, the example words would look more like: Light/Liȝt, Night/Niȝt, Fright/Friȝt, Though/Tho, Through/Thru, Cough/Couȝ. I feel english speakers on one hand may be a bit unhappy with people using a new letter, as has been shown with people occasionally using thorn and eth, but alternatively people could also just find it to be kinda fun. I think what would be important is to make sure that such changes have easy to understand rules behind them. I think personally that using thorn exclusively is really stupid, because it ultimately is just to look quirky, which is fine in a way, but as a "spelling improvement" it has nothing above th other than being one less letter (which we would need a dedicated key for), which is why I think personally that if we were to bring back thorn, it would HAVE to be paired with eth imo to be actually beneficial in any way, although I am a more positive advocate for the "dh" digraph instead of eth+thorn. Dhis is what it would look like basically, dhe "th" digraph replaced with a "dh" when it is dhe voiced dental fricative radher dhan dhe unvoiced counterpart. It looks a little bit ugly but I hope dhat is just because it's new-ish to my eyes and not because it's just really really ugly and unsiȝtly lol
I really like this video, it displays some of the challenges of making an English spelling reform. Many people think that the main hurdles are convincing stake holders that a reform is necessary and making reformers agree with each other. The thing is, even if one person singlehandedly reforms this orthography, it's still vrey difficult because every choice you make messes with the system and you have to either deal with the consequences in some way or scrap the idea in the first place. I have a couple things to say though. 1) We should represent every dialect we can The original ⟨e⟩ letter in ⟨reform⟩ only works just fine etymologically. I hope I'm not wrong, but you seem to have the weak vowel merger, so the ⟨e⟩ represents /ə/ for you. But if we consider English as a global system, there are dialects that distinguish between /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unstressed positions. This is my personal opinion, but English orthography should be representative of most, if not all, historical dialects. This is the same reason why I don't think you can spell ⟨earth⟩ as ⟨irth⟩. In Scotland, they don't have the nurse mergers, so the say "fern" as /fern/ and it's diffent from, say the ⟨ir⟩ in ⟨bird⟩. 2) If we want a reform, we have to accept that interrelatedness might be obscured I think that for a reform to be put forth, we need to accept that some etyomological interconnectivity will be lost. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but with a lot of research this loss can be minimised, but it's impossible to 100% avoid it. I've made some attempts at a reform: ⟨oblidged⟩ and ⟨obligation⟩ are ⟨oblîġd⟩ and ⟨obligation⟩ (they are visibly related), but ⟨reform⟩ is ⟨riform⟩ and ⟨reformation⟩ is ⟨refformation⟩, and ⟨should⟩ is ⟨shùd⟩ with no ⟨l⟩. In the case of ⟨reform⟩ there is ambiguity on whether that ⟨e⟩ should represent /ɪ/ or /ə/ here (in a pan-dialectal perspective). If we want to remove at least some of such ambiguities, we'll have to make decisions that are sometimes going to mess with morphological/lexical interconnectivity. 3) ⟨vv⟩ vs ⟨w⟩ One way you could go about the ⟨vv⟩ vs ⟨w⟩ confusion is to make an inconsistent rule which already exists consistent: if a vowel is followed by ⟨v⟩ (I would say by ⟨z⟩ too), it's short. If it's long, one could use a diacritic (I used a circumflex). So ⟨heaven⟩ is ⟨heven⟩ and ⟨even⟩ is ⟨êven⟩. Double v and double z are historically not that productive in English orthography, so I figured it might be good to avoid them.
I disagree with the point about etymology. Why would the average English speaker need to know about the etymological link between shall and should? I never even noticed that's the reason for the L being there. "Shüd" would be way easier to remember. Plus English already has plenty of words that share etymology but are spelt completely different from each other
Doubling consonants to make short vowels is an excellent idea for English given that it is a Germanic language. One of the benefits of writing English in runes is that more vowels are distinguished.
Working with consontants will not make the vowels randomly change (Except you make some rule tho). Btw... given my lack of knowledge in terms of Runes (Which have been used for more languages than just English) I don't think 7 symbols from the Runic alphabet can represent (At least) 12 vowels (And if you add dipthongs it can became to 20 and not even counting semi-vowels too) of Modern English. Neither 16 symbols for at least 22 consonants (Some runic symbols can't even distinguish between some consonants, just like ᚠ and ᚦ) It never evolved enough to became standardized in the way it's written or which symbols make what so... I think it has less beneficts than drawbacks.
@@m4rloncha We had thought that the 12th century monk Orm made the rule that a doubled consonant indicates that the vowel before it is short however we've since discovered there's some evidence of that practice appearing prior to his time. The Anglo-Saxon fuþorc could arguably have up to 11 vowel runes (depending on how you count them). But the trick in creating a working system is to remember that it is not necessary to distinguish all sounds, only those which hearers care about distinguishing. For example, ᚦ is perfectly good for both hard & soft "th" sounds because native English speakers have never cared about distinguishing them. As there are at least 22 consonant runes in the Anglo-Saxon rune row, you may find it's not all that hard to learn Modern English Futhorc. The problem of distinguishing /v/ from /f/ is covered reasonably early in our Touchstone series.
@@LearnRunes Okay, that explained a lot, but what's the difference between, well, let's use BETWEEN: We all know those "ee" sound like "/iː/" so it's a good example for this: We could use: "between" or "betwwen". Which one do you think people (Native or not) will think the sound is different? The w or the e? From what I (Subjetive) could think, most probably I'll tell you the "w", because it takes more space and it should make a different sound if it's double. But even more, with less space for the "e" it looks like it's shorter, so it may be /ɪ/. That's why for example in that word we see one "e" and then two for a different sound. Seems logical, right? Well, English doesn't have that rule, so there are words like: "abstemiously" which has up to 3 /iː/'s!! /əbˈstiːmiːəsliː/ If you want to use "Double consonants, short vowel" it will look like: "absttemmiouslly". But if we use double vowels it will look like: "absteemiiouslyy". Of course, it doesn't look right because they use 3 letters for one sound, if we use "ee" for /iː/ it will just look like: "absteemeeouslee". Which makes a total of 4 vowels shown but 2 in phonology! My suggestion will be to use (For example) double consonants for vowels that aren't "e" and double vowels when it's "e" in the original, like this: "absteemmiouslly". But with any of those ways, the word will be longer by 3 letters! (And I'm not even counting "ou" which is a single schwa /ə/). Oh, and to finish: How do you pronounce "Rotherhithe"? Roθerhiθe? Roðerhiðe? Maybe... Roðerhiθe? or Roθerhiðe? How can an English native speaker pronounce this famous bridge in GB? Is there a rule we could know? For example words that end with "the" are /θ/? No, even "The" itself is /ð/. Well, at least words that start with it should be /ð/! "Theatre" /θ/... Yeah, I don't think it's easy for anybody to know when "th" is one or another. Because some people didn't do it at a time where there were no rules that doesn't mean you have to do the same.
