The easier thing to do is just say Q only properly makes the the “kw” sound and drop out the u. Then you just replace q with k in the few words where q actually makes its own sound.
@@JimCarner Ž for "zh", then use Š for "sh" and Č for "ch". Well I assume you mean with the squiggle on the bottom not the top! The symbol on the top was used for N to mean 'ng'.
To avoid diacritics at all you can take the cyrillic Ж and Ш. So that these sounds will have their own letters and avoid confusion. Greetings from Bulgaria ❤ 🇧🇬
Yes! Our current song does weird things to the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. If TTLS was to use the Alphabet Song's tempo: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, how I wonder what-the-hell you are. Up above, oh so high, like a dot, in the sky. Now I know my ABCs, this sounds bad so stop with me.
@@EllenKozisek does this 3rd song differ in rhythm rather than tempo itself? … Baa, Baa, Black sheep. Have you any wool? Yes Sir! Yes Sir! 3 bags full! One for the master! One for the dame! And one for the little boy, who lives down the lane! Baa, baa, black sheep! Have you any wool? Yes Sir! Yes Sir! 3 bags full!!! 🙂
I þink ðat we shud recúvver too Owld Ingglish letterz, eð and þorn, to make Ingglish much eezier to spel. For exzámpel: uððer (other), faaðer (father), þaut (thought), aþþlete (athlete), etc.
Hi Rob, I was in first grade in 1966/67. They carved out about 30 of us and got our parents to agree for us to be part of an experiment. We learned to read using the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA). They did exactly what you are doing; they added characters to match common sounds. Every word was written exactly as it sounded. You can Google it and see their alphabet. The results of the experiment was that we, the ITA students, learned to read much quicker and were several grades ahead in our reading ability. However, because we had to then adapt to the traditional alphabet we had the arduous task of learning a very illogical system utilizing a bunch of silly extra and sometimes silent letters. To a first grader the ITA system was superior and made much more sense. I still have a couple of kids books written in the ITA language. As an adult I am a very proficient reader, not sure if I can attribute that to ITA or not.
Wow, this is fascinating! Thank you for sharing this😍 What a shame, after the success of the experiment, they didn't roll this out to schooling! Think of where we'd all be now, had we followed in your footsteps!!
Me too, except preschool and 1969. Mom & Dad were worried because I was already reading the Latin alphabet. Teacher said not to worry, I was proficient with both & I'm still a total alphabet nerd. :)
For ch, sh and zh I would recommend you the letters č, š and ž coming originally from the Czech language. They are used in most of Balto-Slavic languages.
Yeah, it would make sense to use those, because they all use the same sign at the top. It wouldn't be a good idea to have for example the ç letter represent the "ch" sound but for "zh" to use the ž letter, it needs some consistency.
“English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.” - Sir Terry Pratchett
@@Merecir Norse doesn't take particularly heavy from other languages. If anything Norse went around and stuffed random pieces of itself in other languages' mail-boxes. Unless you mean continental Scandinavia after the black plague. But that was more just so many people died that the language's grammar completely collapsed and it lost multiple sounds. Because it's kinda hard to keep a language stable when the closes person to you is the 6 year old feral girl two villages over because, except for the two of you, everyone in your village, hers and the one in-between died.
Thank you. I have revised the German alphabet a couple of times. While I would have left Q to make the sound of qu, I really honour you for using my favourite letter which is ß. :-)
I þink ðat we shud recúvver too Owld Ingglish letterz, eð and þorn, to make Ingglish much eezier to spel. For exzámpel: uððer (other), faaðer (father), þaut (thought), aþþlete (athlete), etc.
@@j.a.weishaupt1748 finally after over 50 years of life I find a response worthy of my overblown ego. I’ll take your grammatical insight to heart and change my evil ways. The trauma of 10th grade ‘advanced grammar’ class has been manifest all these years in my errant use of the apostrophe. You’ve exposed the deep trauma and truly your correct earned the thumbs up and your second sigel on your shoulder patch
For ch,sh,zh to keep things consistent you could just simply use č,š and ž from the Czech alphabet. These characters or letters are called or known as chet, shet and zhet and they are used to make the ch, sh and zh sounds in the Czech Republic Alphabet and we could have them in English as well.
Modern Czech was designed to be phonetical , and it makes it easy to read without understanding it. But some of the single letters have different uses. jam = džem. However, boat = loď and is pronounced lotch. And Character = charakter, but the ch in Czech is pronounced like Scottish Loch.
One major problem with giving the schwa a letter is that, as you mention, English speakers often reduce other vowels to schwa. This means that, if you're spelling words how they're pronounced, you might need to accept that nearly every English word has multiple correct spellings.
Yes; both "Taiga" and "Tiger" have the schwa at the end in British and Australian/New Zealand English, but not in U.S. English, where the R in tiger is pronounced. An American student objected when I said that Taiga and Tiger are pronounced identically.
@@RainbowMama143 I'm not talking about different dialects, though that's certainly a problem as well. I'm referring to using multiple spellings for a word within a single dialect (for example "the" /ði/ and "the" /ðə/)
This is actually a big reason why Swedish can't fix the horrible mess with /x/ (the sje-sound). It's basically used as a schwa, but for for consonant clusters. It can take on many different forms, so spelling things phonetically would obfuscate where the words came from. (which is confusing and clashes with how some people pronounce them)
6:45 I mean is there any language with a real usage of the letter Q? Besides keyboard input. As a spanish speaker it's just another way to say K and we don't use K because most of the K sound is made with C or QU.
The problem with having schwa (“ə”) as a separate letter is vowel reduction. Vowels are reduced to a schwa based on the stress. But sometimes the same word will be used in a different context or in a different form, changing the stress and, if schwa were a letter, changing the spelling. Sometimes the word “a” is pronounced as a schwa, sometimes not. Sometimes the word “to” is pronounced with a schwa, sometimes not. Etc. So we’d have: “To be competətive, Americə is goiŋ tə have tə give American compətişion reciprocity if ə dəzen or more countries pass a reciprəcaşion чreaty.”
i like ` for that where schwa is written as whatever vowel it originally was (or à if its unclear/irrelevant/whatever) so finite and infìnite for example
@@HyTricksyy i understand and to some extent agree w the general sentiment but you just very confidently made two claims that are both like objectively verifiably wrong
I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR SO LONG I HATE WHEN PEOPLE REMAKE THE ALPHABET AND THROW OUT K SAYING C CAN DO IT. IT INFURIATES ME TO NO END. That being said, agreed.
@@al3xa723 The Etruscans already did that (throw out kappa), and it’s the reason the Latin alphabet’s letter G looks like a modified C rather than the Greek letter gamma.
How about Š for "sh" and Č for "ch" from Czech and Baltic alphabets? This solution is a bit more consistent than adopting a Turkish and a Cyrillic letters for this purpose. EDIT: and now after I discovered that you propose to adopt Ž from Czech, this idea looks even better.
I love the Czech alphabet loads of useful letters to steal, just please god , don't add Ř. Any letter that requires a large proportion of the population to have speech therapy to pronounce it, should have been strangled at birth.
@@JB9000x And the reason is that there are these sounds in the language. Strictly speaking, there are much more sounds in each language than the letter they use to represent these sounds, and only "essential" sounds have dedicated letters. Sh and ch are certainly among those what I called "essentials" and deserve, imho, to have separate letters. If the simplicity of the alphabet is the target, then we could drop some letters (obviously "c", "q") to replace them with some combination of 2.. Say, lets replace "j" with "dz" and "f" with "ph". Saving 2 letter, getting short alphabet! But I would not vote for moving this way.
Hi Rob, my late father researched this very topic for over 30 years. However his focus was vowels and their many sounds. IE many more than 5 in English. He was developing what he called "12 Vowel English", specically aimed at people learning English from Asain decent to have an intermediary step in understanding how to navigate English. If you would like to know more, lemme know. Great content!
Okay, thank you all for showing interest. Please allow me some time to do some digging. It was supposed to be a free/open source thing. My father wanted it to je accessible to anyone. I believe there is an internet ready page but it wasn't renewed, years ago. I will have to contact the fella that did that for my father. Will reply in this comment section when I have more. Hopefully soon but please don't wait in suspense. Thank you all again for showing interest amd pardon the tardy response. Good day!
The way you use ß is actually different from the German way. In German, it is used to signal that the vowel that comes before it is a long one. So "graß" would be pronounced in a British way and "poßeß" would just be weird😂 Edit: I just realized that the first ss in possess is actually not voiceless (which ß always is) so that makes it even worse🥲
Doesn't necessarily mean that we need to adopt the exact same grammatical rules as in German language. We could still use the letter to contract double ss without any rules attached to it!
@@oilydoubloonz6001 the thing is there is actually a pattern with them. They denote a certain type of stress between syllables (e.g. poses has stress on the first syllable but possess has stress on the second. However you could probably get rid of the second double s)
@@Ashille01True. But as Rob in other parts of the video stresses, he doesn't want to use letters, that are differently used in other languages, so he shows inconsequence here. Maybe also a lack of knowledge of this rule. But it doesn't make me wonder, as in practice the ,,elder Generations" (eg Generation X) haven't accustomed to the spelling reform of 1996. Back then the use of ss & ß was the opposite of how they are used nowadays, they swapped places. Therefore for an unknowing nonmotherspeaker it if one writes ,,dass" or ,,daß" seem interchangeable, whilst the latter's spelling is wrong and just a relic, that is merely a sign, that the writer likely is not of the younger generations.
I’m fully here for binning C… it seems more confusing than useful, having two potential sounds that are both duplicates of other letters in the alphabet.
if you removed ‹c›, you'd have issues such as the words ‹ice› or ‹ace› becoming ‹ise› and ‹ase› which would be read as though they're ‹ize› and ‹aze› doubling the s to create ‹isse› and ‹asse› would make the words look as though they're pronounced /ısə/ or /asə/, due to how doubled consonants typically function in english if you wanted to fully ditch ‹c› in such positions, the most sensible replacement that i know of would be ‹ß›, creating ‹iße› and ‹aße›. however, rob's already replaced just a simple double-s with ‹ß›, which isn't actually how it works in german, as ‹ß› is used to indicate that there's a /s/ sound and that the preceding vowel is long, which is how ‹c› is currently used in english when it makes a /s/ sound
@@zoecassI say, we just use (or rather, uze) ⟨s⟩ for the /s/ sound, and ⟨z⟩ for the /z/ sound. Why not write words like phase rose, and demise as faze, roze and demize, and replace ice and ace with ise and ase, job done. Why use ⟨s⟩ for the /z/ sound when we have a perfectly good letter ⟨z⟩ for it?
You can replace /ku/ sound with a C and replace every word using a C with a K like ‘ciet’ ‘quiet’, ‘cest’ ‘quest’, and ‘cotient’ ‘quotient’. And the other words: ‘kome’ ‘come’, ‘komplete’ ‘complete’, and ‘kan’ ‘can’. With words that end in ‘ck’ like ‘quick’ and ‘kick’, you can just drop the ‘c’. ‘cik’ ‘quick’ and ‘kik’ ‘kick’
The alphabet is not the main problem. What English needs is consistent spelling so people don't need to remember the pronunciation and the spelling of each word separately. It's so much easier to write stuff when the same letter (or a combination of letters) represents the same sound everywhere. Even the ridiculous German spelling of č (tsch) is ok, because it's consistent.
The problem with that idea is the fact of dialects are different not only between English speaking countries, but even in different regions of the same country.
@@indigobunting5041 Who says we need a single spelling system for all dialects? There are already competing spelling systems so we might as well just let different dialects spell things differently.
Fun fact: ẞ and ß were originally two different letters, ẞ is a digraph of ſ+z, and ß is a digraph of ſ+s. Eventually they became interchangeable, but without a capital, so ẞ is sometimes used as a capital ß.
ẞ is officially the capital of ß in my country since a few years! Hello from someone with ß in their last name that can finally have the real name on passport etc. instead of it being written ss. 😂
@@SchemeTintFocusin German letters with the umlaut (ä,ü,ö) are legitimate letters that each have their own sound, same with the ß. What many people do nowadays is if they can’t write ß because they don’t have the right keyboard or something is writing ss or sz (this one is not vey common, at least from my experience). If you can’t write the letters with the umlaut you can write ae for ä, oe for ö and ue for ü
The problem with using phonetic alphabets is that not everyone pronounces words the same way, for example, "crayon" has 5 different pronunciations, but as long as people understand what people are trying to say, I guess it works.
another problem is that pronunciation is expected to change again in future. another problem is that some people are going to use old alphabet. i have watched only 1 m 21 s only for now.
The trouble with that idea is that there is never a time when everyone understands something. There are always people who will get it wrong. That is one of the reasons that the English language is so hard to learn, especially as a second or third language. People who are influential got things wrong and we are stuck with their mistakes.
Spanish has a phonetic alphabet and we can understand each other just fine even with different pronunciations. If anything it would help to further standardize the language. I find it interesting that Spanish has a regulatory body called the RAE or Real Academia Española which regulates the language internationally regardless of country, it’d be nice for English to have a similar thing in the future.
I think there was a better solution for 'sh' 'ch' and the "zh" sound like the 'su' in 'pleasure'. In my language (Bosnian, a south slavic language), they're written like š, č, and ž. It makes it super consistent and easy to understand. Much simpler than taking the letters for sh from turkish, ch from cyrillic, and zh from czech. After reading the comments I see a czech person has already suggested what I just did lol. Our alphabet is based on the Czech one so it makes sense lol
There's no Bosnian language, you literally just took Croatian language and alphabet and slapped Bosnian on it. You've got some Turkish words, but it's a dialect of Croatian. Your alphabet is Croatian alphabet, made by Ljudevit Gaj, which based some of the letters on the Czech alphabet, and some he made up because he didn't want too many letters. Like LJ, NJ and DŽ No such thing as Bosnian
The letters 'X', 'Q' and 'C' always seemed like something you could comfortably nuke out of our alphabet and replace with other letters or pairings of letters. I guess there'd be one Twitch streamer who might not be overly happy about it though.
don't nuke, that's a waste of keyboard places, reassign instead. reassign instead of creating new letters. maybe we still need to borrow some, but we have more than enough letters to make English at least a little more logical.
@@remycallie No, Greek has the letter "phi" (Φφ). The Romans didn't have phi, so when they imported Greek words containing phi they replaced it with "PH" (Latin only had what we call "capital" letters) just as they replaced "theta" (Θθ) with "TH." Europeans using the Roman alphabet followed this practice when they made up new words based on Greek roots.
@@chriswinstanley6824 Interesting. I should have known this because I know the Cyrillic alphabet, which is basically a combination of the Latin and Greek alphabets, and their letter for "f" is almost the same as the Greek (can't represent it here). Cyrillic creates one letter for a whole bunch of sounds that we require two (or more) letters to represent in the Latin alphabet, including "sh" "ch" "shch" (like freSH CHeese) "ts" (like iT'S) and "yo" (like Yo -- Adrian!).
Yes, english and french are the only living languages borrowing ancient Greek who write like that... even tho the Greeks themselves never did because they had their own alphabet and old English and old French used the f The ph spelling only dates from a few centuries back when smart people saw the ph in old latin texts and decided that was cool
@@nix-consulting Hebrew still has vowels though, they're just memorized. They can optionally be written as nikkudot (kind of like diacritics) as well. Honestly, it makes for a rather shitty language if your written form has implied spoken parts that just have to be memorized (which is a reason why I partly hate English, unfortunately my only language).
Not really, the biggest issue is unconsitency, and accents are just a really bad excuse, we Hispanics speak really differently and we all write the same.
It would be nice if the new alphabet was also in an order that made sense. Like maybe all of the vowels are grouped together and then the consonants are in their voiced/unvoiced pairs.