@m4rloncha You seem quite confused. Is English not your native language? The word "abstemiously" is the kind of word one might learn in a language course but it's rarely used by most native speakers. As such, it would be a poor example even if you weren't applying the rules incorrectly. The IPA symbol /ː/ is used to indicate a long vowel. As the rule regarding doubled consonants in English applies to short vowels, the examples you have given are completely irrelevant. More importantly, the rule is that a doubled consonant indicates that the vowel BEFORE it is short. That is, a vowel preceding a doubled consonant is short. You have done the total opposite by doubling the consonants before long vowels. If you're still confused, go read about how Orm applied the rule himself. In regards to Rotherhithe, I would pronounce it the way locals say to because I have no desire to create a disturbance and language is basically oral. If one does not know how to pronounce a word, a quick search online will reveal the local way, but in a worst case situation one should ask someone who does know how, like a local. Writing is only intended to indicate sound insofar as native speakers care about distinguishing differences. English speakers have never cared about distinguishing the hard and soft forms of ᚦ. It is disrespectful to force such a distinction upon native speakers because it is a form of cultural imperialism.
@@LearnRunes I already know "Abstemiously" isn't a common word, but it is a valid word to use even if it's not the norm. But right! Let's give you more examples: "Previous" (/ˈpriː.viː.əs/), "Media" (/ˈmiː.diː.ə/), "Senior" (/ˈsiː.niː.ə/)/( /ˈsiːn.jɚr/), "Easy" (/ˈiː.ziː/), "Recently" (/ˈriː.sənt.liː/), "Weekly" (/ˈwiː.kliː/) and "Medium" (/ˈmiː.diː.əm/). So we can learn from this examples that we could agree they are quite common and: 1) None of this words have a double consonant to showcase the sound /iː/, previous or prior this sound. 2) (e / i / ea / y / ee) can equal /iː/ in different cases and for so there's is no easy way to know for a non-native or native speaker learning the language which letter of those make that sound in any given situation. 3) Written consonants doesn't affect spoken vowels. Continuing... /ː/ doesn't represent a "Long vowel" because if that were the case we would see the vowel extending like "/ee/", the thing is that the symbol represents the vowels that doesn't stop inmediately but let a little bit of air before continuing the sentence. That's why for example in Japanese you can see this text but inside you can hear literally the same "o" but some are pronounced a little bit further: "鳳凰ほうおうを追おおう" (/[hoː.oː.o.o.oː]/) That doesn't happen in English, where you cannot say: /ɪː/ or /i/, not because English speakers can't make it (Which they could easily), but on they daily speak they pronounce this different vowels in a short and long way. And yes, some English speakers could pronounce some words differently (As we have seen before), but the rule is that /i/ is elongated and /ɪ/ don't (I could follow this examples in more vowels). Aaaand, to finish up... What do you call "Locals?" the ones living one kilometer apart from that place? The same city? The same state? The same country? The same dialect? I've taken that word because it's one of Many examples of Nouns that are differently pronounced from place to place. Even in Internet you'll see people don't call it just one way. And is that Wrong? Are their English bad even when they are clearly Natives? Of course not, the problem is that as English speakers hasn't decided to change or differentiate the "TH" combination for 2 sou- wait, is there more? Yes! TH can be also be pronounced as /t/ as in: "Thailand" or "Thomas" or like /th/ as in: "Anthill", "Goatherd", "Lighthouse" or "Pothead". So now the problem will be that to learn how to pronounce a word I have to learn others too?! It's not like I'm forcing a "Distinction" but to make the spelling easier for both, Non-Natives and Native speakers, such as (Probably) you, to learn how to pronounce stuff without someone telling you "No, you see? Because it has been like this in a while and that's why you have to pronounce this way even if it looks the same as this other word" just like you've proven saying you cannot even tell by yourself how to pronounce a simple place. Btw, /θ/ is one of the less used sounds in the English language, making a distinction will not affect as much as you may think (The same with /ʒ/).
Just remove the unhelpful silent letters (e.g. the b in lamb) and unhelpful single phoneme letter clusters (e.g The dge in edge) then leave the other changes for the next generation.
i think what's interesting is that, listening to your criticisms, it's very clear that your idea of an english spelling reform is VERY DIFFERENT from many other people's spelling reform i'd say the "let's see YOU take a crack at it!" line, but that's not really fun and mature, is it what i observed is that other people's spelling reforms try to remove ambiguity and be intuitive, while you're going full intuition. i'd like to think that many reformers try to put english learners in mind, so they do things like remove c, because how would a learner know if "lace" is pronounced /leɪk/ or /leɪs/ if is both /k/ and /s/? 2:47 the way you described as being perfect for /i:/, /ɪ/, and /ɛ/ in the word "reform(ation)" really hints that you don't think about inconsistencies between sound and letter, and just going full intuition. at a quick glance, i would've almost pronounced "reformation" as /ɹiː.fɔ˞.ˈmeɪ.ʃn̩/. how would you stop me from pronouncing it that way if not for respelling the word and breaking the etymology conservation? as you mentioned in 5:25, it really shows how hard it is to make an english spelling reform in which everyone agrees upon.
an interesting thing is that the world might already be making minor spelling reforms of some words subconsciously "through" being respelled as "thru" in "drive thru" and even the word "doughnut", commonly spelt as "donut" people mix up "your" and "you're" all the time, yet hypercasual typists go by fine respelling both words as "ur"
1. Easy to learn for kids. 2. High efficiency 3. Transitioning is hard, so make it the last time we need to do it. That means, go all the way. 4. Direct connection between graphemes and phonemes. 5. Maintain compatibility with cursive writing. 6. No messy diacritics or hard to write glyphs. Remember the hen scratching on your professor's handwritten notes and don't make that worse! That's why 7M is the way to go.