@@bigsmallgiant3751 That's the least of the nightmares a new alphabet is going to cause, but you're completely right. Will reprints of books be in the new or old spelling? You notice it when you read 19thc German literature. All these 'th's where today it's a straight T (Thor become Tor, Thür Tür etc.)
The current order, I believe, is arbitrary. Consider Chinese. All those strokes to make one character. A Chinese dictionary is organized in stroke count. I offer you: I C J U S O X T L V P D Q G H N F A Y Z K R B M W E
a better character for CH would be the Czech Č because it resembles the C and does not get confused with the digit 4. Instead of shwa you could use the Romanian ă which is pronounced like shwa, and it resembles the letter A
Hi Rob, Roland here from NL, About the KW-sound: Why would you search for one letter for this sound? Let's take 'quicksilver' (Hydrargyrum = Hg, chemically). This translates into Dutch in 'kwik'. I would say this is the most efficient way to pronounce the 4 different sounds in this word. Try to say 'kwik' slowly and you will discover that the first (and the last) 'k' is formed in your throat. Then comes the 'w', which is formed by your lips only, apart from a gust of breath. Then the 'i' speaks for itself. Or does it...? How many ways are there in English to pronunciate the 'i' or leave it unpronunciated. (Bizniz a.s.o.). Apart from this, I am a great fan of your channel. Keep on the good work!!!
Nice! My recommendations: Instead of the new letter, just use Q for the “qu” sound. Australia has been doing this for years with “Qantas.” Seems more efficient than a new letter. And for “ch,” I prefer Ç because it follows the same logic as Ş and makes sense in English. I wouldn’t worry so much that Ç is used differently in other languages, because we’ve already seen such rule differences and we just need to establish the rules for English.
Then again... all CH is, is just a T in front of a SH sound SH is a completely different sound to S. So maybe have a different letter for SH instead of just a cedilla on an S. Add a cedilla or something to the new SH letter, to indicate the T sound at the beginning and make the CH sound.
It reminds me of the letter J. As far as I'm aware, English is the _only_ language that gives it a soft G sound. Every other language pronounces it differently.
The Latin Turkish alphabet has been developed quite recently, about a hundred years old in fact so I believe that is why we have ı i, cç, sş, oö, uü, gğ letters refer to different but similar sounds. It makes it much easier to mimic other languages in Turkish because we already have the written concepts of the common pronunciations.
@@dejanjovanovic2298 Turkic languages had used the Orkhon scripts in the old times. And in the Ottoman period, Turkish people used Ottoman Turkish which was written in Perso-Arabic script.
Especially in words of Arabic and Persian origin, I would say? We have had the sounds those letters are referring to (except ı and ğ) in my native Hungarian language for close to a thousand years ago, so for me it's relatively easy to read Turkish. ğ is not even a real sound AFAIK, more of a glottal stop? Correct me if I'm wrong.
So what do you think? And are there any more letters I should add or take away? EDIT: Who knew that the letter C was so many people's trigger? I'm coming round to the idea that we should get rid of it too. Especially as I've solved the problem of needing it for CH. Keep the ideas coming.
I think that all of your decisions in this video essay were for personal taste and that none of them make the alphabet more practical. In fact, I think you've made it vastly more awkward.
You should drop C,Q, and X: C can be substituted with k Q can be substituted with kw X can be substituted with ks You should use Czech letters Š for sh like in shoe Č for ch like in chat Ž for zh like in pleasure
@@lukek8522 The thing is, using a letter for zh is useless. J exists, and plejır could easily be a replacement for pleasure. The last e is useless, drop the last letters like e which are silent that serve no purpose. Using other vowels for the ' sound is consfusing, so use ı instead. It is used so often in literally all languages but none of them use it. Back to s in pleasure, there is a reason J is different than the other J's in other languages. The zh sound. Why do we use J in June while we can say Cune? But for that we must remove the useless usage of the letter C being used as S and K. Easy. Now, we have a beautiful Cune. Dont forget the e though. But... Now it is Cun, which is obviously pronounced faster than June because the purpose of E at the end is removed. So add double vowel pronounciation for u, as oo is already one. Cuun. But, as I would prefer, I would use the letter ğ. It accurately presents lengthening the vowel, is not confused by not even a single letter in any other language, strsight up soft g. So we have a Cuğn, Plejır. But, in English, the re part of pleasure is pronounced like french r, but soundless. Smells like a letter I already mentioned, ğ. Plejığ. But, you can say "uh" too, so it becomes pleasuh, but again, ğ used to have the pronounciation similar to gamma in Greek and another letter i forgot in Arabic. Also, why does the "g" have the pronounciation, ci? Remove that. We dont need that. Gigantic? Caygentik. Oh yeah forgot to say, why is a pronounced like "ey" but not schwa? It is like that in Turkish, and I have no idea why people add the letter "y" in vowels. Vowels are supposed to be alone. So is it for U, pronounced as "yu". Simply, why? Just use yu, make more sense because it gives Y a meaning.
There are silent Us in Spanish whenever you see the sequence “gue” or “gui.” To indicate that the U must be pronounced, the convention is to write “güe” or “güi” as in “vergüenza” or “pingüino.” And of course, all Hs in Spanish are silent (except in English loanwords).
That alone would help the English language 98%. I agree. And for God's sake don't ever reintroduce genders to words for agreement. It's the hardest part of learning Spanish.
@@harrychalfin5835 Actually the "u" IS pronounced. For example in the word pingüino, it is "guu eee no" not "gee no" as if the "u" were silent. It's a diphthong. If people enunciated correctly that is.
@@ScienceNotFaith let me clarify: In Spanish, the letters C and G are hard before the vowels A, O, or U; C and G are soft before the vowels E or I. (Though I think in Spanish they reverse the "hard" and "soft" labels when referring to these sounds.) In IPA notation: Hard C: \k\ Soft C: \s\ Hard G: \g\ Soft G: \h\ (or \x\) But what if you want a *hard* C or G sound to be followed by an E or an I? For a hard C sound: Use Q, followed by a silent U (ex: ¿qué? ¿quién?). If the letter C is used instead of the Q, it means that the U must be pronounced (ex: ¿cuándo? ¿cuánto?) In the original Latin (and in the other modern Romance languages I believe), these were all spelled with QU, pronounced \kw\, as in modern English. For a hard G sound: Retain the G but insert a silent U (ex: guerra, jugúe, Guillermo). The presence of the silent U tells us that the G is hard. But this still leaves open the question how we should spell a word with the sound \gw\ (as in "Gwen") followed by an E or an I. That's where the dieresis comes in. Examples: 1) vergüenza (pronounced /beɾˈɡwensa/, NOT /beɾˈhensa/ or /beɾˈgensa/) 2) pingüino (pronounced /pĩŋˈɡwi.no/, NOT pĩŋˈhi.no or pĩŋˈgi.no) 3) lingüistico (pronounced /linˈɡwi.sti.ko/, NOT /linˈhi.sti.ko/ or /linˈɡi.sti.ko/) Hope that clears it up. Do you agree?
Dude, I've been using your kwak for the symbol of myself for decades. My first name begins with W and my last name K, so it seemed quite logical. When asked for my initials, I write this symbol. Additionally, as a student of language, and in particular orthography, I've been pondering this task, also for decades. I do more replacement than creating & deleting, as you do. I won't go into my own replacement ideas here, because everyone and their sidekick have engaged themselves in this fun little game.
If I hadn't described the precise development process for kwak, you'd be well within your rights to accuse me of plagiarism. Now I want my own special symbol too.
I think you just invented a new language at this point. I am officially going to be using this new alphabet now and see if my family or friends reacted to it. It will be intriguing to witness.
About the ß: in proper German, it has little to do with efficiency. ss or ß determines whether the vowel before it is short or long. Masse (mass) has a short a, Maße (measures/dimensions) has a long a.
Also in German a single consonant denouns a long previous vowel, while a double consonant denouns a short previous vowel. While that works for most consonants, such as Hefe (long e, one f) versus Riffe (short i, double f), it doesnt work for S, as a single S in German is already doing the same sound an English Z makes (Nase = Nah-ze), thus we needed another S for the "long/double vowel, singe S" approach, which ended up being how the ẞ is used today (Rose/Ruße/Russe, first two have a long vowel last has a short vowel; first one has an English Z sound "Roh-ze", last two have an English S sound "Ruh-se, Rus-se").
The reason polish letter for /w/ looks like , is because historically it represented the sound /ɫ/ (velarized/dark l) and it only changed relatively recently. It also still has correspondences in inflection, like mały-mali (small (he)-small (they)), tło-na tle (background-on the background).
The problem with having a separate letter for schwa is that most people don't consciously perceive it as a different type of vowel but rather just a weaker version of other vowels. I think it would be better to consistently use a letter that is already used frequently for schwa, like "a" or "e", to write it in al cases. In Dutch we also have schwa as an unstressed vowel, but it's always written as "e".
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a teform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
This is amazing. I've had similar thoughts while developing a psuedo-conlang for my D&D campaign. However, I just repurposed "c" for the "ch" sound because we already have graphemes for the "s" and "k" sounds. I 100% support the return of Þ Þough I am on the fence about the rest lol. Well I like ş too. I may start my own mini campaign for it lol
I enjoyed this. Phoenetically, "qu" is not one sound but two so, in my opinion it shouldn't be seen as one sound in the alphabet here. I loved that you added schwa. I have taught that to my students every year as we use it so very much in Australia. I liked the addition of thorn, eng, sh and cheh too.
@@krossdreemurr42 but in English, it doesn't appear on its own at all, or at least not that I know of. This is an upgrade for the English (En-glish, not Ng-lish) alphabet. If we start adding all the other sounds from other languages, we should add the clicks from languages like Zulu, etc...but then it's no longer an English alphabet; it becomes a global phonetic alphabet, which is no longer the point.
This was almost therapeutic to watch. Like cleaning out an old cupboard, except the cupboard is the English language, and old meaning hundreds of years. I’ve recently been learning a bit of Basque, and was surprised to find out their written language was only formalised in the 1960s. This seems to have made their alphabet very efficient and logical.
Basque uses "tx" for "ch", which is amazing, but they didn't invent their own letter for that sound. Which shows that most languages are going to employ diagraphs rather than have a single letter.
Cyrillic has pretty much all of your additions covered. Adding new glyphs rather than decorations on existing letters is a more clean approach anyways.
@@vulpes7079 Diacritics are sloppy. I like languages without them. And considering that Cyrillic was created to cover the shortcomings of Greek, it would make sense to not reinvent the wheel.
@@vulpes7079 Becaue they offset the weight of the glyph and most of the time not even connected to it. and besides, with the infinite options to create letters, why essentially reuse one, especially if they don't really sound that similar?
I would make the letter c make a ch sound instead of it making an S or K sound. I would use š for sh, ž for zh(like the su in measure), Q will make a kw sound without the U. I would add both the Þ/þ and Ð/ð(other languages shouldn't impact this at all), I would add the Æ/æ letter. I would add ñ. So the sentence "I love fish and chicken" would become "I love fiš and ciken" as an example Edit: I left out a lot from my vetsion of a revised English alphabet
I didn't include the idea of using c for ch in my long post about this but that was an idea I've had for a long time in my pointless musing about the alphabet. What is the point of the letter C making the sound of an S sometimes and the sound of a K other times. So eliminate C for all current purposes and repurpose it for CH. Let's do it.
There is actually a difference between "ß" and "ss" in German. "ß" is used in the middle or at the end of a word after a long vowel, indicating its length. "SS" is used when the preceding vowel is short. The use of "ß" or "SS" is not interchangeable, even though "SS" is occasionally seen in older texts due to outdated spelling rules. "ẞ" is also called "scharfes S" ("sharp S"), especially in Austria.
You use it in Austria too? I thought both, Switzerland and Austria removed it from their alphabets. Seems I was wrong Also, funfact: They recently added a capital version of the ß: ẞ cool huh?
These rules are the accurate use of ß as according to the German language spelling reform in 1996. For several decades prior, people just used ß to replace all double s’s. That wasn’t terribly long ago, so there are plenty of documents around that use different rule sets still.
@@b5fremdet Switzerland and Liechtenstein don't have it but they never introduced it officially either (that is, when it was defined as a separate letter in Germany and Austria), so in a sense they didn't remove it.
This is something I have thought about a LOT! I like most of the additions, except I propose we just use the letter Q by itself for the "kw" sound. I was surprised you didn't didn't go further since we have too much duplicity. We do not need G to have 2 sounds so "G" is used for the "hard g (guh)" and J is used for "huh" . Same with the letter C, so my proposal is that C is the new "ch" and K is used for "hard c". S is only used for "s", C doesn't get "s" anymore. I don't think we need anything for double S either, just use one S. And use a Z when that sound is "z." I would also prefer to use the Greek letter Theta (O with a slash) instead of the Thorn which looks too much like a P. As someone with very sloppy handwriting it is much easier for me to cross out an O than to get the hump placed properly to distinguish between a P and a Thorn.
This is so much better than his suggestions overall, but we must bring back thorn. It is very easy to distinguish þ from p or b because it has a vertical line above and below, and this is provable because they still have all three letters in Icelandic without causing issues.
In my own private ways of rytN (now publik) I do most of what you say here. I like the Q and C ideas very muc. I also point out that if Tis was in audio, all problems solved, unless a transkription is kalled for.
Θ is a Greek letter; not an English nor Latin letter. Þ is an English letter, but not a Latin letter. Luckily for you, I will sometimes use θ in place of þ, specifically when þe word in question is obviously Greek by using non-English digraφs, like in þe word "diφθoŋ." (Yes, I suggest replacing any "ph" within Greek loanwords not with "f", but with "φ".)
"propose we just use the letter Q by itself for the kw sound." Changing the way the existing letters sound wasn't the point of Rob's video, though. He was adding or removing letters from the alphabet. Changing the sound of Q is beside the point and doesn't change the number of replacements nor the look of his final alphabet. Even the mnemonic song would be unaffected, since Q would still be there as a letter regardless of the way it sounds.
Hi Rob, I really love your videos. As a German native I'd like to tell you that the "ß" doesn't replace double s. The example mentioned with the street sign is in fact a typo. Quite the contrary, "ß" is always followed by a long vowel (Fuß, Straße etc.), double s by a short one like in "Kasse" (unless in Switzerland, since they don't have it, so the plural of bus and the word for repentance are the same: Busse). Keep going! Benjamin
I love the cyrillic alphabet, there is a letter for every sound and once you know the alphabet you can read everything perfectly, as it is absolutely phonetic. It has the sh letter which looks like a cursive W, it has the shch letter which is the cursive w with a little tail, it has the ch letter you displayed and the ts letter which sounds like the zeds in pizza or the ts in lots, bits, etc. And it even has the soft sound to add when you want to soften a letter as in a soft n sound.
Cyrillic also neeeds to be adapted to local langages. For example as far as I know no cyrillic alphabet has a letter for "TH" sound, or even any way to approximate it, and russian cyrillic doesn't have a letter for "W" sound - but Belorussian does.
@@lonesailThe English alphabet has already been converted to Cyrillic, although not officially the other day look at the alphabet "Cyringlisch" from "Niño Eduardo Evan Fernande" (I hope I spelled it right).