7M Phonemic Alphabet: [uppercase]: H, U, Ŋ, G, I, N, V, ᐱ, ⴳ D, W, E, Ћ, Z, R, P, T K, L, Q, F, S, M, A, X Y, O, J, ᖶ,Ђ, B, Ů, C and Ɂ (glottal stop) [lower case]: h, u, ŋ, g, i, n, v, ʌ, ⴳ d, w, ε, ћ, z, r, p, t k, l, q, f, s, m, a, x y, o, j, e, ѣ, b, ů, c and ɂ (glottal stop) 7M to IPA to Current English Table: 7M | IPA | Current English h | h | hat, [h]at u | ə | mud, m[u]d ŋ | ŋ | sing, si[ng] g | g | get, [g]et i | ɪ | sit, s[i]t n | n | nap, [n]ap v | v | very, [v]ery ʌ | ɑ | not, n[o]t ⴳ | ʒ | measure, mea[s]ure -------------------------------------------------------- d | d | dot, [d]ot w | w | wet, [w]et ε | i | feet, f[ee]t ћ | ð | smooth, smoo[th] z | z | zip, [z]ip r | ɹ | dirt, d[ir]t p | p | pet, [p]et t | t | tub, [t]ub -------------------------------------------------------- k | k | kite, [k]ite l | l | little, [l]itt[le]* q | u | loop, l[oo]p f | f | fig, [f]ig s | s | sit, [s]it m | m | man, [m]an a | æ | cat, c[a]t x | ʃ | dish, di[sh] -------------------------------------------------------- y | j | yellow, [y]ellow o | o̞ | note, n[o]te j | d͡ʒ | judge, [j]u[dg]e e | e | get, g[e]t ѣ | θ | tooth, too[th] b | b | bed, [b]ed ů | ʊ | put, p[u]t c | t͡ʃ | chat, [ch]at and ɂ (glottal stop) crc = church *The letter /L/ represents both a consonant form & a vowel form. Ten pure vowels [no diphthongs]: 7M(U I Λ E R Q A O ᖶ Ů u i ʌ ε r q a o e ů) IPA(ə ɪ ɑ i [ɹ] u æ o̞ e ʊ) 2 additional vowels with no glyphs Dark L /ɫ/ and raised /æ/ This IPA nuttiness will clearly not work for everyday handwriting: ʊ, d͡ʒ, t͡ʃ, o̞, æ, ð, ʒ, ə, ɪ, ɚ
It is impossible to change spelling only unless we also change the words, example: row - to row a boat, and row - to have an argument have 2 differing sounds and thus their spelling can be changed. But, there words ‘there’ and ‘their’ have same Sound. So, how does one deal with their fonetik speling. I prefer to create a whole new Global language which does not duplicate pronunciation or spelling, but has distinct and unique words for each meaning. I have developed such a language already but I am realistic enough to know it will never eventuate. It is a losing battle
@@jacobjohnson8069 yes. All too often. But reading a language differs from speaking that same language. Example: two, to, too. Pronunciation of circle, concern, concur, sauce…. The C is pronounced differently in each occasion. When we ‘speak’, the spelling of the words we speak do not come into our heads. English spelling is not based on the Sound of the words we speak, and nor is it based on the meaning of the words we speak. Of, and off. Both spelled with ‘f’ but one is pronounced with a ‘V’. Yes. I prefer to create a new global language rather than retain the stupid english language, context or not. Alternatively we can all have lessons in telepathy, which would eliminate this english language farce completely.🥰
@@anitaheubel3228 basing words off of context and getting rid of silent letters or letter pairs that together make sounds that we already have like ER, IR, UR, AR, EE, EA, PH, GH, CK, AI, and sets of 3 letters like GHT, and extending the magic E rule to consonants would go farr in fixing the written word and it wouldn't change the pronunciation.
@@anitaheubel3228YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME! In all my years listening to English speakers I did not notice that "of" was pronounced like "ov". English truly has the worst spelling ever.
Can't we just make the quick and easy change of replacing "ph" with "f"? The only problem I see is giving the people of Phoenix a difficult choice to change to Foenix or not.
@@javierlatorre480 The same reason for all spelling reforms: simplification. People learning English currently need to learn two graphemes for one sound (three actually if you count the "ugh" in words like "cough" and "laugh"). Having just one saves class room time. And by having one letter for the sound instead of two or three, words become shorter, saving paper, ink, hard drive space, and making literature easier to read.
@@gamma_nerdI just found your channel today and I watched every video, love your editing and presentation style and the diversity of your knowledge base and interests, very curious what you're majoring in, would be cool to see you short video introducing yourself and giving us a background on what you're studying and what other subjects you're into
@@gamma_nerd I feel ya on the anonymity part but you don't have to reveal any details about your personal life or anything like that, it would just be cool to hear about your favorite areas of study and your academic interests
@@xp8969 Thanks man! I actually put a poll up asking if folks would want a video like that and the "yes" option is currently losing, so make your voice heard if you want the vid! Also thanks for all the comments and support on my videos. Maybe we can keep in touch somehow and talk about what would be good for my channel moving forward?
Why does Timmy the first grader, spell 'was' w-u-z? Because he's smart. It's the adults who are stupid. He sounded it out. A fully corrected spelling system facilitates that to the highest degree possible by providing a single dedicated letter to each speech sound - one phoneme per glyph and one glyph per phoneme - direct connect! How do you spell 'was' using 7M? W-U-Z! We got you Timmy. We gotchu with 'kat' as well! 7M gonnu shorten your public schooling by two years.
@@LearnRunes Look how French operates, for instance. It has such a massive amount of homophones that it pays to distinguish between them all in writing.
@@javierlatorre480 French is prescriptivist language to the point where its governing bodies actively enforce prejudices against minorities. English has always been a descriptivist language where our spelling is meant to depict the speech of the people.
@@stegotyranno4206 People already write in slang according to local dialects, not only their own but others too. While having some standards can aid communication, those standards need not be so inflexible that they entirely obfuscate local pronunciations. We already see this in simple words like mum/mom.
Words in the past tense ending in ed, where the E isn't pronounced should change to ending with a K. Like the informal spelling of wrecked being rekt. "He workt for the company and urgd evrywun to do their due diligence.
That would make the written form, which is the main teaching form more confusing. Though you could use a contraction symbol like work’d and people would get it.
I definitely think diacritics are the best way to go. It doesn't rock the boat two hard, but still gives necessary distinction. Plus, there is like ten diacritics for each vowel letter, so you would not have to change the underlying basic Latin spelling, while still distinguishing different vowels.
On the other hand, you wouldn't want English to be overflowing with them. I think it'd make sense for it to have, like, 3, maybe 4 diacritics tops. Many languages make do with less.
@@javierlatorre480 I strongly agree. Having the option to ignore the diacritics is very important.
I'd go for a diacritic for long vowels, probably a macron (i = ɪ, ī = aɪ, u = ʌ, ū = u:),
then a diacritic for gliding, probably an umlaut (must = mʌst, müsic = mjusɪk),
and finally, like in Klein's vid, a schwa diacritic, probably a circle (åbout = əbaʊt, allo̊phōne = æləfoʊn, ālie̊n = eɪljən).
@@abarette_ Me personally I would try to have as many of those as possible be indicated either by the stress or by the surrounding environment (so silent E for the long vowels and the schwa stays unwritten), and the ones that just can't be represented that way be given diacritics.
@@javierlatorre480 honestly, I know absolutely nothing about stress because I'm ESL and my first language has no phonemic stress, so I don't tend to notice the difference, ever
I'm not sure of how valuable it would be to write it down, though I know many languages (namely español) do this.
Stress miiiight be very dialect-reliant, too.
@@abarette_ For English, surprisingly little. Stress is very consistent across English's dialects and is often very important in distinguishing words. It's also more noticeable in English because it directly affects the quality of the vowels, as opposed to Spanish whose vowels remain the same whether they're stressed or not.
things that are often forgotten in spelling reforms
- other accents exist
- making words etymologically related look so
- making words easy and familiar to read
- schwa and schwi
challenges
- the "eye" sound
- the "book" sound
- schwa
- hard and soft g
digraphs i'm considering for book/foot vowel
- ui (is in between u and i, would make wuimen and wimmen more related looking, but "suit" looks confusing)
- iu (also because looks like u and i, but digraph doesn't exist in english, and it looks like "ew", so also confusing)
- oo (is vowel in foot and soot and look, but oo is very much associated with the vowel in boot and toot and kook instead)
- uu (it's related to the strut vowel, but is not the vowel in vacuum or continuum either)
- uo (combination of above two, but confusing because of words like "duo")
- u, next letter is doubled (probably most intuitive, lukk vs luck vs Luke, but makes wummen ambiguous between foot and strut vowels)
ok now i have two better ideas: one that makes sense and one that is weird
- "a" , "e", "i", "o", "u", and "y" have short and long forms. what if that's the same for "oo"? just like all the rest of the short vowels, it's checked, while the long one is a diphthong. so "book" vs "kooke", woman is "woomman", look stays the same
- "w" and "oo" have no minimal pairs, since w only occurs before a vowel while oo only occurs before a consonant. so we could spell book "bwk", woman "wwman", wool "wwl", and bush "bwsh". it looks much weirder and kinda like uwu but it is KIND of intuitive
Other things to comment too:
- You have to remove all ambiguity the other one had and not to add more (Imagine making something worse bruh)
- You have to make the reform look natural to the native speakers and don't think it's meant for another language.
- You have to make the reform in a way that native speakers can see it and easily understand it or take a little bit of effort to read it perfectly (Conservative people are the ones that are more affected by this)
(Personal mine) You don't need to make all words etymologically related to each-other, but to mix both phonetically and etymologically words, of course, this last ones for the less used ones.
- You have to be able to Write it in a Keyboard (Very important in case you want to add all those nice looking diacritics you know?)
- It has to be balanced in a way that you find the good spot between spoken's spelling: The closer the words are from what is spoken they are shorter, but they need more time to learn how to read it and words that are far from what is spoken tends to be larger, being difficult to also read because you don't have so much time to differentiate which is from the other (For example those funny videos trying to cut letters from the alphabet and trying to make words with less than 15 letters)
- EXTRA - (In case you want to add a new script)
- Letters have to be familiar to the ones from the old Script (Western).
- Letters have to be easy to write (Hand).
- There has to be at least more than 3 types of fonts so people can start writting with it on their keyboard.
- The script needs a balance between the design of letters, in a way that letters doesn't look completely different from each other (Deseret) or too similiar so you can't easily determinate which one is (Shavian).
- Respect the handwritting of native speakers around the ages. Making the script only have Print letters will remove all the fashion, style and speed of Cursive, and making it only have Cursive letters will make it difficult for people who can only write in print (Which is the major % sadly)
- Cursive and Print versions will need to be closer to each other so people don't confuse them (For example what happens with English Cursive now with G, I, Q, S, T or Z and many more)
@@m4rloncha
here's my prototype, using the north wind and the sun text:
"*" indicates "in practice i'd make no change, because no one will change the most common words"
The North Wind and the Sun wer* disputing which woz* the strong'er, when a traveller came along wrapp'd in a warm cloak.
Thay* agree'd that the won* hoo* first succeed'd in making the traveller take his cloak off shood* be consider'd strong'er than the other.
Then the North Wind blew as hard as he cood*, but the more he blew the more clossely did the traveller fold his cloak around him;
and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immeediatly the traveller took off his cloak.
And so the North Wind woz* obliged to confess that the Sun woz* the strong'er of the twoo.
@@m4rloncha
and using "the chaos":
Dearest creature in Cre'ation,
Studdying Ingglish pronunciation,
I will teache yoo* in my verse
Sounds like corpse, _corps,_ horse and worse.
It will keep you, Susy, bizzy,
Make your head with heate gro dizzy;
Tear in ie* your dress you'll teare.
So shall I! Oh, heare my prayre,
Pray, console your loving po'et,
Make my coat look new, dear, so it?
Just compare hart, beerd and herd,
Dies and di'et, lord and word,
S(w)ord and sward, retain and Brittan,
(Minde the latter, how it's written!)
Made has not the sound of bad(d)e,
Seh-sed, pay-pay'd, lay'd, but plad.
From NY, can confirm that the digraphs "aw/au/al" have a completely separate sound from that in father. Keep the resistance strong unmerged cot-caught bros ✊
An underrated spelling reform idea that I rarely see implemented is indicating stress.
Stress in English is largely unpredictable. While it wasn't during Old English, which pretty much always followed the Germanic stress rule of stressing the first syllable of the root word, it became unpredictable after the huge influx of loanwords from other languages. In addition, some native words ended up shifting their stress (like how eleven was originally stressed on the first syllable, and not the second.) The solution is then to indicate stress, preferably with an acute or grave accent. Of course, if other diacritics are used (like for long vowels), this means that stressed vowels with diacritics would be written with double diacritics, which I personally hate the aesthetic of. The solution is to have different diacritics to represent short stressed vowels, long unstressed vowels, and long stressed vowels. A solution I like is to use is a grave for short stress, an acute for long vowels, and a circumflex for stressed long vowels since the circumflex looks like a combination of the two. In general, stress is either completely left out of spelling reform proposals, or they explicitly say they don't include it. To be fair, it's not super important, but it is phonemic like distinguishing récord and recórd, and stress also varies between dialects sometimes. That being said, I still think that indicating stress should be taken more seriously in spelling reform ideas.