@@lonesailse the expanded Cyrillic. Like you use the extended Latin alphabet, the Germans or Czechs use it. Because the same Belarusian Cyrillic alphabet is Cyrillic, but expanded. (The following Cyrillic characters can be used for th: Ђђ-[ð] Ћћ-[θ] (they are from the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet))
it's not "absolutely" phonetic coz of vowel reduction in languages like russian and consonants shifting into kind of a "weaker" forms at times. But that's still very minor difference compared to, for example, english, so ye, kinda also soft sign literally only exists in russian
I actually did what RobWords has done here, with runes instead, but for Danish. If anyone is interested I could share it but I doubt it. xD I resurrected most of Elder Futhark to get the characteristic straight lines, then I added a whole bunch of letters for vowels, added some for a couple of new sounds like the soft d, added a letter for the stød that you place after it, and updated the spelling for hundreds of words. Some letters go away, such as C, Q, W, X, Z, though no vowels do. There’s also some funny stylistic choices. For example it’s got a line above and below so you can write non-straight lines and : is used to separate words. ; for a comma, and : plus a large actual space for a new sentence. Loads of things I haven’t figured out though. I only did this because that’s how runes looked.
Runes are unequivocally awesome looking and I completely agree it's a shame they were done away with. But remember, the power is yours to start using them again if you'd like to! NOTHING CAN STAND IN THE WAY OF FULFILLING YOUR RUNIC DREEEEEAAAAMMMSSSS
I think 'Қ' kazak k (q) works too it is a deep k sound so depending on how the k sound sounds you can use this it is similar to k which makes it easy too Also you can use 'Ö' for for example: Förniçr something like this furniture the u becomes more like a ö sounds for some reason
I'm a school-based speech-language pathologist and I have been discussing the schwa sound with one of the students on my caseload. I'll have to show him your section about the schwa. Also, I vote for including both thorn and eth to differentiate between voiceless and voiceless "th." Theta from the Greek alphabet also is an option for voiceless "th."
The two pronunciations of "th" are such a difficult thing to explain to people needing to pronounce words correctly. A separate letter (or letter pair) would be nice.
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a teform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
That's the thing I love about latvian - we speak as we write and we write as we speak. The only letter that has 2 different sounds is "o" (in the words that have latvian origin it's pronounced more as "uo" (e.g. "koks", meaning tree), but in words that are from other languages it's pronounced as just "o" (e.g. "radio" and other internationalisms)).
Forgot to mention, but latvian also has č (ch), š (sh), ņ (nj, the same as ñ) and even ķ (kj). Latvian as a language used to have ŗ (rj), but it has died out and isn't in use anymore. Furthermore, vowels can have the little line on top making them "longer" (e.g. ā (aa), ē (ee), ī (ii) etc). Do I believe that Latvian is the best language ever to exist? No. Definitely not. But, in my opinion, it's far better than English (except the fact that everything is gendered and there really isn't a neutral gender, like something you'd see in Russian)
Well, since the point is trying to simplify the orthography, eliminating confusions, I think it'd be important distinguish the "th" sounds, using Ð (only for /ð/ sound) and Þ (only for /θ/). Plus, despite loving ß, it'd more efficient just turning all the SS into S (when sounded like /s/), using Z when it's /z/. I also think that J should be used with all the /dʒ/, and G only for /g/. C could represent /tʃ/, once K would be used for all the /k/, while Q (without U) could stands for /kw/, so it wouldn't be necessary a new letter. I really enjoyed the other solutions though, like Ə, Ŋ, Ñ, Ş and Ž.
I think using diacritics is the way to go. Essentially it's what ñ is, an n with a tilde diacritic. I think using hačeks for voiced and unvoiced 'th', 'ch', 'sh' and 'zh' (treasure/pleasure/measure 's') is the way to go. With the two forms of 'th', we can use d for voiced 'th' and t for unvoiced 'th', each with a hacek to demonstrate that it's not the standard letter sound. For that matter, the simple solution to q is the throw a breve on it. Take a note from the ñ orthography and put a small u on top of the q. What we really need to do is make separate vowel characters for each vowel sound. Probably easiest to crib the ligatures from IPA or wherever.
@@dizzydaisy909 "Therapy" "Think" "Thank" "Thick" "Throng" "Throw" : "This" "That" "There" "Them" "Though" "Then" I think you're completely wrong on this one, just my opinion. Those words were right off the top of my head. Maybe I can't think of any that are particularly confusing, but the point is they're two entirely different sounds. We don't write "dough" as "tough" or "go" as "ko" so why should we represent both sounds with only one letter?
Consistency is the problem. English is horribly inconsistent. read vs read (present vs past) and read vs red (past of read vs the color) sound the same so in speech how do you know which one is being said? By context. Just write "red" for both the color and the past tense verb. Same with lead and led: led for both the past tense verb and the mineral. "reed" for the present tense verb and the grasslike plant; context will tell you which is being meant. "Why do you reed so slowly" does anyone honestly think it means "the grasslike plant" in this sentence??
Better make a 14 letter alphabet for a smaller keyboard. Then put hats or schillas on top of the letter and double ,or even triple the letters. Even if you don't write the hats ,the meaning can be inteligibile if the letter are arranged by similarity. For ex.. P next to B. It has bin ă plejăr end uiș iur çanăl ă șaini dei .
I þink ðat we shud recúvver too Owld Ingglish letterz, eð and þorn, to make Ingglish much eezier to spel. For exzámpel: uððer, faaðer, þaut (thought), aþþlete, etc.
I love the initiative! Being a Croat I was always flabergasted by the complex spelling of most languages. As kids we never had to learn spelling, just the letters because of the simple idea that YOU SPELL IT AS YOU SAY IT. All around ex-Yugoslavia we have this principle and it makes the spelling obsolete, we just use a phonetic way of spelling mapped to our alphabeth. There are no spelling contests around here ;) In the same way it would be much easier for the English language to use such a principle. We even already use it as a joke in Croatia, since you can spell almost all of English the way it sounds, for example - Robvorc iz a grejt čenl - Robwords is a great channel. (or another example, a famous joke here in Croatia: Pipl mast trast as - People must trust us).
There are at least 8 ways to pronounce A in English. Phonetic spelling isn't possible in English unless one accepts phonetic overloading for almost every letter.
@@harlangrove3475 And only uses one accent. Spelling would be different for how I pronounce English compared to how he does, for example. (I'm Pacific NW U.S.)
Both of you guys are right. You can use phonetic spelling because every person pronounces words differently and each person has a different idea of what each letter sounds like.
Hey neighbo(u)r, tell me about lj, is this really a different sound than just l and j after each-other? We also have these soft letters like "ny/nj" so I understand the difference, but in case of lj I always wondered whether it's really a different sound. In Hungarian, ly is completely unnecessary, sounds like 'j' in Croatian and we also have j for this.
My favorite "redo the alphabet" exercise is to go back to the Phoenician alphabet and what (we think) the letters sounded like, then trace them forward through time but with minimal sound changes through Greek, Etruscan, Latin, then finally English. You get some interesting results: - C makes the G sound - F making the W sound - G just straight up doesn't exist, and instead Z never moves to the end of the aphabet - Something theta-like comes between H & I for the "th" sound - Some new letter based on samech comes between N and O to make the S sound, and S actually makes the "sh" sound - Something phi-like comes after T for the F sound - etc. There are some sounds that need either the runic letters or a new invention to fill in sounds like "ch" or "v", and you need a bunch more vowel letters, but it's a fun experiment.
Curse cursive. I once had an affair with a very nice girl from Canada. This was before the internet, and we sent letters, which she wrote in a beautiful fluid cursive. I couldn't make out a single word, and thus, probably, lost the love of my life.
@Errol Van Stralen the cursive s, r, o, and z are all vastly different for the plain versions. I think it would be cool to see what he comes up with, seems like a smart fella
This is something I've been thinking about for years - just call 'W' WE instead of double-U. Then it fits with most of the other letters (except H, weirdo) and it could double as the word 'we', saving more time. Side note - I'd keep 'zed' as I just like how it sounds.
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a teform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
It's so fascinating how countries, languages and cultures get so disconnected because of those "small" kind of things. I have some friends close to a boarder with Germany for example, they just speak in dialect with some German friends no problem. Funny part is that they know only very little standard German language. Even something like how an alphabet changed, shows so much how connected countries were.
Yeah its really weird to have such vast linguistic differences beyween countries that border each other... its understandbale for island nations to differ but even then just look how different english and welsh are!
A lot of these changes are accent-specific. Would people with different accents spell words differently from each other? (For example: ‘ñew’ works for people who pronounce it ‘nyew’, but others don’t add a ‘y’ sound. ‘Lettə’ works for those who “drop the r”, as they say, but others don’t)
If the language should be democratic, wouldn't North America dictate English's future? So Americans and Canadians could keep spelling it 'new', but the English would have to spell it 'ñew'. On a tangent, would 'pure' become 'pyur' or 'pyu ər'? If long U should always begin with Y, that'd be 'pur', but 'new' could just be 'nu'. If 'cute' and 'lute' should retain their similar spelling but different pronunciation, who cares how to spell 'new' no matter how it's pronounced?
A couple notes: firstly, I think introducing the number four as a new letter pronounced ch...may be problematic. Instead, there's an incredibly simple solution: C says Ch. S and K can do its old job no problem, or even ß and K. Second, as someone else mentioned, we can keep Q as the QU, while simply dropping the U. Third, if we introduce ß, would it be viable to have S say SH by itself, since ẞ is pronounced as an unvoiced S? I know it typically represents SS, but the sound is the same. So instead of adding Ş to say SH, we can just make S say SH and ß say unvoiced S, while Z says voiced S. Does that make sense to anyone else?
Yeah I was waiting for him to say “Make ‘c’ a ‘ch’ sound since it’s utterly redundant on its own.” If I had to change the alphabet, that would absolutely be the first change I’d make. I’m all for your other suggestions, too!
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a reform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
I made my own writing system called ‘boyonian’ for a game I am making and there the ch or th or sh was just c’ or t’ or s’. To be clear, the letter h was just turned into a dot around where you would put an apostrophe. It was much quicker. Replacing one letter, instead of adding lots. It changed the writing system for the better, even if it’s not for the th ,ch or sh: E.g. ‘ello, w’at, ‘ow. Really short, really easy to read once you get used to it, and, best of all, I JUST CHANGED ONE LETTER! BRILLIANT!
I was waiting for a discussion about Eth, and you brought it! So beautifully done! Incredible! Thank you immensely for doing that! I am extremely happy and impressed. You really are excellent. Your narration is absolutely perfect. It's clear, slow enough that one can actually imagine and absorb all that is suggested, implied, and told. Excellent. Just excellent. Well done, my good man! Well done indeed!
No reason not to import both eth and thorn. If you really don't like the capital eth you can always use a larger version of the small letter. It would be far less foolish looking than that ridiculous kwak thing.
@@SethDeitch I agree. That Slavic uses a similar symbol in a different way is irrelevant. Russian uses plenty of symbols that look just like English ones and sound nothing alike.
In this case you can just switch to cyrillic alphabet, where there are a lot of characters that represent the English sounds. TH can be replaced with an old letter Ѳ (fita), that has the origin of Greek's theta. In old Russian script it represented F sound, but it was used only in borrowed Greek words with theta. W sound looks like Ў in Belorussian, shwa also exists in Cyrillic, different J-like sounds exist in Serbian. Соў, ѳə модəрн инглиш лэнгўиџ куд лук лайк ѳиз энд, ай кэн ассйум ѳэт ит ўил би мач изиəр фор йу ту спел ѳиз ўей [So, the modern English language could look like this and I can assume that it will be much easier for you to spell this way].
إف ذۍټ إز ذ کېس ذئن وي کۍن آلسؤ یوْز ذ ماډيفايډ پرسؤ-ۍرَبک (پښتو) ۍلفابئټ ټوْ رايټ إنګلش ۍز وئل If that is the case then we can also use the modified perso-arabic (pashto) alphabet to write English as well
Fun thought indeed. In general most slavic languages do a pretty good job with their alphabets. However, (all hypothetical obviously) making a population that is used to roman letters switch to fully cyrillic probably won't gain a lot of support. A variant of the roman alphabet with representation of these sounds would probably be a more practical solution. Something more like the czech alphabet with š, ž, č. And I don't really understand the reasoning behind not using both θ or þ and ð either - the IPA actually does this.
@@Nitrox-. I don't disagree and actually I do support your way of doing things, because my take was more of a joke, than a reasonable offer. However the biggest problem with your proposal is the reading habits. If you just replace everything with the same letters, it will be much harder to relearn to read and to write comparing to the brand new system with a different alphabet
Absolutely unconscionable to go through the trouble of introducing the thorn, and then sidelining the eth. The voicing distinction is so relevant even though there are very few minimal pairs. The difference in sound is crucial definitely need both if you’re gonna go to the trouble of having one otherwise you might as well just stick with the TH digraph.
As someone from Essex all my life, your segment on "L" is of course near enough spot on and I love it. What I love more is your dead certain "I'm right" at the end of it. 😂😂😂
The German ß does not actually replace a double s. Old signs are just spelled wrong because there was no type for ß, and for some reason it established itself that way. In reality they are distinct, the regular German s is voiced like an English z, but an ß is unvoiced. A double s on the other hand is unvoiced and additially modifies the vowel prior to it to be spoken faster, just like in English.
Replacing an „ß" with „ss" isn't wrong exactly. It's a recognized alternative, at least in Hochdeutsch. Indeed, it's the standard when words are written in all-capitals. But going the other way, you can't always replace „ss" with „ß". I know, it's confusing. Tut mir Leid. =)
In addition, German speaking countries reduces the use of ß in the big "Spelling reform" where ß after a short short vowel was replaced with ss. For example, Fluß (short u) became Fluss, whereas Fuß (long u) stays as it was.
Yes. Or it was a street in Switzerland or Liechtenstein where they don't have a "ß". It got lost in the change from Fraktur to Antiqua whereas it was reinvented in Germany for the new font. And some Germans think that the new writing rules changed every "ß" to "ss". In my hometown are new signs "Hauptstrasse" and "Berliner Strasse" even I don't see any Swarowski there.
Ћ is the most accurate one, this is pronounced "Tsh", but the lowercase is ћ, this is probably used by Serbian but I don't know if it's in that serbian cyrillic alphabet.
Having a letter for schwa would make typing people's accents in stories pretty interesting, as compared to standard written American/British/other English.
Indeed! The problem isn’t with q it is with u. We need to accept that q makes the kw sound not the k sound. Then just drop the u from any word where it is paired with q since it is no longer needed and use k for the few words where q makes a k sound.
@@harshsrivastava9570 No, "cƿen" is the oldest spelling (in the Roman alphabet). Anglo-Saxons didn't use "uu" (often modernized as "w") until after the Norman invasion.
Very interesting Rob. I've often thought about reintroducing some of the Anglo-SAxon letters in to the alphabet. Thing is, I get blank looks from people whenever I mention it.
You could get rid of many of our consonant letters by using the same character with a modifier marker for all our unvoiced/voiced pairs. /t/ and /d/ are pronounced the same way, except d is voiced. The same is true for s and z, f and v, p and b, the two ways to pronounce th, etc. In Japanese, these pairs are written with the same character, with a little marker added to make it voiced. For example, た (ta) and だ (da). Much more efficient.
Except it's not more efficient because when typing with keyboard, you have d as one symbol, while t" is two symbols which you'd have to spend a little more time for.
@@Liggliluff You're actually right! Why treat the dentals differently? I guess the only argument for only using one of them is that you'd be introducing just one new letter instead of two. But I think the efficiency of using both edh and thorn outweights that.
Not too surprising. The "W" sound in Polish is deliberately written as "Ł" as it is a mutated "L", as in the name "Łukasz" ("Lucas"). The same applies to "rz" ("zh") being a former "r", or "sz" ("sh") being a former "s". Just take the name "Krzysztof" (Christopher). The latter two fricatives written in clusters break with the otherwise phonetic spelling of Polish.
This was a lot of fun and you've taught me a lot about other alphabets, but it does bring to mind a terrifying period in my teaching days when I had to tackle the Initial Teaching Alphabet!