Agreed. Stress marking would go such a long way to identifying different vowels and not having to mark them with other diacritics.
The problem is the Latin alphabet doesn't fit English. The only way to fix it is a new alphabet designed for modern English. At that point, you might as well have a letter for every sound in the language and adopt the concepts used in Korean Hangul, using individual letters to build a character representing a syllable. Both concepts would shorten the length of written communication. But I don't see people adopting this any more than they would adopt diacritics. People are too stuck in what they are used to and don't want to use the extra energy to learn new things when they already spend so much energy on surviving.
Idk if there are any other Vlogging Thru History fans on here but this is a great channel and I implore any VTH fans here to recommend he do a review of this channel, it would be awesome to see it get the bump up in exposure that it deserves and VTH is great at highlighting small channels like this and getting more eyes on their work and more subs to their channel
Helper letters would be a lot more typing friendly than diacritics.
Ones that don’t have a sound 🔈 themselves but instead do the same consistent modifying diacritics like the umlaut does.
Plus you can have just one ☝️ letter to deal with all the rare miscellaneous phonemes by sticking it with others.
Most people really tend to get lost in the phonetics of the whole thing, forgetting that a big factor in a successful spelling reform is legibility, particularly for people who were using the previous system. Completely overhauling English in an attempt to have one letter per sound and one sound per letter will ALWAYS result in an even messier clutter than English already has, one which doesn't even have the existing upsides of the current orthography, since they keep taking JUST the sounds and none of the grammar.
The best thing that can be done for an English spelling reform in my opinion is to track English's phonological history back to Middle English, where spellings were just beginning to crystallise, and iron out any inconsistencies in the spelling along the way. This way you have a system that not only resembles current Modern English, but that can be used by the largest amount of dialects possible as every split and change is accounted for. It'd also get rid of homographs, which are in my opinion the most annoying part of English orthography.
At this point I'm convinced the only way Inglish spelling cood evver be chainged is if we aul just let peple doo whut they waunt
This video deserves more likes and views
I realized that letter U make two sounds lol. One is U as in FUN and a U in STUDENT
It also makes 2 more sounds, like in FUME and PUT.
Your channel deserves more attention brah, even if people can't agree it's still awesome how much work you put into your videos.
True, very true, I'm glad the algorithm is finally giving him some exposure, adding this reply to your comment to bump up his engagement #'s
for schwa I more or less copied the homework of Romanian and French, for the letter e, "e" is pronounced as a schwa unless otherwise specified with a grave mark for the lower e sound "ɛ" or an accute to represent the higher e sound "e", iirc there are slight exceptions though. then other than e representing the schwa the letters u, o, and a can all also represent the schwa but only if they have a breve above them. "ŭ" "ŏ" "ă", in romanian the only letter with breve is "a". It's been a while since I looked at my reform but I do remember those parts, they generally allow a greater resemblance to the original word without being too difficult either. For dipthongs I think I either used digraphs or a macron, so "ay" would be I with macron "ī" "ey" would be a with macron "ā", and "au" would be spelled as au, stuff like that. For the dzh sound, I either use the digraph dj and g with dot above for the "soft g" iirc. The dental fricatives I use either the "th" and "dh" digraphs, or I use the letters thorn and eth. Overall it's something I haven't touched in a while because realistically the only spelling reform that can actually come to fruition is for non-standard spelling to become popular, like how people spell "you" as "u", or "though" as "tho", a complete overhaul is unlikely to be accepted because quite frankly english speakers don't want to be forced to do anything, but will gladly accept something if they like it, which is highly subjective. Who knows, maybe somebody manages to create a reform so amazingly good that english speakers can't keep their hands off it, but until then I think just treating it as experimentation and light implementation is the best route to making sustained change over time.
One reform idea I have been thinking of using is to use the letter yogh actually, it did in *some* areas get used to represent the "gh" sound that we used to have, kinda like the ch sound in loch or the ch sound in the german language. Basically, my idea is to implement yogh wherever the gh digraph is, that way we don't even need to think of the letter g when looking at it, it would also provide a letter to take the place of gh where otherwise dropping it might make it look too small and mess with the really really fragile spelling system we already have. Examples, Liȝt, Niȝt, Friȝt, thoȝ, thruȝ, couȝ, it isn't the prettiest tbh, I think it should probably only be used sparingly but could be an interesting usage, I think that if anything gh at the end of words if unpronounced should just be dropped, and then if pronounced we'll know it's pronounced as "f" like in cough or tough, couȝ touȝ, although that would present issue with words like lift, and stuff if people think that ȝ should always be pronounced as /f/. I think that "gh" needs to get sorted somehow tho. But anyways, if we drop the "gh" ending when unpronounced, use yogh to represent /f/ if it is, and before the end of the word don't pronounce it, the example words would look more like:
Light/Liȝt, Night/Niȝt, Fright/Friȝt, Though/Tho, Through/Thru, Cough/Couȝ. I feel english speakers on one hand may be a bit unhappy with people using a new letter, as has been shown with people occasionally using thorn and eth, but alternatively people could also just find it to be kinda fun. I think what would be important is to make sure that such changes have easy to understand rules behind them. I think personally that using thorn exclusively is really stupid, because it ultimately is just to look quirky, which is fine in a way, but as a "spelling improvement" it has nothing above th other than being one less letter (which we would need a dedicated key for), which is why I think personally that if we were to bring back thorn, it would HAVE to be paired with eth imo to be actually beneficial in any way, although I am a more positive advocate for the "dh" digraph instead of eth+thorn. Dhis is what it would look like basically, dhe "th" digraph replaced with a "dh" when it is dhe voiced dental fricative radher dhan dhe unvoiced counterpart. It looks a little bit ugly but I hope dhat is just because it's new-ish to my eyes and not because it's just really really ugly and unsiȝtly lol
4:22 th... th... thy kingdom WHAT??
I really like this video, it displays some of the challenges of making an English spelling reform. Many people think that the main hurdles are convincing stake holders that a reform is necessary and making reformers agree with each other. The thing is, even if one person singlehandedly reforms this orthography, it's still vrey difficult because every choice you make messes with the system and you have to either deal with the consequences in some way or scrap the idea in the first place.
I have a couple things to say though.
1) We should represent every dialect we can
The original ⟨e⟩ letter in ⟨reform⟩ only works just fine etymologically. I hope I'm not wrong, but you seem to have the weak vowel merger, so the ⟨e⟩ represents /ə/ for you. But if we consider English as a global system, there are dialects that distinguish between /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unstressed positions. This is my personal opinion, but English orthography should be representative of most, if not all, historical dialects.
This is the same reason why I don't think you can spell ⟨earth⟩ as ⟨irth⟩. In Scotland, they don't have the nurse mergers, so the say "fern" as /fern/ and it's diffent from, say the ⟨ir⟩ in ⟨bird⟩.
2) If we want a reform, we have to accept that interrelatedness might be obscured
I think that for a reform to be put forth, we need to accept that some etyomological interconnectivity will be lost. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but with a lot of research this loss can be minimised, but it's impossible to 100% avoid it.
I've made some attempts at a reform: ⟨oblidged⟩ and ⟨obligation⟩ are ⟨oblîġd⟩ and ⟨obligation⟩ (they are visibly related), but ⟨reform⟩ is ⟨riform⟩ and ⟨reformation⟩ is ⟨refformation⟩, and ⟨should⟩ is ⟨shùd⟩ with no ⟨l⟩. In the case of ⟨reform⟩ there is ambiguity on whether that ⟨e⟩ should represent /ɪ/ or /ə/ here (in a pan-dialectal perspective). If we want to remove at least some of such ambiguities, we'll have to make decisions that are sometimes going to mess with morphological/lexical interconnectivity.
3) ⟨vv⟩ vs ⟨w⟩
One way you could go about the ⟨vv⟩ vs ⟨w⟩ confusion is to make an inconsistent rule which already exists consistent: if a vowel is followed by ⟨v⟩ (I would say by ⟨z⟩ too), it's short. If it's long, one could use a diacritic (I used a circumflex). So ⟨heaven⟩ is ⟨heven⟩ and ⟨even⟩ is ⟨êven⟩. Double v and double z are historically not that productive in English orthography, so I figured it might be good to avoid them.
Let Inglish spellings be desided by popular usage . Demmocractic spellings.
pretty sure the fun reform was supposed to be variable for different accents but i haven't watched jan misali in forever now
I disagree with the point about etymology. Why would the average English speaker need to know about the etymological link between shall and should? I never even noticed that's the reason for the L being there. "Shüd" would be way easier to remember. Plus English already has plenty of words that share etymology but are spelt completely different from each other
All decent points tbh. It really just depends on what you prioritize in orthography
Doubling consonants to make short vowels is an excellent idea for English given that it is a Germanic language.
One of the benefits of writing English in runes is that more vowels are distinguished.
Working with consontants will not make the vowels randomly change (Except you make some rule tho).
Btw... given my lack of knowledge in terms of Runes (Which have been used for more languages than just English) I don't think 7 symbols from the Runic alphabet can represent (At least) 12 vowels (And if you add dipthongs it can became to 20 and not even counting semi-vowels too) of Modern English.
Neither 16 symbols for at least 22 consonants (Some runic symbols can't even distinguish between some consonants, just like ᚠ and ᚦ)
It never evolved enough to became standardized in the way it's written or which symbols make what so... I think it has less beneficts than drawbacks.
@@m4rloncha We had thought that the 12th century monk Orm made the rule that a doubled consonant indicates that the vowel before it is short however we've since discovered there's some evidence of that practice appearing prior to his time.
The Anglo-Saxon fuþorc could arguably have up to 11 vowel runes (depending on how you count them). But the trick in creating a working system is to remember that it is not necessary to distinguish all sounds, only those which hearers care about distinguishing.
For example, ᚦ is perfectly good for both hard & soft "th" sounds because native English speakers have never cared about distinguishing them. As there are at least 22 consonant runes in the Anglo-Saxon rune row, you may find it's not all that hard to learn Modern English Futhorc. The problem of distinguishing /v/ from /f/ is covered reasonably early in our Touchstone series.
@@LearnRunes Okay, that explained a lot, but what's the difference between, well, let's use BETWEEN: We all know those "ee" sound like "/iː/" so it's a good example for this:
We could use: "between" or "betwwen".
Which one do you think people (Native or not) will think the sound is different? The w or the e? From what I (Subjetive) could think, most probably I'll tell you the "w", because it takes more space and it should make a different sound if it's double. But even more, with less space for the "e" it looks like it's shorter, so it may be /ɪ/.
That's why for example in that word we see one "e" and then two for a different sound. Seems logical, right?
Well, English doesn't have that rule, so there are words like: "abstemiously" which has up to 3 /iː/'s!! /əbˈstiːmiːəsliː/
If you want to use "Double consonants, short vowel" it will look like: "absttemmiouslly".
But if we use double vowels it will look like: "absteemiiouslyy". Of course, it doesn't look right because they use 3 letters for one sound, if we use "ee" for /iː/ it will just look like: "absteemeeouslee". Which makes a total of 4 vowels shown but 2 in phonology!
My suggestion will be to use (For example) double consonants for vowels that aren't "e" and double vowels when it's "e" in the original, like this: "absteemmiouslly". But with any of those ways, the word will be longer by 3 letters! (And I'm not even counting "ou" which is a single schwa /ə/).
Oh, and to finish: How do you pronounce "Rotherhithe"? Roθerhiθe? Roðerhiðe? Maybe... Roðerhiθe? or Roθerhiðe? How can an English native speaker pronounce this famous bridge in GB? Is there a rule we could know? For example words that end with "the" are /θ/? No, even "The" itself is /ð/. Well, at least words that start with it should be /ð/! "Theatre" /θ/...
Yeah, I don't think it's easy for anybody to know when "th" is one or another. Because some people didn't do it at a time where there were no rules that doesn't mean you have to do the same.
@m4rloncha You seem quite confused. Is English not your native language? The word "abstemiously" is the kind of word one might learn in a language course but it's rarely used by most native speakers. As such, it would be a poor example even if you weren't applying the rules incorrectly.
The IPA symbol /ː/ is used to indicate a long vowel. As the rule regarding doubled consonants in English applies to short vowels, the examples you have given are completely irrelevant. More importantly, the rule is that a doubled consonant indicates that the vowel BEFORE it is short. That is, a vowel preceding a doubled consonant is short. You have done the total opposite by doubling the consonants before long vowels. If you're still confused, go read about how Orm applied the rule himself.
In regards to Rotherhithe, I would pronounce it the way locals say to because I have no desire to create a disturbance and language is basically oral. If one does not know how to pronounce a word, a quick search online will reveal the local way, but in a worst case situation one should ask someone who does know how, like a local. Writing is only intended to indicate sound insofar as native speakers care about distinguishing differences. English speakers have never cared about distinguishing the hard and soft forms of ᚦ. It is disrespectful to force such a distinction upon native speakers because it is a form of cultural imperialism.