The RobWords alphabet is great! Kwak looks great. I would totally use it. I would love to hear your thoughts on the incredibly efficient and and somewhat recently "invented" Korean alphabet. I didn't know I loved language until I learned Korean. ❤
I was recently in Seoul and on a tour we saw the building where the alphabet was supposedly invented. They said the average person should be able to learn it in a day and "an idiot could learn it in a week". I think it's gorgeous.
What ns - it looks very uncouth / unrefined, and not great at all, especially that SH letter, and the N letter is a Spanish letter and it should stay that way, and the English alphabet doesn’t need actual changes, and Modern English spelling is perfect as it is, as ppl that are learning English are supposed to learn the pronunciation of the each word when learning the word itself! And love only exists for me the only lovable being and the only doll / delightful being, and the misused big terms love (and the love emoji) and dollightful and great and loved must be edited out, and also the unsuitable names sol and li and kar / Karin must be changed! And kwak looks like teenage spelling - Modern English spelling is very professional and serious looking and very easy on the eye, and the letter combinations are great!
Modern English is not a phonetic or semi-phonetic language, and it would never work as one, and one that learns English is supposed to learn the pronunciation of each word when learning the word itself, and not rely on pronunciation rules, and it should be like that in every Germanic language, not just English - the way Modern English words are spelled is great and easy to read and have a very refined aspect (Modern English & Modern Dutch have been made into the most refined languages with the most pretty and poetic words) and it should stay that way! It’s mostly the pronouns that need some modifying, and maybe the verb endings, if it would be possible to find different verb endings for each pronoun (but without affecting the infinitive or the overall serious sound) that are perfect and pretty and suitable, which isn’t easy for plurals! Besides, certain words should become part of the English vocab, such as pretty words from other languages, including languages that are a non-pretty language and only have a few pretty words!
Here's my latest alternative Orthography, F, U, U̇, UE, Þ, A, Æ, Ṙ, R, K, G, Q, H, X, N, I, J, P, İ, Z, S, C, T, B, E, Ė, M, L, Ŋ, D, Đ, O, Ȯ, Œ. Worth noting that X and Q represent sounds not common in most English dialects, and there are orthographical rules for it that mean not every sound gets a letter, the ch in cheese is a digraph for example, Tc.
Hi Rob, I'm a bit late to your video, but I hopefully I can still chime in here. I'm an English teacher and I've actually put some thought into this in the past and have done my own thought exercises of the restructuring of the alphabet several years ago to make the alphabet more phonetic and more practical, while at the same time trying to keep words from looking too foreign. There's many factors to consider, such as both upper and lower case letters, how easily they are to write in freehand, and how they would fit on a standard keyboard. Any new letters created should be different, yet still familiar enough to English speaking people so that they could figure out what words are just by looking at them. And the alphabet song will need to be either revised or replaced with an equal or better song if people were to teach the new alphabet to children. I think any attempts to get people to adopt an updated alphabet will result in failure if it cannot do these things successfully. I think having the squiggle marks on existing letters to represent different sounds is not something most English speaking people will want to adopt. Especially in cases where different squiggle marks are used on the same letter. The Ş letter, for example, looks too much like an S at first glance, and the same for upper case Ŋ with N, so it's just going to needlessly confuse most people. I think it's also unnecessary to introduce new letters for cases of common letter combinations when phonetically it's no different from the original letter sound. Instead of ß for SS, we can just cut out the extra S in cases where it isn't necessary depending on the pronunciation of each syllable for a word. Your new /kw/ letter doesn't need to be a new letter when phonetically it is just a /k/ and a /w/ sound together /kw/, which also happens to be what the letter Q does (see "queen" /kween/ or "quit" /kwit/). It'd be like inventing a new letter for the letters B and R with /br/ (as in "bring" or "broth") or the letters S and W with /sw/ (as in "swing" or "swim"). You mentioned removing Q and I'd also be in favor of that, but not replacing it with a new letter for the /kw/ sound, as we can just use KW. If English is going to add new letters, it should be for cases where letters already have multiple phonetic uses. The letter A for example, makes not 2, but at least 3 different vowel sounds (compare "apple", "snake", and "sofa""). All other vowels also have at least 2 sounds, and some of those overlap with each other, like with E and I, or O and A, and OO and U. The way we pronounce the letter "I" is also just a combination of short A and long E, but the letter itself is mostly used for the short I (as in "it", "swim", or "finish"). So we could unassociate some of these sounds to make each letter phonetically unique and make new letters where needed. Then there are some cases of redundancy with letters like C and K, or also C and S, or G and J. For G and J, it is simple, just use G for words like "good" and "game", and J for words like "giant". If /s/ and /k/ sounds are to be used with a single letter, then one of the three between C, K, and S should be dropped or changed. We could have C be used for /s/ and K for /k/ and maybe S could be repurposed as /sh/. Or we could drop K and use C for /k/ and keep S for /s/. Or we can use K for /k/ and S for /s/ and maybe C could be repurposed as /ch/ (as in the instrument "cello"). I'd prefer the latter. And the letters TH makes 2 different /th/ sounds (compare "think", "thorn" and "mother" to "this", "that" and "the"), so we'd need two new letters for TH, not just Þ (which is the /th/ sound of "think"). Ultimately, I think a more phonetic approach would be best to make an updated English alphabet easier for people to adapt. I started thinking about this when I first started learning Korean, as their alphabet is mostly phonetic with a few exceptions. The idea of a Korean spelling bee in unheard of. So imagine that being the case for English as well.
I agree with everything you said. Why adopt so many new letters when we have so many redundant letters? We should totally repurpose letters and change spellings. Very few new letters would be necessary.
Yes, I'm very surprised he didn't address the letter sound redundancy. There was a lot more that can be taken out or repurposed before we add new letters. But it was fun!
Instead of removing Q (Qu) why not remove the following u-and yes, have the Q take over for KW (which are phonetically equivalent)? With a nod to JRR Tolkien, English is Bizarrely inconsistent with C and K when it comes to soft (s sound-celebrate) and hard (klang). Tolkien used the K sound consistently for all his invented names and places where C is used. The Hebraic “ch” (produced in the throat, not the palate) is missing; so too are many sounds common to Hindi and Sanskrit-transliterations rely upon diacriticals (some pretty obscure) to indicate the particular sound. Do they need to be in the English language/alphabet? IMO no, but a standardized extension to represent sounds not usual makes sense to me. A good example is Chumos-properly pronounced with the Hebraic ch I previously mentioned but spelled, these days, with a simplified (and incorrect!) Humos. Silent letters weren’t mentioned in the video-get rid of them! UK English has a number of seemingly unnecessary vowels that American English shed (colour versus color). To what purpose? Last, diacriticals in general. Some of the changes suggested involved adding a diacritical and calling it a unique letter. Really? To my mind a letter is characterized as being a contiguous character; a diacritical modifies it from the standardized pronunciation. Does the middle n in onion deserve it’s own letter? Probably. Should it be ñ? My opinion: no. A unique character ought to serve. And I wouldn’t necessarily restrict myself to letters from other languages that have the desired sound-although they are a good first choice. Unique, easy to recognize and use shape seem to me to be more important in creating a workable language.
Az an Ingliş spiker, hu risently lerned Turkiş, I was fasinated bay haw isi ther raiting sistem is. As you could see I was trying to reflect Turkish letters and way of writing up, and I think it makes a perfect sense, some of your new letters makes perfect sense, while others were complicated things, but I still think Turkish is way kore straight forward and I could literally write any Turkish sentence I hear even without knowing the full meaning which is so beautiful in my opinion.
The eszet is a solution to problem better solved by the elimination of the practice. Also, C is just a cut-rate K and a double for S, so chuck it, same for X (sounds like KS or Z). Kwak is cracked, just keep the Q and let it ALWAYS make a KW sound. I really dig the addition of Thorn and the other letters, though I dispute your ditching of the Eth. Instead of Ð, perhaps we could use a larger version of ð, or make a grammatical rule that whenever the TH sound begins a word it's always Þ, and is pronounced as a hard TH (e.g. that), while a th sound that comes in the middle or end of a word is always a soft TH (e.g feather or with) and is represented by an ð. I really think we need new vowels to cover the sounds OO, OI, and OY make and a removal of the EA vowel combination from the language. Just use an E, an EE, or a yet-to-be-determined letter to replace the AY vowel combo. Now that I think of it, can we just get rid of double letters altogether when they don't make the distinct sound of two letters (e.g. unnamed)?
The X is useful because it helps truncating the word. I would use it in other words with KS sound like axesory, trax, exept, the name Jaxon, etc. There are so many redundant ways of spelling that truncating words should be done if possible like getting rid of double letters and silent letters. The letter C is the most useless letter and should scrapped.
Unnamed is a bad example since you drop the voicing temporarily between the N’s. Hyphenated words would be a solution, so un-named. Solves double vowels like re-elected, but I much rather the diarises (reëlected)
My idea for an alphabet is 26 standard letters ( -c ) ð - voiced th þ - unvoiced th ɕ - sh č - ch ŋ - ng ɳ - n with another consonant following ɫ - l with another consonant following ƾ - ts ɒ - o (‘bot‘) œ - oy ɤ - er ʌ - u (‘cut‘) ʉ - long oo ʊ - short oo ɱ - m with another consonant following ψ - ps ä - ah (‘father‘) æ - a (‘fat‘) ɔ - aw 𐑣 - ow ɛ - e (‘bet‘) ɪ - i (‘bit‘) ʒ - zh ɾ - ‘rolled‘ r (the t in water) ʇ - the t in the end of bot ʳ - ɛʳ = air, ɪʳ = ear ˀ - the ‘-‘ in uh-oh
I have just 1 small problem with this new alphabet: too many letters look too similar which would be incredibly difficult to read when people have bad handwriting
I believe that to be a minor problem. Words are read in the context of all the letters so one mistake doesn't make a difference. For example: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabridge uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
@@EdgarRoockIt is incredible that I managed to understand that even if I am not an English native speaker (I have a level equivalent to First of Cambridge and B2 in European Common levels), but computer algorithms excluding AI cannot solve that.
This was fun. What I really want to adopt is to punctuate sentences at the beginning and the end. Learning Spanish, this concept made so much sense to me. Reading a child a story, you know in advance how the phrasing needs to sound. No need to back up and read it over.
¡Yes! I agree completely. ¿Can you imagine how much easier it would be to read a script aloud if you knew from the beginning of each sentence if it was going to be a statement, question, or exclamation? ¡Excellent idea!
@@VTSifuSteve ohhh i never quite understood the reason for using punctuation like that in Spanish. Just felt weirdo lol But as someone who was diagnosed with dyslexia, after so much struggling while presenting scientific studies during college, It just made sense to me! I can feel that confidence coming while reading a text. ¡We need alphabet and gramatical revision asap!
As a native Spanish speaker, I think it's unnecessary in English. Using auxiliaries (do, did, will, etc) does the job fine for questions. In exclamations, it could be a good idea though.
You should run a Discord to bounce ideas and revise this. There are some redundant letters we could reuse. For example c to consistently use for ch in chip, x to consistently use for sh in ship, etc.
For "W" I don't think there's anything that needs changing, except maybe for the name of the letter. Other languages just call this letter "wee", similar to how "V" is called "vee", and I think that's just way more elegant and consistent with the rest of the alphabet lol
The easier thing to do is just say Q only properly makes the the “kw” sound and drop out the u. Then you just replace q with k in the few words where q actually makes its own sound.
Yes, exactly what I said. Just drop the U
I went through a whole rabbit hole to come up with the same idea. XD
Yep, I came to the comments to say the same.
Yep, that's what I said, too. But you beat me by an hour.
Swedish dropped the letter (except for surnames) and replaced "qu" with "kv", which I think is a good solution.
Rob, if you would like to use Ž for "zh", then use Š for "sh" and Č for "ch". Consequence gives ease of learning.
Hey I just noticed that 'SH' and 'ZH' are the exact same but you dont vocalise with SH but you do vocalise with ZH.
@@JimCarner Ž for "zh", then use Š for "sh" and Č for "ch". Well I assume you mean with the squiggle on the bottom not the top! The symbol on the top was used for N to mean 'ng'.
@@JimCarner You are right. But I'll not correct my previous comment.
@@JimCarner Why should I do it when it is not necessary?
To avoid diacritics at all you can take the
cyrillic Ж and Ш. So that these sounds will have their own letters and avoid confusion.
Greetings from Bulgaria ❤ 🇧🇬
If you change the alphabet you are required to also include a workable alphabet song. No exceptions.
Yes! Our current song does weird things to the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. If TTLS was to use the Alphabet Song's tempo:
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, how I wonder what-the-hell you are. Up above, oh so high, like a dot, in the sky. Now I know my ABCs, this sounds bad so stop with me.
Actually, the two songs differ in rhythm, not tempo.
@@EllenKozisek does this 3rd song differ in rhythm rather than tempo itself? …
Baa, Baa, Black sheep. Have you any wool? Yes Sir! Yes Sir! 3 bags full! One for the master! One for the dame! And one for the little boy, who lives down the lane! Baa, baa, black sheep! Have you any wool? Yes Sir! Yes Sir! 3 bags full!!! 🙂
@@craiglungren8703 Yes. Tempo is how fast the beats go by. More or less notes on a beat is rhythm.
You could add a symbol to a letter for Qu
Rob:Q sucks
Also Rob:*pays a artist money to make something to replace Q*
I þink ðat we shud recúvver too Owld Ingglish letterz, eð and þorn, to make Ingglish much eezier to spel. For exzámpel: uððer (other), faaðer (father), þaut (thought), aþþlete (athlete), etc.
Hi Rob, I was in first grade in 1966/67. They carved out about 30 of us and got our parents to agree for us to be part of an experiment. We learned to read using the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA). They did exactly what you are doing; they added characters to match common sounds. Every word was written exactly as it sounded. You can Google it and see their alphabet. The results of the experiment was that we, the ITA students, learned to read much quicker and were several grades ahead in our reading ability. However, because we had to then adapt to the traditional alphabet we had the arduous task of learning a very illogical system utilizing a bunch of silly extra and sometimes silent letters. To a first grader the ITA system was superior and made much more sense. I still have a couple of kids books written in the ITA language. As an adult I am a very proficient reader, not sure if I can attribute that to ITA or not.
Wow, this is fascinating! Thank you for sharing this😍 What a shame, after the success of the experiment, they didn't roll this out to schooling! Think of where we'd all be now, had we followed in your footsteps!!
Bros 1000 years old 💀
@@Luke_the_LukYou clearly bad at Math 💀 he's 57-58 years old
Next video on this plz
Me too, except preschool and 1969. Mom & Dad were worried because I was already reading the Latin alphabet.
Teacher said not to worry, I was proficient with both & I'm still a total alphabet nerd. :)
For ch, sh and zh I would recommend you the letters č, š and ž coming originally from the Czech language. They are used in most of Balto-Slavic languages.
Yeah, it would make sense to use those, because they all use the same sign at the top. It wouldn't be a good idea to have for example the ç letter represent the "ch" sound but for "zh" to use the ž letter, it needs some consistency.
Agree. I like these letters a lot.
I was gonna suggest the same exact thing.
THIS
in turkish, just the "ç" "ş" "j" for these
“English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”
- Sir Terry Pratchett
It learned that behavior from one of its parents: Norse
@@Mereciror any number of other conquerors' languages - Latin, French, West Germanic...
You mean "Eŋliş”?
@@Merecir Norse doesn't take particularly heavy from other languages. If anything Norse went around and stuffed random pieces of itself in other languages' mail-boxes.
Unless you mean continental Scandinavia after the black plague. But that was more just so many people died that the language's grammar completely collapsed and it lost multiple sounds. Because it's kinda hard to keep a language stable when the closes person to you is the 6 year old feral girl two villages over because, except for the two of you, everyone in your village, hers and the one in-between died.