@@LearnRunes I already know "Abstemiously" isn't a common word, but it is a valid word to use even if it's not the norm. But right! Let's give you more examples:
"Previous" (/ˈpriː.viː.əs/), "Media" (/ˈmiː.diː.ə/), "Senior" (/ˈsiː.niː.ə/)/( /ˈsiːn.jɚr/), "Easy" (/ˈiː.ziː/), "Recently" (/ˈriː.sənt.liː/), "Weekly" (/ˈwiː.kliː/) and "Medium" (/ˈmiː.diː.əm/).
So we can learn from this examples that we could agree they are quite common and:
1) None of this words have a double consonant to showcase the sound /iː/, previous or prior this sound.
2) (e / i / ea / y / ee) can equal /iː/ in different cases and for so there's is no easy way to know for a non-native or native speaker learning the language which letter of those make that sound in any given situation.
3) Written consonants doesn't affect spoken vowels.
Continuing... /ː/ doesn't represent a "Long vowel" because if that were the case we would see the vowel extending like "/ee/", the thing is that the symbol represents the vowels that doesn't stop inmediately but let a little bit of air before continuing the sentence. That's why for example in Japanese you can see this text but inside you can hear literally the same "o" but some are pronounced a little bit further: "鳳凰ほうおうを追おおう" (/[hoː.oː.o.o.oː]/)
That doesn't happen in English, where you cannot say: /ɪː/ or /i/, not because English speakers can't make it (Which they could easily), but on they daily speak they pronounce this different vowels in a short and long way. And yes, some English speakers could pronounce some words differently (As we have seen before), but the rule is that /i/ is elongated and /ɪ/ don't (I could follow this examples in more vowels).
Aaaand, to finish up...
What do you call "Locals?" the ones living one kilometer apart from that place? The same city? The same state? The same country? The same dialect?
I've taken that word because it's one of Many examples of Nouns that are differently pronounced from place to place. Even in Internet you'll see people don't call it just one way.
And is that Wrong? Are their English bad even when they are clearly Natives? Of course not, the problem is that as English speakers hasn't decided to change or differentiate the "TH" combination for 2 sou- wait, is there more? Yes! TH can be also be pronounced as /t/ as in: "Thailand" or "Thomas" or like /th/ as in: "Anthill", "Goatherd", "Lighthouse" or "Pothead".
So now the problem will be that to learn how to pronounce a word I have to learn others too?!
It's not like I'm forcing a "Distinction" but to make the spelling easier for both, Non-Natives and Native speakers, such as (Probably) you, to learn how to pronounce stuff without someone telling you "No, you see? Because it has been like this in a while and that's why you have to pronounce this way even if it looks the same as this other word" just like you've proven saying you cannot even tell by yourself how to pronounce a simple place.
Btw, /θ/ is one of the less used sounds in the English language, making a distinction will not affect as much as you may think (The same with /ʒ/).
Just remove the unhelpful silent letters (e.g. the b in lamb) and unhelpful single phoneme letter clusters (e.g The dge in edge) then leave the other changes for the next generation.
"The criminal was on the lam" 🤔
That phrase has nothing to with silent letters.@@EvdogMusic
1:12 I think you forgot to put it in the description!
Great video though
You should at least have 1m subscribers
True, very true, I'm glad the algorithm is finally giving him some exposure, adding this reply to your comment to bump up his engagement #'s
@@xp8969 yeah
i think what's interesting is that, listening to your criticisms, it's very clear that your idea of an english spelling reform is VERY DIFFERENT from many other people's spelling reform
i'd say the "let's see YOU take a crack at it!" line, but that's not really fun and mature, is it
what i observed is that other people's spelling reforms try to remove ambiguity and be intuitive, while you're going full intuition.
i'd like to think that many reformers try to put english learners in mind, so they do things like remove c, because how would a learner know if "lace" is pronounced /leɪk/ or /leɪs/ if is both /k/ and /s/?
2:47 the way you described as being perfect for /i:/, /ɪ/, and /ɛ/ in the word "reform(ation)" really hints that you don't think about inconsistencies between sound and letter, and just going full intuition.
at a quick glance, i would've almost pronounced "reformation" as /ɹiː.fɔ˞.ˈmeɪ.ʃn̩/. how would you stop me from pronouncing it that way if not for respelling the word and breaking the etymology conservation?
as you mentioned in 5:25, it really shows how hard it is to make an english spelling reform in which everyone agrees upon.
an interesting thing is that the world might already be making minor spelling reforms of some words subconsciously
"through" being respelled as "thru" in "drive thru"
and even the word "doughnut", commonly spelt as "donut"
people mix up "your" and "you're" all the time, yet hypercasual typists go by fine respelling both words as "ur"
1. Easy to learn for kids.
2. High efficiency
3. Transitioning is hard, so make it the last time we need to do it. That means, go all the way.
4. Direct connection between graphemes and phonemes.
5. Maintain compatibility with cursive writing.
6. No messy diacritics or hard to write glyphs. Remember the hen scratching on your professor's handwritten notes and don't make that worse!
That's why 7M is the way to go.
7M Phonemic Alphabet:
[uppercase]:
H, U, Ŋ, G, I, N, V, ᐱ, ⴳ
D, W, E, Ћ, Z, R, P, T
K, L, Q, F, S, M, A, X
Y, O, J, ᖶ,Ђ, B, Ů, C
and Ɂ (glottal stop)
[lower case]:
h, u, ŋ, g, i, n, v, ʌ, ⴳ
d, w, ε, ћ, z, r, p, t
k, l, q, f, s, m, a, x
y, o, j, e, ѣ, b, ů, c
and ɂ (glottal stop)
7M to IPA to Current English Table:
7M | IPA | Current English
h | h | hat, [h]at
u | ə | mud, m[u]d
ŋ | ŋ | sing, si[ng]
g | g | get, [g]et
i | ɪ | sit, s[i]t
n | n | nap, [n]ap
v | v | very, [v]ery
ʌ | ɑ | not, n[o]t
ⴳ | ʒ | measure, mea[s]ure
--------------------------------------------------------
d | d | dot, [d]ot
w | w | wet, [w]et
ε | i | feet, f[ee]t
ћ | ð | smooth, smoo[th]
z | z | zip, [z]ip
r | ɹ | dirt, d[ir]t
p | p | pet, [p]et
t | t | tub, [t]ub
--------------------------------------------------------
k | k | kite, [k]ite
l | l | little, [l]itt[le]*
q | u | loop, l[oo]p
f | f | fig, [f]ig
s | s | sit, [s]it
m | m | man, [m]an
a | æ | cat, c[a]t
x | ʃ | dish, di[sh]
--------------------------------------------------------
y | j | yellow, [y]ellow
o | o̞ | note, n[o]te
j | d͡ʒ | judge, [j]u[dg]e
e | e | get, g[e]t
ѣ | θ | tooth, too[th]
b | b | bed, [b]ed
ů | ʊ | put, p[u]t
c | t͡ʃ | chat, [ch]at
and ɂ (glottal stop)
crc = church
*The letter /L/ represents both a consonant form & a vowel form.
Ten pure vowels [no diphthongs]:
7M(U I Λ E R Q A O ᖶ Ů
u i ʌ ε r q a o e ů)
IPA(ə ɪ ɑ i [ɹ] u æ o̞ e ʊ)
2 additional vowels with no glyphs
Dark L /ɫ/ and raised /æ/
This IPA nuttiness will clearly not work for everyday handwriting:
ʊ, d͡ʒ, t͡ʃ, o̞, æ, ð, ʒ, ə, ɪ, ɚ
It is impossible to change spelling only unless we also change the words, example: row - to row a boat, and row - to have an argument have 2 differing sounds and thus their spelling can be changed. But, there words ‘there’ and ‘their’ have same Sound. So, how does one deal with their fonetik speling.
I prefer to create a whole new Global language which does not duplicate pronunciation or spelling, but has distinct and unique words for each meaning. I have developed such a language already but I am realistic enough to know it will never eventuate. It is a losing battle
we already use context to know what a person is saying based on a conversation.
@@jacobjohnson8069 yes. All too often. But reading a language differs from speaking that same language.
Example: two, to, too.
Pronunciation of circle, concern, concur, sauce….
The C is pronounced differently in each occasion.
When we ‘speak’, the spelling of the words we speak do not come into our heads. English spelling is not based on the Sound of the words we speak, and nor is it based on the meaning of the words we speak.
Of, and off. Both spelled with ‘f’ but one is pronounced with a ‘V’.
Yes. I prefer to create a new global language rather than retain the stupid english language, context or not. Alternatively we can all have lessons in telepathy, which would eliminate this english language farce completely.🥰
@@anitaheubel3228 basing words off of context and getting rid of silent letters or letter pairs that together make sounds that we already have like ER, IR, UR, AR, EE, EA, PH, GH, CK, AI, and sets of 3 letters like GHT, and extending the magic E rule to consonants would go farr in fixing the written word and it wouldn't change the pronunciation.
@@jacobjohnson8069 Also, do what Spanish does and add an acute accent above the stressed vowel to distinguish the meanings.
@@anitaheubel3228YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME! In all my years listening to English speakers I did not notice that "of" was pronounced like "ov".
English truly has the worst spelling ever.
Can't we just make the quick and easy change of replacing "ph" with "f"? The only problem I see is giving the people of Phoenix a difficult choice to change to Foenix or not.
Fenix is a better spelling
@@Writer_Productions_Map Even better would be Feniks
@@willpoundstone71 Finnix?
Why get rid of PH, though?
@@javierlatorre480 The same reason for all spelling reforms: simplification. People learning English currently need to learn two graphemes for one sound (three actually if you count the "ugh" in words like "cough" and "laugh"). Having just one saves class room time. And by having one letter for the sound instead of two or three, words become shorter, saving paper, ink, hard drive space, and making literature easier to read.
Thoughts on the TH-camr Biblaridion?
I've watched some of his stuff. Solid channel! Not my biggest influences though
@@gamma_nerdI just found your channel today and I watched every video, love your editing and presentation style and the diversity of your knowledge base and interests, very curious what you're majoring in, would be cool to see you short video introducing yourself and giving us a background on what you're studying and what other subjects you're into
@@xp8969 Good idea! I'll put out a community post to see if people would be interested. I want to maintain some anonymity though, at least for now
@@gamma_nerd I feel ya on the anonymity part but you don't have to reveal any details about your personal life or anything like that, it would just be cool to hear about your favorite areas of study and your academic interests
@@xp8969 Thanks man! I actually put a poll up asking if folks would want a video like that and the "yes" option is currently losing, so make your voice heard if you want the vid! Also thanks for all the comments and support on my videos. Maybe we can keep in touch somehow and talk about what would be good for my channel moving forward?
jan Misali didn't remove c.
Why does Timmy the first grader, spell 'was' w-u-z? Because he's smart. It's the adults who are stupid. He sounded it out. A fully corrected spelling system facilitates that to the highest degree possible by providing a single dedicated letter to each speech sound - one phoneme per glyph and one glyph per phoneme - direct connect!
How do you spell 'was' using 7M? W-U-Z! We got you Timmy. We gotchu with 'kat' as well! 7M gonnu shorten your public schooling by two years.
how about we pronounce how its written rather than write how its pronounced?
That's putting the cart before the horse. Language is basically oral. Writing exists to represent speech, not dictate it.
@Rune Revival - with ᚱᚢᚾ᛫ᛗᚫᚾ standardization helps alot. In all communicative purposes why should we care about slang and dialects.
@@LearnRunes Look how French operates, for instance. It has such a massive amount of homophones that it pays to distinguish between them all in writing.
@@javierlatorre480 French is prescriptivist language to the point where its governing bodies actively enforce prejudices against minorities. English has always been a descriptivist language where our spelling is meant to depict the speech of the people.
@@stegotyranno4206 People already write in slang according to local dialects, not only their own but others too. While having some standards can aid communication, those standards need not be so inflexible that they entirely obfuscate local pronunciations. We already see this in simple words like mum/mom.
3:37 oops, i think you meant BLEW and blue.
I absolutely did
Words in the past tense ending in ed, where the E isn't pronounced should change to ending with a K. Like the informal spelling of wrecked being rekt.
"He workt for the company and urgd evrywun to do their due diligence.
That would make the written form, which is the main teaching form more confusing.
Though you could use a contraction symbol like work’d and people would get it.
The E is silent in virtually all cases, it'd make more sense to mark it when it IS pronounced. Also, "urged" needs the E to soften the G
@@javierlatorre480 I'd write that as _Érgcd._ Gc → /dʒ/ and É → /ɜ/. Also, _R_ after a vowel marks length since my speech is non-rhotic.
very polite "critique". Hope you get BIG
i'd like to point out that k klein uses they/them pronouns, and jan misali uses he/they pronouns
very epic 👍
absolutely huge bro