So it's a Frankenstein's monster...of a bandit of a language!
Thank you. I have revised the German alphabet a couple of times. While I would have left Q to make the sound of qu, I really honour you for using my favourite letter which is ß. :-)
I þink ðat we shud recúvver too Owld Ingglish letterz, eð and þorn, to make Ingglish much eezier to spel. For exzámpel: uððer (other), faaðer (father), þaut (thought), aþþlete (athlete), etc.
In German langgwij, yu duplicate ða consonants too indicate ðat ða previos vouel iz short. We shud doo ða same wið Ingglish.
in all seriousness, would love to see thorn make it's comeback
Thorn is better than many letters still in the alphabet.
*its
@@j.a.weishaupt1748 finally after over 50 years of life I find a response worthy of my overblown ego. I’ll take your grammatical insight to heart and change my evil ways. The trauma of 10th grade ‘advanced grammar’ class has been manifest all these years in my errant use of the apostrophe. You’ve exposed the deep trauma and truly your correct earned the thumbs up and your second sigel on your shoulder patch
@@saltyyankee5149 that's errrr... a unique response you've given there www
I would love to see the disappearance of the misplaced apostrophe.
For ch,sh,zh to keep things consistent you could just simply use č,š and ž from the Czech alphabet. These characters or letters are called or known as chet, shet and zhet and they are used to make the ch, sh and zh sounds in the Czech Republic Alphabet and we could have them in English as well.
I like that. Above I suggested using a Z with a cedilla instead of zhet, but I like this idea better.
@@ConceptJunkie I see
Perfect. I thought the same.
Modern Czech was designed to be phonetical , and it makes it easy to read without understanding it. But some of the single letters have different uses. jam = džem. However, boat = loď and is pronounced lotch. And Character = charakter, but the ch in Czech is pronounced like Scottish Loch.
THANK YOU SO MUCH! the háček looks sooo much neater than the Cedilla! Read my comment above.
One major problem with giving the schwa a letter is that, as you mention, English speakers often reduce other vowels to schwa. This means that, if you're spelling words how they're pronounced, you might need to accept that nearly every English word has multiple correct spellings.
Yes; both "Taiga" and "Tiger" have the schwa at the end in British and Australian/New Zealand English, but not in U.S. English, where the R in tiger is pronounced. An American student objected when I said that Taiga and Tiger are pronounced identically.
We might have to accept that there are different forms of English that require different spellings.
@@RainbowMama143 I'm not talking about different dialects, though that's certainly a problem as well. I'm referring to using multiple spellings for a word within a single dialect (for example "the" /ði/ and "the" /ðə/)
This is actually a big reason why Swedish can't fix the horrible mess with /x/ (the sje-sound). It's basically used as a schwa, but for for consonant clusters. It can take on many different forms, so spelling things phonetically would obfuscate where the words came from. (which is confusing and clashes with how some people pronounce them)
Yeah as an American we like to pronounce our r's
6:45 I mean is there any language with a real usage of the letter Q?
Besides keyboard input.
As a spanish speaker it's just another way to say K and we don't use K because most of the K sound is made with C or QU.
The problem with having schwa (“ə”) as a separate letter is vowel reduction. Vowels are reduced to a schwa based on the stress. But sometimes the same word will be used in a different context or in a different form, changing the stress and, if schwa were a letter, changing the spelling. Sometimes the word “a” is pronounced as a schwa, sometimes not. Sometimes the word “to” is pronounced with a schwa, sometimes not. Etc. So we’d have: “To be competətive, Americə is goiŋ tə have tə give American compətişion reciprocity if ə dəzen or more countries pass a reciprəcaşion чreaty.”
And not only that, but different speakers (particularly with different accents) don't necessarily reduce vowels in exactly the same ways.
not everyone pronounces the first t in treaty as a tʃ.
i like ` for that where schwa is written as whatever vowel it originally was (or à if its unclear/irrelevant/whatever) so finite and infìnite for example
Using the schwa in spelled form is dumb to begin with, all languages have it, none write it.
@@HyTricksyy i understand and to some extent agree w the general sentiment but you just very confidently made two claims that are both like objectively verifiably wrong
If we are fantasizing we might just make the letter 'C' into the CH sound. C doesn't do anything that K and S can't do.
I love this idea!
I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR SO LONG I HATE WHEN PEOPLE REMAKE THE ALPHABET AND THROW OUT K SAYING C CAN DO IT. IT INFURIATES ME TO NO END.
That being said, agreed.
Yes, I was wondering why he didn't do away with C, it doesn't make any sound of its own
@@al3xa723
The Etruscans already did that (throw out kappa), and it’s the reason the Latin alphabet’s letter G looks like a modified C rather than the Greek letter gamma.
That's what is what C is being used for in my native language (Malay/Indo), and it works way better.
How about Š for "sh" and Č for "ch" from Czech and Baltic alphabets? This solution is a bit more consistent than adopting a Turkish and a Cyrillic letters for this purpose.
EDIT: and now after I discovered that you propose to adopt Ž from Czech, this idea looks even better.
Exactly, if we design a new alphabet, we might as well make it look consistent. No need to have three different squigglies.
I love the Czech alphabet loads of useful letters to steal, just please god , don't add Ř. Any letter that requires a large proportion of the population to have speech therapy to pronounce it, should have been strangled at birth.
100% on board with that. I remember admiring the Slovak alphabet because of those letters the first time I encountered it. So intuitive.
Yeah but then you're adding another letter into the alphabet, which in my opinion makes it more, not less, complicated
@@JB9000x And the reason is that there are these sounds in the language.
Strictly speaking, there are much more sounds in each language than the letter they use to represent these sounds, and only "essential" sounds have dedicated letters. Sh and ch are certainly among those what I called "essentials" and deserve, imho, to have separate letters.
If the simplicity of the alphabet is the target, then we could drop some letters (obviously "c", "q") to replace them with some combination of 2.. Say, lets replace "j" with "dz" and "f" with "ph". Saving 2 letter, getting short alphabet! But I would not vote for moving this way.
Hi Rob, my late father researched this very topic for over 30 years. However his focus was vowels and their many sounds. IE many more than 5 in English. He was developing what he called "12 Vowel English", specically aimed at people learning English from Asain decent to have an intermediary step in understanding how to navigate English. If you would like to know more, lemme know. Great content!
I would like to know
@@CRINGEESTUFF-q7s same!
Leaving a comment for a reminder.
This sounds so interesting!!
Okay, thank you all for showing interest. Please allow me some time to do some digging. It was supposed to be a free/open source thing. My father wanted it to je accessible to anyone. I believe there is an internet ready page but it wasn't renewed, years ago. I will have to contact the fella that did that for my father. Will reply in this comment section when I have more. Hopefully soon but please don't wait in suspense. Thank you all again for showing interest amd pardon the tardy response. Good day!
The way you use ß is actually different from the German way. In German, it is used to signal that the vowel that comes before it is a long one. So "graß" would be pronounced in a British way and "poßeß" would just be weird😂
Edit: I just realized that the first ss in possess is actually not voiceless (which ß always is) so that makes it even worse🥲
Doesn't necessarily mean that we need to adopt the exact same grammatical rules as in German language. We could still use the letter to contract double ss without any rules attached to it!
@@Ashille01 im more on the side of removing double letters altogether instead of adding a new letter for that job
If getting rid, just drop one of the s's. Spelling should become easier still with less need to know when to write a double letter.
@@oilydoubloonz6001 the thing is there is actually a pattern with them. They denote a certain type of stress between syllables (e.g. poses has stress on the first syllable but possess has stress on the second. However you could probably get rid of the second double s)
@@Ashille01True. But as Rob in other parts of the video stresses, he doesn't want to use letters, that are differently used in other languages, so he shows inconsequence here. Maybe also a lack of knowledge of this rule. But it doesn't make me wonder, as in practice the ,,elder Generations" (eg Generation X) haven't accustomed to the spelling reform of 1996. Back then the use of ss & ß was the opposite of how they are used nowadays, they swapped places. Therefore for an unknowing nonmotherspeaker it if one writes ,,dass" or ,,daß" seem interchangeable, whilst the latter's spelling is wrong and just a relic, that is merely a sign, that the writer likely is not of the younger generations.
I’m fully here for binning C… it seems more confusing than useful, having two potential sounds that are both duplicates of other letters in the alphabet.
What about just turning 'c' into the 'ch' sound? That seems like a good compromise imo.
if you removed ‹c›, you'd have issues such as the words ‹ice› or ‹ace› becoming ‹ise› and ‹ase› which would be read as though they're ‹ize› and ‹aze›
doubling the s to create ‹isse› and ‹asse› would make the words look as though they're pronounced /ısə/ or /asə/, due to how doubled consonants typically function in english
if you wanted to fully ditch ‹c› in such positions, the most sensible replacement that i know of would be ‹ß›, creating ‹iße› and ‹aße›. however, rob's already replaced just a simple double-s with ‹ß›, which isn't actually how it works in german, as ‹ß› is used to indicate that there's a /s/ sound and that the preceding vowel is long, which is how ‹c› is currently used in english when it makes a /s/ sound
Unpopular opinion but I like the letter C more than K because it looks nicer
I must disagree on principle :P
@@zoecassI say, we just use (or rather, uze) ⟨s⟩ for the /s/ sound, and ⟨z⟩ for the /z/ sound. Why not write words like phase rose, and demise as faze, roze and demize, and replace ice and ace with ise and ase, job done. Why use ⟨s⟩ for the /z/ sound when we have a perfectly good letter ⟨z⟩ for it?
You can replace /ku/ sound with a C and replace every word using a C with a K like ‘ciet’ ‘quiet’, ‘cest’ ‘quest’, and ‘cotient’ ‘quotient’. And the other words: ‘kome’ ‘come’, ‘komplete’ ‘complete’, and ‘kan’ ‘can’. With words that end in ‘ck’ like ‘quick’ and ‘kick’, you can just drop the ‘c’. ‘cik’ ‘quick’ and ‘kik’ ‘kick’
using c for this is absolutely insane
The alphabet is not the main problem. What English needs is consistent spelling so people don't need to remember the pronunciation and the spelling of each word separately. It's so much easier to write stuff when the same letter (or a combination of letters) represents the same sound everywhere. Even the ridiculous German spelling of č (tsch) is ok, because it's consistent.
The problem with that idea is the fact of dialects are different not only between English speaking countries, but even in different regions of the same country.
@@indigobunting5041 Not really. There are plenty of languages with dialects that have consistent spelling.
@@indigobunting5041 Who says we need a single spelling system for all dialects?
There are already competing spelling systems so we might as well just let different dialects spell things differently.
How gracious of you to permit others to spell things as they actually saond... just use the phonetic alphabet?
@@indigobunting5041 no big deal. The same thing happens in Spanish and still we have consistent spelling.
Fun fact: ẞ and ß were originally two different letters, ẞ is a digraph of ſ+z, and ß is a digraph of ſ+s. Eventually they became interchangeable, but without a capital, so ẞ is sometimes used as a capital ß.
ẞ is officially the capital of ß in my country since a few years! Hello from someone with ß in their last name that can finally have the real name on passport etc. instead of it being written ss.
😂
@@Skaryysß is not really a legitimate letter, is how I was told. Like umlaut.
@@Skaryysßẞ
@@SchemeTintFocusan umlaut is a legitimate letter tho, just not in english
@@SchemeTintFocusin German letters with the umlaut (ä,ü,ö) are legitimate letters that each have their own sound, same with the ß. What many people do nowadays is if they can’t write ß because they don’t have the right keyboard or something is writing ss or sz (this one is not vey common, at least from my experience). If you can’t write the letters with the umlaut you can write ae for ä, oe for ö and ue for ü
The problem with using phonetic alphabets is that not everyone pronounces words the same way, for example, "crayon" has 5 different pronunciations, but as long as people understand what people are trying to say, I guess it works.
too true. I had to take a second to realize that some people do pronounce it "nyew" when I saw the thumbnail lol
another problem is that pronunciation is expected to change again in future. another problem is that some people are going to use old alphabet. i have watched only 1 m 21 s only for now.
The trouble with that idea is that there is never a time when everyone understands something. There are always people who will get it wrong. That is one of the reasons that the English language is so hard to learn, especially as a second or third language. People who are influential got things wrong and we are stuck with their mistakes.
Spanish has a phonetic alphabet and we can understand each other just fine even with different pronunciations. If anything it would help to further standardize the language. I find it interesting that Spanish has a regulatory body called the RAE or Real Academia Española which regulates the language internationally regardless of country, it’d be nice for English to have a similar thing in the future.
@@3lisem168 Yup - I pronounce it "noo", not "nyew".
the first and probably the best video ive ever seen on this channel
I think there was a better solution for 'sh' 'ch' and the "zh" sound like the 'su' in 'pleasure'. In my language (Bosnian, a south slavic language), they're written like š, č, and ž. It makes it super consistent and easy to understand. Much simpler than taking the letters for sh from turkish, ch from cyrillic, and zh from czech.
After reading the comments I see a czech person has already suggested what I just did lol. Our alphabet is based on the Czech one so it makes sense lol
çange
Привет бо҆шняк
I'd also drop the j letter and replace it with an annotated 'd' since 'J' is phonetically part of the same family, no?
@@MitchYouCantScratchJ is still a needed letter.
There's no Bosnian language, you literally just took Croatian language and alphabet and slapped Bosnian on it. You've got some Turkish words, but it's a dialect of Croatian. Your alphabet is Croatian alphabet, made by Ljudevit Gaj, which based some of the letters on the Czech alphabet, and some he made up because he didn't want too many letters. Like LJ, NJ and DŽ
No such thing as Bosnian
The letters 'X', 'Q' and 'C' always seemed like something you could comfortably nuke out of our alphabet and replace with other letters or pairings of letters. I guess there'd be one Twitch streamer who might not be overly happy about it though.
Hah, too true.
don't nuke, that's a waste of keyboard places, reassign instead. reassign instead of creating new letters. maybe we still need to borrow some, but we have more than enough letters to make English at least a little more logical.
What are you going to use for CH then? Tsh? Kh makes the sound in loCH
Yeah I was surprised he didn't just get rid of X, Q, C, and W, when other letters can make those sounds. I kuestion uay ue kan't niks all 4!
We can make them use other sounds
one of my favourite things is that we have an 'f' in english and yet we still use ph to create the f sound
Only in words derived from Greek (photon, photo) because that's how the "f" sound is make in Greek.
@@remycallie No, Greek has the letter "phi" (Φφ). The Romans didn't have phi, so when they imported Greek words containing phi they replaced it with "PH" (Latin only had what we call "capital" letters) just as they replaced "theta" (Θθ) with "TH." Europeans using the Roman alphabet followed this practice when they made up new words based on Greek roots.
@@chriswinstanley6824 Interesting. I should have known this because I know the Cyrillic alphabet, which is basically a combination of the Latin and Greek alphabets, and their letter for "f" is almost the same as the Greek (can't represent it here). Cyrillic creates one letter for a whole bunch of sounds that we require two (or more) letters to represent in the Latin alphabet, including "sh" "ch" "shch" (like freSH CHeese) "ts" (like iT'S) and "yo" (like Yo -- Adrian!).
Yes, english and french are the only living languages borrowing ancient Greek who write like that...
even tho the Greeks themselves never did because they had their own alphabet and old English and old French used the f
The ph spelling only dates from a few centuries back when smart people saw the ph in old latin texts and decided that was cool
Spanish replaces the ph with f, for example: "Aerophobia", and in spanish we say "Aerofobia".
I’m loving ðis new Icelændic Ælphabet.
Īm luving it tō
ωπατ αβουτ δακε ζςεεκ?
(What about fake Greek?)
But wait… WHATS ÞAT YOU SAY? ÞAT ISNT ENGLIŞ!
ROB ONL3 MENŠIONED ICELÆNDIC ONCE IN THIS VID!
ARE 3OU OUTTA 3OUR BRAIN?
WH3 ARE 3OU ÞINKIŅ ÞIS IS AN ICELÆNDIC ÆLPHƏBET? ITS NOT!
Iota pi phi beta kappa phi beta sigma alpha alpha phi
Love this! I get that the bigger issue with the English alphabet is that we use just 5 - 7 letters to represent about 20 vowel sounds.
We could get rid of vowels completely, like in Hebrew.
Digraphs would solve the matter, they just would have to be applied consistently
@@nix-consulting Hebrew still has vowels though, they're just memorized. They can optionally be written as nikkudot (kind of like diacritics) as well. Honestly, it makes for a rather shitty language if your written form has implied spoken parts that just have to be memorized (which is a reason why I partly hate English, unfortunately my only language).
Not really, the biggest issue is unconsitency, and accents are just a really bad excuse, we Hispanics speak really differently and we all write the same.
It would be nice if the new alphabet was also in an order that made sense. Like maybe all of the vowels are grouped together and then the consonants are in their voiced/unvoiced pairs.
That's a great idea!
god no can you imagine the nightmare scenario this causes in paper filing
@@bigsmallgiant3751 That's the least of the nightmares a new alphabet is going to cause, but you're completely right. Will reprints of books be in the new or old spelling? You notice it when you read 19thc German literature. All these 'th's where today it's a straight T (Thor become Tor, Thür Tür etc.)
The current order, I believe, is arbitrary. Consider Chinese. All those strokes to make one character. A Chinese dictionary is organized in stroke count. I offer you: I C J U S O X T L V P D Q G H N F A Y Z K R B M W E
a better character for CH would be the Czech Č because it resembles the C and does not get confused with the digit 4. Instead of shwa you could use the Romanian ă which is pronounced like shwa, and it resembles the letter A
@@xohyuu Either
Caps Lock + 4
or
Shift + = followed by Shift + C
Why not change the C to a CH? A C is nothing but a K or an S. We don't need it. (Kat, kan kap, kar.)
a worse problem with Cyrillic Ч is that when you write it in cursive, it looks exactly the same as the Latin r
@@vahonenko But you can not do this and it will look like _ч_
@@vahonenkoyea ur right im half russian and half turkish and i see it confuses people
Hi Rob, Roland here from NL,
About the KW-sound: Why would you search for one letter for this sound? Let's take 'quicksilver' (Hydrargyrum = Hg, chemically). This translates into Dutch in 'kwik'. I would say this is the most efficient way to pronounce the 4 different sounds in this word. Try to say 'kwik' slowly and you will discover that the first (and the last) 'k' is formed in your throat. Then comes the 'w', which is formed by your lips only, apart from a gust of breath. Then the 'i' speaks for itself. Or does it...? How many ways are there in English to pronunciate the 'i' or leave it unpronunciated. (Bizniz a.s.o.).
Apart from this, I am a great fan of your channel. Keep on the good work!!!
Nice! My recommendations:
Instead of the new letter, just use Q for the “qu” sound. Australia has been doing this for years with “Qantas.” Seems more efficient than a new letter.
And for “ch,” I prefer Ç because it follows the same logic as Ş and makes sense in English. I wouldn’t worry so much that Ç is used differently in other languages, because we’ve already seen such rule differences and we just need to establish the rules for English.
Then again... all CH is, is just a T in front of a SH sound
SH is a completely different sound to S. So maybe have a different letter for SH instead of just a cedilla on an S. Add a cedilla or something to the new SH letter, to indicate the T sound at the beginning and make the CH sound.
@@marioluigi9599 I like that idea too, that might be even better.
I've always pronounced it as kantas
Why didn't Rob add ü,or ç
It reminds me of the letter J. As far as I'm aware, English is the _only_ language that gives it a soft G sound. Every other language pronounces it differently.
The Latin Turkish alphabet has been developed quite recently, about a hundred years old in fact so I believe that is why we have ı i, cç, sş, oö, uü, gğ letters refer to different but similar sounds. It makes it much easier to mimic other languages in Turkish because we already have the written concepts of the common pronunciations.
What alphabet had been used in Turkey before that?
@@dejanjovanovic2298 Turkic languages had used the Orkhon scripts in the old times. And in the Ottoman period, Turkish people used Ottoman Turkish which was written in Perso-Arabic script.
Especially in words of Arabic and Persian origin, I would say?
We have had the sounds those letters are referring to (except ı and ğ) in my native Hungarian language for close to a thousand years ago, so for me it's relatively easy to read Turkish.
ğ is not even a real sound AFAIK, more of a glottal stop? Correct me if I'm wrong.
@@zk513 We pronounce ğ the way British people pronounce R, that's the best way I can describe it :D
Perso-Arabic might be difficult.@@foxus-a113 | Cầu nguyện cho Үкраїна và hòa bình.
So what do you think? And are there any more letters I should add or take away?
EDIT: Who knew that the letter C was so many people's trigger? I'm coming round to the idea that we should get rid of it too. Especially as I've solved the problem of needing it for CH. Keep the ideas coming.
Ai dont know.
Ai sii it ferst.
Down with c
Quenya alphabet
I have seen the rune ᛢ/ CWEORTH used to represent the Kw sound. Hopefully that helps!
I think that all of your decisions in this video essay were for personal taste and that none of them make the alphabet more practical. In fact, I think you've made it vastly more awkward.
You should drop C,Q, and X:
C can be substituted with k
Q can be substituted with kw
X can be substituted with ks
You should use Czech letters
Š for sh like in shoe
Č for ch like in chat
Ž for zh like in pleasure
I came here just to say that! Why borrow the cedilla from Turkish if we're going to then take the caron from Czech? Wildly inconsistent.
@@lukek8522 The thing is, using a letter for zh is useless. J exists, and plejır could easily be a replacement for pleasure. The last e is useless, drop the last letters like e which are silent that serve no purpose. Using other vowels for the ' sound is consfusing, so use ı instead. It is used so often in literally all languages but none of them use it. Back to s in pleasure, there is a reason J is different than the other J's in other languages. The zh sound. Why do we use J in June while we can say Cune? But for that we must remove the useless usage of the letter C being used as S and K. Easy. Now, we have a beautiful Cune. Dont forget the e though. But... Now it is Cun, which is obviously pronounced faster than June because the purpose of E at the end is removed. So add double vowel pronounciation for u, as oo is already one. Cuun. But, as I would prefer, I would use the letter ğ. It accurately presents lengthening the vowel, is not confused by not even a single letter in any other language, strsight up soft g. So we have a Cuğn, Plejır. But, in English, the re part of pleasure is pronounced like french r, but soundless. Smells like a letter I already mentioned, ğ. Plejığ. But, you can say "uh" too, so it becomes pleasuh, but again, ğ used to have the pronounciation similar to gamma in Greek and another letter i forgot in Arabic. Also, why does the "g" have the pronounciation, ci? Remove that. We dont need that. Gigantic? Caygentik. Oh yeah forgot to say, why is a pronounced like "ey" but not schwa? It is like that in Turkish, and I have no idea why people add the letter "y" in vowels. Vowels are supposed to be alone. So is it for U, pronounced as "yu". Simply, why? Just use yu, make more sense because it gives Y a meaning.
Þank you for bringing back my favourite letter.
Þe letter þ is pretty cool indeed
I use boþ "Þ" and "Ð", and I would use ðe schwa, but my keyboard doesn't have it.
@@armakitty1I can do it! Ә! Tutorial: Go to settings app, Click keyboards, Choose Kazakh. To switch keyboards, hold the lined globe.
i love the letter þorn
@@eliaszero852 i read ðat as "p__n" at first before noticing ðe second line lol (i put the "ð" for fun)
When I was learning Spanish, I was thrilled to learn that everything is spelled exactly as it sounds. What a joy!
There are silent Us in Spanish whenever you see the sequence “gue” or “gui.” To indicate that the U must be pronounced, the convention is to write “güe” or “güi” as in “vergüenza” or “pingüino.”
And of course, all Hs in Spanish are silent (except in English loanwords).
That alone would help the English language 98%. I agree. And for God's sake don't ever reintroduce genders to words for agreement. It's the hardest part of learning Spanish.
@@harrychalfin5835 Actually the "u" IS pronounced. For example in the word pingüino, it is "guu eee no" not "gee no" as if the "u" were silent. It's a diphthong. If people enunciated correctly that is.
@@ScienceNotFaith let me clarify:
In Spanish, the letters C and G are hard before the vowels A, O, or U; C and G are soft before the vowels E or I. (Though I think in Spanish they reverse the "hard" and "soft" labels when referring to these sounds.)
In IPA notation:
Hard C: \k\
Soft C: \s\
Hard G: \g\
Soft G: \h\ (or \x\)
But what if you want a *hard* C or G sound to be followed by an E or an I?
For a hard C sound: Use Q, followed by a silent U (ex: ¿qué? ¿quién?). If the letter C is used instead of the Q, it means that the U must be pronounced (ex: ¿cuándo? ¿cuánto?) In the original Latin (and in the other modern Romance languages I believe), these were all spelled with QU, pronounced \kw\, as in modern English.
For a hard G sound: Retain the G but insert a silent U (ex: guerra, jugúe, Guillermo). The presence of the silent U tells us that the G is hard. But this still leaves open the question how we should spell a word with the sound \gw\ (as in "Gwen") followed by an E or an I. That's where the dieresis comes in.
Examples:
1) vergüenza (pronounced /beɾˈɡwensa/, NOT /beɾˈhensa/ or /beɾˈgensa/)
2) pingüino (pronounced /pĩŋˈɡwi.no/, NOT pĩŋˈhi.no or pĩŋˈgi.no)
3) lingüistico (pronounced /linˈɡwi.sti.ko/, NOT /linˈhi.sti.ko/ or /linˈɡi.sti.ko/)
Hope that clears it up. Do you agree?
@@harrychalfin5835Also in Spanish double L is pronounced L + Y like Sevilla is actually pronounced Sevilya.
Dude, I've been using your kwak for the symbol of myself for decades. My first name begins with W and my last name K, so it seemed quite logical. When asked for my initials, I write this symbol.
Additionally, as a student of language, and in particular orthography, I've been pondering this task, also for decades. I do more replacement than creating & deleting, as you do. I won't go into my own replacement ideas here, because everyone and their sidekick have engaged themselves in this fun little game.
Whoa, that's really a neat coincidence. Now you have a name for your K/W combo
If I hadn't described the precise development process for kwak, you'd be well within your rights to accuse me of plagiarism.
Now I want my own special symbol too.
@@RobWords It's called a monogram. Also used when royal married couples combine their initials.
@@RobWords You're going to have to find a way to combine the R and the W in your name into a single symbol ;)
@@prim16 I have an idea: something like \R/
I think you just invented a new language at this point. I am officially going to be using this new alphabet now and see if my family or friends reacted to it. It will be intriguing to witness.
About the ß: in proper German, it has little to do with efficiency. ss or ß determines whether the vowel before it is short or long. Masse (mass) has a short a, Maße (measures/dimensions) has a long a.
Also in German a single consonant denouns a long previous vowel, while a double consonant denouns a short previous vowel.
While that works for most consonants, such as Hefe (long e, one f) versus Riffe (short i, double f), it doesnt work for S, as a single S in German is already doing the same sound an English Z makes (Nase = Nah-ze), thus we needed another S for the "long/double vowel, singe S" approach, which ended up being how the ẞ is used today (Rose/Ruße/Russe, first two have a long vowel last has a short vowel; first one has an English Z sound "Roh-ze", last two have an English S sound "Ruh-se, Rus-se").
The reason polish letter for /w/ looks like , is because historically it represented the sound /ɫ/ (velarized/dark l) and it only changed relatively recently. It also still has correspondences in inflection, like mały-mali (small (he)-small (they)), tło-na tle (background-on the background).
The problem with having a separate letter for schwa is that most people don't consciously perceive it as a different type of vowel but rather just a weaker version of other vowels. I think it would be better to consistently use a letter that is already used frequently for schwa, like "a" or "e", to write it in al cases. In Dutch we also have schwa as an unstressed vowel, but it's always written as "e".
You forget words like "gezellig" and "eindelijk" where the schwa is spelled as "i" or "ij".
@@dirk_math6794 You’re right, I feel so dumb now!
I think phoneticians are splitting hairs too much, but some argue using 1 schwa.
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a teform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
Add schwa but only use ending words with 2 or less syllables. Or between two vowel sounds that is always weak form.
This is amazing. I've had similar thoughts while developing a psuedo-conlang for my D&D campaign. However, I just repurposed "c" for the "ch" sound because we already have graphemes for the "s" and "k" sounds. I 100% support the return of Þ Þough I am on the fence about the rest lol. Well I like ş too. I may start my own mini campaign for it lol
I enjoyed this. Phoenetically, "qu" is not one sound but two so, in my opinion it shouldn't be seen as one sound in the alphabet here. I loved that you added schwa. I have taught that to my students every year as we use it so very much in Australia. I liked the addition of thorn, eng, sh and cheh too.
*laughs in X*
NG is two sounds as well, but you don't mind adding Eng? It seems unnecessary to me
@@baberiel Ng is actually only one sound on its own. In fact it's used as such in some languages.
@@krossdreemurr42 but in English, it doesn't appear on its own at all, or at least not that I know of. This is an upgrade for the English (En-glish, not Ng-lish) alphabet. If we start adding all the other sounds from other languages, we should add the clicks from languages like Zulu, etc...but then it's no longer an English alphabet; it becomes a global phonetic alphabet, which is no longer the point.
@@baberiel That is not even close to what I said, nor did I suggest such a thing. And it's comically missing the point, to an extreme degree.
This was almost therapeutic to watch. Like cleaning out an old cupboard, except the cupboard is the English language, and old meaning hundreds of years.
I’ve recently been learning a bit of Basque, and was surprised to find out their written language was only formalised in the 1960s. This seems to have made their alphabet very efficient and logical.
Basque uses "tx" for "ch", which is amazing, but they didn't invent their own letter for that sound. Which shows that most languages are going to employ diagraphs rather than have a single letter.
Cyrillic has pretty much all of your additions covered. Adding new glyphs rather than decorations on existing letters is a more clean approach anyways.
I agree, but use C for Ch, X for Sh & 3 for Zh in my own secret alphabet. K & Q simply dispenses with hard C for this reason.
What makes it better than a simple diacritic?
@@vulpes7079 Diacritics are sloppy. I like languages without them. And considering that Cyrillic was created to cover the shortcomings of Greek, it would make sense to not reinvent the wheel.
@@combusean how are they "sloppy"?
@@vulpes7079 Becaue they offset the weight of the glyph and most of the time not even connected to it. and besides, with the infinite options to create letters, why essentially reuse one, especially if they don't really sound that similar?
I would make the letter c make a ch sound instead of it making an S or K sound. I would use š for sh, ž for zh(like the su in measure), Q will make a kw sound without the U. I would add both the Þ/þ and Ð/ð(other languages shouldn't impact this at all), I would add the Æ/æ letter. I would add ñ. So the sentence "I love fish and chicken" would become "I love fiš and ciken" as an example
Edit: I left out a lot from my vetsion of a revised English alphabet
I agree, that sounds way better!
In indonesian c already makes the ch sound
I didn't include the idea of using c for ch in my long post about this but that was an idea I've had for a long time in my pointless musing about the alphabet. What is the point of the letter C making the sound of an S sometimes and the sound of a K other times. So eliminate C for all current purposes and repurpose it for CH. Let's do it.
How did you type thorn
Oh rught
There is actually a difference between "ß" and "ss" in German. "ß" is used in the middle or at the end of a word after a long vowel, indicating its length. "SS" is used when the preceding vowel is short. The use of "ß" or "SS" is not interchangeable, even though "SS" is occasionally seen in older texts due to outdated spelling rules. "ẞ" is also called "scharfes S" ("sharp S"), especially in Austria.
You use it in Austria too? I thought both, Switzerland and Austria removed it from their alphabets. Seems I was wrong
Also, funfact: They recently added a capital version of the ß: ẞ cool huh?
I always thought of ẞ as S set, a set of S's. I didn't realize there was rules in its use.
These rules are the accurate use of ß as according to the German language spelling reform in 1996. For several decades prior, people just used ß to replace all double s’s. That wasn’t terribly long ago, so there are plenty of documents around that use different rule sets still.
Lets just make it cool looking like this ⚡️⚡️
@@b5fremdet Switzerland and Liechtenstein don't have it but they never introduced it officially either (that is, when it was defined as a separate letter in Germany and Austria), so in a sense they didn't remove it.
This is something I have thought about a LOT! I like most of the additions, except I propose we just use the letter Q by itself for the "kw" sound. I was surprised you didn't didn't go further since we have too much duplicity. We do not need G to have 2 sounds so "G" is used for the "hard g (guh)" and J is used for "huh" . Same with the letter C, so my proposal is that C is the new "ch" and K is used for "hard c". S is only used for "s", C doesn't get "s" anymore. I don't think we need anything for double S either, just use one S. And use a Z when that sound is "z." I would also prefer to use the Greek letter Theta (O with a slash) instead of the Thorn which looks too much like a P. As someone with very sloppy handwriting it is much easier for me to cross out an O than to get the hump placed properly to distinguish between a P and a Thorn.
This is so much better than his suggestions overall, but we must bring back thorn. It is very easy to distinguish þ from p or b because it has a vertical line above and below, and this is provable because they still have all three letters in Icelandic without causing issues.
In my own private ways of rytN (now publik) I do most of what you say here. I like the Q and C ideas very muc. I also point out that if Tis was in audio, all problems solved, unless a transkription is kalled for.
Θ is a Greek letter; not an English nor Latin letter. Þ is an English letter, but not a Latin letter.
Luckily for you, I will sometimes use θ in place of þ, specifically when þe word in question is obviously Greek by using non-English digraφs, like in þe word "diφθoŋ." (Yes, I suggest replacing any "ph" within Greek loanwords not with "f", but with "φ".)
"propose we just use the letter Q by itself for the kw sound."
Changing the way the existing letters sound wasn't the point of Rob's video, though. He was adding or removing letters from the alphabet. Changing the sound of Q is beside the point and doesn't change the number of replacements nor the look of his final alphabet. Even the mnemonic song would be unaffected, since Q would still be there as a letter regardless of the way it sounds.
Ø is a vowel in many languages tho
Hi Rob,
I really love your videos. As a German native I'd like to tell you that the "ß" doesn't replace double s. The example mentioned with the street sign is in fact a typo. Quite the contrary, "ß" is always followed by a long vowel (Fuß, Straße etc.), double s by a short one like in "Kasse" (unless in Switzerland, since they don't have it, so the plural of bus and the word for repentance are the same: Busse).
Keep going!
Benjamin
I love the cyrillic alphabet, there is a letter for every sound and once you know the alphabet you can read everything perfectly, as it is absolutely phonetic. It has the sh letter which looks like a cursive W, it has the shch letter which is the cursive w with a little tail, it has the ch letter you displayed and the ts letter which sounds like the zeds in pizza or the ts in lots, bits, etc. And it even has the soft sound to add when you want to soften a letter as in a soft n sound.
Cyrillic also neeeds to be adapted to local langages. For example as far as I know no cyrillic alphabet has a letter for "TH" sound, or even any way to approximate it, and russian cyrillic doesn't have a letter for "W" sound - but Belorussian does.
@@lonesail True, we just don't have those sounds in our languages.so not a problem.
@@lonesailThe English alphabet has already been converted to Cyrillic, although not officially the other day look at the alphabet "Cyringlisch" from "Niño Eduardo Evan Fernande" (I hope I spelled it right).
@@lonesailse the expanded Cyrillic. Like you use the extended Latin alphabet, the Germans or Czechs use it. Because the same Belarusian Cyrillic alphabet is Cyrillic, but expanded. (The following Cyrillic characters can be used for th: Ђђ-[ð] Ћћ-[θ] (they are from the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet))
it's not "absolutely" phonetic coz of vowel reduction in languages like russian and consonants shifting into kind of a "weaker" forms at times. But that's still very minor difference compared to, for example, english, so ye, kinda
also soft sign literally only exists in russian
I'll never forgive English for getting rid of the runic letters 😔
They are closely related to frisian, and not altogether different
I actually did what RobWords has done here, with runes instead, but for Danish. If anyone is interested I could share it but I doubt it. xD
I resurrected most of Elder Futhark to get the characteristic straight lines, then I added a whole bunch of letters for vowels, added some for a couple of new sounds like the soft d, added a letter for the stød that you place after it, and updated the spelling for hundreds of words. Some letters go away, such as C, Q, W, X, Z, though no vowels do.
There’s also some funny stylistic choices. For example it’s got a line above and below so you can write non-straight lines and : is used to separate words. ; for a comma, and : plus a large actual space for a new sentence. Loads of things I haven’t figured out though. I only did this because that’s how runes looked.
Runes are unequivocally awesome looking and I completely agree it's a shame they were done away with. But remember, the power is yours to start using them again if you'd like to! NOTHING CAN STAND IN THE WAY OF FULFILLING YOUR RUNIC DREEEEEAAAAMMMSSSS
I have an anglo saxon runik font & when I use it I use T and N (Torn & ing) very frekwently.
dont be angry bud, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to Dark Side.
I watch a whole lot of TH-cam, yet this is probably the most creative premise for a language video I’ve ever seen, period. Thank you!
I think 'Қ' kazak k (q) works too it is a deep k sound so depending on how the k sound sounds you can use this it is similar to k which makes it easy too
Also you can use 'Ö' for for example: Förniçr something like this furniture the u becomes more like a ö sounds for some reason
I'm a school-based speech-language pathologist and I have been discussing the schwa sound with one of the students on my caseload. I'll have to show him your section about the schwa. Also, I vote for including both thorn and eth to differentiate between voiceless and voiceless "th." Theta from the Greek alphabet also is an option for voiceless "th."
The two pronunciations of "th" are such a difficult thing to explain to people needing to pronounce words correctly. A separate letter (or letter pair) would be nice.
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a teform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
@@jdhatl I suspect that would just transfer the problem to the spelling which would be worse.
Or just write voiced "the" as "dhe". "Dhis", "dhere", "dhat", "dhem", "dhose".
@@PeterDMayr See my comment above.
That's the thing I love about latvian - we speak as we write and we write as we speak. The only letter that has 2 different sounds is "o" (in the words that have latvian origin it's pronounced more as "uo" (e.g. "koks", meaning tree), but in words that are from other languages it's pronounced as just "o" (e.g. "radio" and other internationalisms)).
Forgot to mention, but latvian also has č (ch), š (sh), ņ (nj, the same as ñ) and even ķ (kj). Latvian as a language used to have ŗ (rj), but it has died out and isn't in use anymore. Furthermore, vowels can have the little line on top making them "longer" (e.g. ā (aa), ē (ee), ī (ii) etc). Do I believe that Latvian is the best language ever to exist? No. Definitely not. But, in my opinion, it's far better than English (except the fact that everything is gendered and there really isn't a neutral gender, like something you'd see in Russian)
Yes, and "ai" is pronounced "e" (I think).
Well, since the point is trying to simplify the orthography, eliminating confusions, I think it'd be important distinguish the "th" sounds, using Ð (only for /ð/ sound) and Þ (only for /θ/). Plus, despite loving ß, it'd more efficient just turning all the SS into S (when sounded like /s/), using Z when it's /z/. I also think that J should be used with all the /dʒ/, and G only for /g/. C could represent /tʃ/, once K would be used for all the /k/, while Q (without U) could stands for /kw/, so it wouldn't be necessary a new letter. I really enjoyed the other solutions though, like Ə, Ŋ, Ñ, Ş and Ž.
the voicedness of θ doesn't matter in english for almost every word
Hard agree. I don't think we need a ss/ß distinction which in German only exists to reflect the length of the preceding vowel.
I think using diacritics is the way to go. Essentially it's what ñ is, an n with a tilde diacritic. I think using hačeks for voiced and unvoiced 'th', 'ch', 'sh' and 'zh' (treasure/pleasure/measure 's') is the way to go. With the two forms of 'th', we can use d for voiced 'th' and t for unvoiced 'th', each with a hacek to demonstrate that it's not the standard letter sound. For that matter, the simple solution to q is the throw a breve on it. Take a note from the ñ orthography and put a small u on top of the q.
What we really need to do is make separate vowel characters for each vowel sound. Probably easiest to crib the ligatures from IPA or wherever.
@@dizzydaisy909 "Therapy" "Think" "Thank" "Thick" "Throng" "Throw" : "This" "That" "There" "Them" "Though" "Then"
I think you're completely wrong on this one, just my opinion. Those words were right off the top of my head. Maybe I can't think of any that are particularly confusing, but the point is they're two entirely different sounds. We don't write "dough" as "tough" or "go" as "ko" so why should we represent both sounds with only one letter?
Consistency is the problem. English is horribly inconsistent. read vs read (present vs past) and read vs red (past of read vs the color) sound the same so in speech how do you know which one is being said? By context. Just write "red" for both the color and the past tense verb. Same with lead and led: led for both the past tense verb and the mineral. "reed" for the present tense verb and the grasslike plant; context will tell you which is being meant. "Why do you reed so slowly" does anyone honestly think it means "the grasslike plant" in this sentence??
Better make a 14 letter alphabet for a smaller keyboard. Then put hats or schillas on top of the letter and double ,or even triple the letters. Even if you don't write the hats ,the meaning can be inteligibile if the letter are arranged by similarity. For ex.. P next to B.
It has bin ă plejăr end uiș iur çanăl ă șaini dei .
I þink ðat we shud recúvver too Owld Ingglish letterz, eð and þorn, to make Ingglish much eezier to spel. For exzámpel: uððer, faaðer, þaut (thought), aþþlete, etc.
I love the initiative! Being a Croat I was always flabergasted by the complex spelling of most languages. As kids we never had to learn spelling, just the letters because of the simple idea that YOU SPELL IT AS YOU SAY IT. All around ex-Yugoslavia we have this principle and it makes the spelling obsolete, we just use a phonetic way of spelling mapped to our alphabeth. There are no spelling contests around here ;) In the same way it would be much easier for the English language to use such a principle. We even already use it as a joke in Croatia, since you can spell almost all of English the way it sounds, for example - Robvorc iz a grejt čenl - Robwords is a great channel. (or another example, a famous joke here in Croatia: Pipl mast trast as - People must trust us).
There are at least 8 ways to pronounce A in English. Phonetic spelling isn't possible in English unless one accepts phonetic overloading for almost every letter.
@@harlangrove3475 And only uses one accent. Spelling would be different for how I pronounce English compared to how he does, for example. (I'm Pacific NW U.S.)
Both of you guys are right.
You can use phonetic spelling because every person pronounces words differently and each person has a different idea of what each letter sounds like.
i'm all for using Latin alphabet. less letters not more.
Hey neighbo(u)r, tell me about lj, is this really a different sound than just l and j after each-other? We also have these soft letters like "ny/nj" so I understand the difference, but in case of lj I always wondered whether it's really a different sound. In Hungarian, ly is completely unnecessary, sounds like 'j' in Croatian and we also have j for this.
My favorite "redo the alphabet" exercise is to go back to the Phoenician alphabet and what (we think) the letters sounded like, then trace them forward through time but with minimal sound changes through Greek, Etruscan, Latin, then finally English. You get some interesting results:
- C makes the G sound
- F making the W sound
- G just straight up doesn't exist, and instead Z never moves to the end of the aphabet
- Something theta-like comes between H & I for the "th" sound
- Some new letter based on samech comes between N and O to make the S sound, and S actually makes the "sh" sound
- Something phi-like comes after T for the F sound
- etc.
There are some sounds that need either the runic letters or a new invention to fill in sounds like "ch" or "v", and you need a bunch more vowel letters, but it's a fun experiment.
Or you can just make a new version of Cyrillic for English.
I absolutely loved the chaotic energy this video had
Damn, that's a perfect description. Chaotic energy. I LOVE IT
Oh wow! Þat is very cool, Rob! I love this ñew alphəbet!
Please add the characters to write cursive. I personally love writing in cursive and find it makes writing both beautiful and informative.
Cursive/handwriting is kin to lower case. (vid: M-m, T-t). Not to say every letter gets a lower case change. (vid: V-v, S-s)
Curse cursive. I once had an affair with a very nice girl from Canada. This was before the internet, and we sent letters, which she wrote in a beautiful fluid cursive. I couldn't make out a single word, and thus, probably, lost the love of my life.
@Errol Van Stralen the cursive s, r, o, and z are all vastly different for the plain versions. I think it would be cool to see what he comes up with, seems like a smart fella
@@Lighthouse_out_of_order that sounds painful, I'm sorry that happened to you
This is something I've been thinking about for years - just call 'W' WE instead of double-U. Then it fits with most of the other letters (except H, weirdo) and it could double as the word 'we', saving more time.
Side note - I'd keep 'zed' as I just like how it sounds.
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a teform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
I like it. Double-u is dead. From now on W is pronounced we. Long live W(we)
It's so fascinating how countries, languages and cultures get so disconnected because of those "small" kind of things.
I have some friends close to a boarder with Germany for example, they just speak in dialect with some German friends no problem.
Funny part is that they know only very little standard German language.
Even something like how an alphabet changed, shows so much how connected countries were.
Yeah its really weird to have such vast linguistic differences beyween countries that border each other... its understandbale for island nations to differ but even then just look how different english and welsh are!
I assume you're talking about Alsace?
Well done. Good program. You are getting closer to best of BBC ( from the good times) with this episode.
A lot of these changes are accent-specific. Would people with different accents spell words differently from each other? (For example: ‘ñew’ works for people who pronounce it ‘nyew’, but others don’t add a ‘y’ sound. ‘Lettə’ works for those who “drop the r”, as they say, but others don’t)
If the language should be democratic, wouldn't North America dictate English's future? So Americans and Canadians could keep spelling it 'new', but the English would have to spell it 'ñew'.
On a tangent, would 'pure' become 'pyur' or 'pyu ər'? If long U should always begin with Y, that'd be 'pur', but 'new' could just be 'nu'. If 'cute' and 'lute' should retain their similar spelling but different pronunciation, who cares how to spell 'new' no matter how it's pronounced?
@@harlangrove3475 Interesting insight!
@@harlangrove3475 Ƕut abaut pjeir?
@@harlangrove3475 pyó
A couple notes: firstly, I think introducing the number four as a new letter pronounced ch...may be problematic. Instead, there's an incredibly simple solution: C says Ch. S and K can do its old job no problem, or even ß and K. Second, as someone else mentioned, we can keep Q as the QU, while simply dropping the U. Third, if we introduce ß, would it be viable to have S say SH by itself, since ẞ is pronounced as an unvoiced S? I know it typically represents SS, but the sound is the same. So instead of adding Ş to say SH, we can just make S say SH and ß say unvoiced S, while Z says voiced S.
Does that make sense to anyone else?
Yeah I was waiting for him to say “Make ‘c’ a ‘ch’ sound since it’s utterly redundant on its own.” If I had to change the alphabet, that would absolutely be the first change I’d make. I’m all for your other suggestions, too!
You could also assign the ‘ch’ sound to the letter ‘Q’ and assign the ‘sh’ sound to ‘X’.
cell & sell
now:
sell & sell
^
unneded homophone
Not a bad video. Thanks. But i think the idea to add letters will demand unnecessary costs (new keyboards in school), and break down communication if we use the French reform model (current users & new learners, starting at grade "allowed" to use either spellings, which happens already with words like colour & color). But a reform is needed. The English spelling system has tens of 1000s of errors, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research, that impairs learning to read by 2 y. (Seymour, 2003) for most English-speaking students (vs Finnish students learning a very phonemic orthography). Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes? So, lets use the current system. Tweak thousands of words a little. If homonyms scare you, the truth is that no one BATS an eyeLASH OVER them, especially in oral communication. There are many. Context matters of course. If there are too many misunderstanding, alternate spellings could be used, but in rare instances. Sign my petition. twitter.com/DmarePierre/status/1649296424247640064?t=1-mU1QoZnJtyqNhNg0d95w&s=19
I had the exact same thought and was checking the comments for it.
Why not just remove the U after the Q? We all think of Q having a QU sound anyway.
It's fewer strokes than the silly 'kwak'. I mean the 'kw' is just too complicated a character. There should be a four stroke max limit!
Except for queue, which I pronounce keeoo, not kwee...
@@petertrudelljr should be 3 strokes. Capital M and W can be fixed by turning the middle into single strokes
@@d00dEEE thats just a horribly spelt word in the first place when we already have 'cue'
@@d00dEEEwhen I read "keoo", I just realized you use the O differently in English.
O in "Own" , "sOund" , "Off" are all pronounced differently 😂😂
I made my own writing system called ‘boyonian’ for a game I am making and there the ch or th or sh was just c’ or t’ or s’. To be clear, the letter h was just turned into a dot around where you would put an apostrophe. It was much quicker. Replacing one letter, instead of adding lots.
It changed the writing system for the better, even if it’s not for the th ,ch or sh: E.g. ‘ello, w’at, ‘ow.
Really short, really easy to read once you get used to it, and, best of all, I JUST CHANGED ONE LETTER! BRILLIANT!
I was waiting for a discussion about Eth, and you brought it! So beautifully done! Incredible! Thank you immensely for doing that! I am extremely happy and impressed. You really are excellent. Your narration is absolutely perfect. It's clear, slow enough that one can actually imagine and absorb all that is suggested, implied, and told. Excellent. Just excellent. Well done, my good man! Well done indeed!
@BagelBrainBFDIA irrelevant.
@@singlesidemanrelevant.
No reason not to import both eth and thorn. If you really don't like the capital eth you can always use a larger version of the small letter. It would be far less foolish looking than that ridiculous kwak thing.
@@SethDeitch I agree. That Slavic uses a similar symbol in a different way is irrelevant. Russian uses plenty of symbols that look just like English ones and sound nothing alike.
De "th" is like "d" or sometimes "t" in other Germanic languages... e.g.
Thank
Dank
Tak
In this case you can just switch to cyrillic alphabet, where there are a lot of characters that represent the English sounds. TH can be replaced with an old letter Ѳ (fita), that has the origin of Greek's theta. In old Russian script it represented F sound, but it was used only in borrowed Greek words with theta. W sound looks like Ў in Belorussian, shwa also exists in Cyrillic, different J-like sounds exist in Serbian. Соў, ѳə модəрн инглиш лэнгўиџ куд лук лайк ѳиз энд, ай кэн ассйум ѳэт ит ўил би мач изиəр фор йу ту спел ѳиз ўей [So, the modern English language could look like this and I can assume that it will be much easier for you to spell this way].
YES!!!
That looks so cursed omg xD
إف ذۍټ إز ذ کېس ذئن وي کۍن آلسؤ یوْز ذ ماډيفايډ پرسؤ-ۍرَبک (پښتو) ۍلفابئټ ټوْ رايټ إنګلش ۍز وئل
If that is the case then we can also use the modified perso-arabic (pashto) alphabet to write English as well
Fun thought indeed. In general most slavic languages do a pretty good job with their alphabets.
However, (all hypothetical obviously) making a population that is used to roman letters switch to fully cyrillic probably won't gain a lot of support. A variant of the roman alphabet with representation of these sounds would probably be a more practical solution. Something more like the czech alphabet with š, ž, č. And I don't really understand the reasoning behind not using both θ or þ and ð either - the IPA actually does this.
@@Nitrox-. I don't disagree and actually I do support your way of doing things, because my take was more of a joke, than a reasonable offer. However the biggest problem with your proposal is the reading habits. If you just replace everything with the same letters, it will be much harder to relearn to read and to write comparing to the brand new system with a different alphabet
To be honest: this is surprisingly easy to read. Love it!
I like the idea of having the letter that looks like a 4 be the 4th letter in the alphabet
Oh, my! LOVE the new alphabet, the video, and ESPECIALLY the song!!! Rob, you're the best.
My favorite part of this is the outro script. It really shows how just a few changes in symbols make the same language look completely alien
Absolutely unconscionable to go through the trouble of introducing the thorn, and then sidelining the eth. The voicing distinction is so relevant even though there are very few minimal pairs. The difference in sound is crucial definitely need both if you’re gonna go to the trouble of having one otherwise you might as well just stick with the TH digraph.
After all, we distinguish d and t, z and s, b and p, v and f, etc.
As someone from Essex all my life, your segment on "L" is of course near enough spot on and I love it. What I love more is your dead certain "I'm right" at the end of it. 😂😂😂
Immediately says bring back thorn. Love it
The German ß does not actually replace a double s. Old signs are just spelled wrong because there was no type for ß, and for some reason it established itself that way. In reality they are distinct, the regular German s is voiced like an English z, but an ß is unvoiced. A double s on the other hand is unvoiced and additially modifies the vowel prior to it to be spoken faster, just like in English.
Yep. Mase, Masse and Maße are all pronouned differently
I was just about to say that lol
Replacing an „ß" with „ss" isn't wrong exactly. It's a recognized alternative, at least in Hochdeutsch. Indeed, it's the standard when words are written in all-capitals. But going the other way, you can't always replace „ss" with „ß". I know, it's confusing. Tut mir Leid. =)
In addition, German speaking countries reduces the use of ß in the big "Spelling reform" where ß after a short short vowel was replaced with ss.
For example, Fluß (short u) became Fluss, whereas Fuß (long u) stays as it was.
Yes. Or it was a street in Switzerland or Liechtenstein where they don't have a "ß". It got lost in the change from Fraktur to Antiqua whereas it was reinvented in Germany for the new font. And some Germans think that the new writing rules changed every "ß" to "ss". In my hometown are new signs "Hauptstrasse" and "Berliner Strasse" even I don't see any Swarowski there.
Þis is lovely
Nice one Robwərds!
No is ðis not þis
No is Yis not Ððis@@Dis_4_6
“This” looks a lot like piss….😬
@@CarinTurner 🤣
@@Dis_4_6 ye its ðis
Kwak iz awesuhm! I want it on my keybord. Þanks alot! But thorn should be a mix of t and h
Ћ is the most accurate one, this is pronounced "Tsh", but the lowercase is ћ, this is probably used by Serbian but I don't know if it's in that serbian cyrillic alphabet.
Having a letter for schwa would make typing people's accents in stories pretty interesting, as compared to standard written American/British/other English.
Depending on the author I've definitely seen a few things pop out like "well what cullah wazzit?"
- "Wazzaaa!"
- "Oh mah gawd!"
- "Y'all know that ol' man"
I use quikscript, a variant of Shavian, to take notes every day. It's a very efficient alternative orthography for English, with around 40 letters.
Shavian? ...sounds interesting..
I started with these a long time ago but mine changed over time to the point it doesn’t look like either anymore.
I played around with learning shavian a while ago. I should pick it up again.
thank you for allowing me to find this, it looks amazing.
I stan thorn but I will hear no more tarnishing of the good name of Q she’s perfect the way she is and she deserves to be seen
Indeed! The problem isn’t with q it is with u. We need to accept that q makes the kw sound not the k sound. Then just drop the u from any word where it is paired with q since it is no longer needed and use k for the few words where q makes a k sound.
@@donkeysaurusrex7881 I hereby declare that if I _ever_ see a Q with no U (for example qeen) I will not try to correct it.
@@michaelstreeter3125 but the word originally was 'cwen'
@@harshsrivastava9570 No, "cƿen" is the oldest spelling (in the Roman alphabet). Anglo-Saxons didn't use "uu" (often modernized as "w") until after the Norman invasion.
Would we have to change the Freddie Mercury band to Qeen then? What of the logo?
Very interesting Rob. I've often thought about reintroducing some of the Anglo-SAxon letters in to the alphabet. Thing is, I get blank looks from people whenever I mention it.
You could get rid of many of our consonant letters by using the same character with a modifier marker for all our unvoiced/voiced pairs. /t/ and /d/ are pronounced the same way, except d is voiced. The same is true for s and z, f and v, p and b, the two ways to pronounce th, etc. In Japanese, these pairs are written with the same character, with a little marker added to make it voiced. For example, た (ta) and だ (da). Much more efficient.
Especially since he titn't want a tistinction between voicet ant unvoicet th ...
The same is true of ch and j. And, of course, sh and zh.
Except it's not more efficient because when typing with keyboard, you have d as one symbol, while t" is two symbols which you'd have to spend a little more time for.
@@DedYefremiy Why would that have to change?
@@Liggliluff You're actually right! Why treat the dentals differently? I guess the only argument for only using one of them is that you'd be introducing just one new letter instead of two. But I think the efficiency of using both edh and thorn outweights that.
Fun fact: In some dialects of old Polish L and Ł are pronounced extremely similar. Not anymore but in 20s and 30s it was a thing.
Not too surprising. The "W" sound in Polish is deliberately written as "Ł" as it is a mutated "L", as in the name "Łukasz" ("Lucas"). The same applies to "rz" ("zh") being a former "r", or "sz" ("sh") being a former "s". Just take the name "Krzysztof" (Christopher). The latter two fricatives written in clusters break with the otherwise phonetic spelling of Polish.
Because Ł in Polish used to meant a velarised (a.k.a "dark") version of L, before its pronunciation morphed into a /w/ sound.
The tilde in España is more similar to the italian sound "gn" (gnomo, segno) that to the english words union etc. It is a little bit stronger
This was a lot of fun and you've taught me a lot about other alphabets, but it does bring to mind a terrifying period in my teaching days when I had to tackle the Initial Teaching Alphabet!
The RobWords alphabet is great! Kwak looks great. I would totally use it. I would love to hear your thoughts on the incredibly efficient and and somewhat recently "invented" Korean alphabet. I didn't know I loved language until I learned Korean. ❤
I was recently in Seoul and on a tour we saw the building where the alphabet was supposedly invented. They said the average person should be able to learn it in a day and "an idiot could learn it in a week". I think it's gorgeous.
If you say a letter called kwak, follow te countyre of a kwsk glass instead? www.vhbieresbelges.fr/wp-content/uploads/Kwak.jpg
@@RobWords Hey, Robwords?
What ns - it looks very uncouth / unrefined, and not great at all, especially that SH letter, and the N letter is a Spanish letter and it should stay that way, and the English alphabet doesn’t need actual changes, and Modern English spelling is perfect as it is, as ppl that are learning English are supposed to learn the pronunciation of the each word when learning the word itself! And love only exists for me the only lovable being and the only doll / delightful being, and the misused big terms love (and the love emoji) and dollightful and great and loved must be edited out, and also the unsuitable names sol and li and kar / Karin must be changed! And kwak looks like teenage spelling - Modern English spelling is very professional and serious looking and very easy on the eye, and the letter combinations are great!
Modern English is not a phonetic or semi-phonetic language, and it would never work as one, and one that learns English is supposed to learn the pronunciation of each word when learning the word itself, and not rely on pronunciation rules, and it should be like that in every Germanic language, not just English - the way Modern English words are spelled is great and easy to read and have a very refined aspect (Modern English & Modern Dutch have been made into the most refined languages with the most pretty and poetic words) and it should stay that way! It’s mostly the pronouns that need some modifying, and maybe the verb endings, if it would be possible to find different verb endings for each pronoun (but without affecting the infinitive or the overall serious sound) that are perfect and pretty and suitable, which isn’t easy for plurals! Besides, certain words should become part of the English vocab, such as pretty words from other languages, including languages that are a non-pretty language and only have a few pretty words!
Here's my latest alternative Orthography,
F, U, U̇, UE, Þ, A, Æ, Ṙ, R, K, G, Q, H, X, N, I, J, P, İ, Z, S, C, T, B, E, Ė, M, L, Ŋ, D, Đ, O, Ȯ, Œ.
Worth noting that X and Q represent sounds not common in most English dialects, and there are orthographical rules for it that mean not every sound gets a letter, the ch in cheese is a digraph for example, Tc.
Hi Rob, I'm a bit late to your video, but I hopefully I can still chime in here. I'm an English teacher and I've actually put some thought into this in the past and have done my own thought exercises of the restructuring of the alphabet several years ago to make the alphabet more phonetic and more practical, while at the same time trying to keep words from looking too foreign. There's many factors to consider, such as both upper and lower case letters, how easily they are to write in freehand, and how they would fit on a standard keyboard. Any new letters created should be different, yet still familiar enough to English speaking people so that they could figure out what words are just by looking at them. And the alphabet song will need to be either revised or replaced with an equal or better song if people were to teach the new alphabet to children. I think any attempts to get people to adopt an updated alphabet will result in failure if it cannot do these things successfully.
I think having the squiggle marks on existing letters to represent different sounds is not something most English speaking people will want to adopt. Especially in cases where different squiggle marks are used on the same letter. The Ş letter, for example, looks too much like an S at first glance, and the same for upper case Ŋ with N, so it's just going to needlessly confuse most people. I think it's also unnecessary to introduce new letters for cases of common letter combinations when phonetically it's no different from the original letter sound. Instead of ß for SS, we can just cut out the extra S in cases where it isn't necessary depending on the pronunciation of each syllable for a word.
Your new /kw/ letter doesn't need to be a new letter when phonetically it is just a /k/ and a /w/ sound together /kw/, which also happens to be what the letter Q does (see "queen" /kween/ or "quit" /kwit/). It'd be like inventing a new letter for the letters B and R with /br/ (as in "bring" or "broth") or the letters S and W with /sw/ (as in "swing" or "swim"). You mentioned removing Q and I'd also be in favor of that, but not replacing it with a new letter for the /kw/ sound, as we can just use KW.
If English is going to add new letters, it should be for cases where letters already have multiple phonetic uses. The letter A for example, makes not 2, but at least 3 different vowel sounds (compare "apple", "snake", and "sofa""). All other vowels also have at least 2 sounds, and some of those overlap with each other, like with E and I, or O and A, and OO and U. The way we pronounce the letter "I" is also just a combination of short A and long E, but the letter itself is mostly used for the short I (as in "it", "swim", or "finish"). So we could unassociate some of these sounds to make each letter phonetically unique and make new letters where needed.
Then there are some cases of redundancy with letters like C and K, or also C and S, or G and J. For G and J, it is simple, just use G for words like "good" and "game", and J for words like "giant". If /s/ and /k/ sounds are to be used with a single letter, then one of the three between C, K, and S should be dropped or changed. We could have C be used for /s/ and K for /k/ and maybe S could be repurposed as /sh/. Or we could drop K and use C for /k/ and keep S for /s/. Or we can use K for /k/ and S for /s/ and maybe C could be repurposed as /ch/ (as in the instrument "cello"). I'd prefer the latter. And the letters TH makes 2 different /th/ sounds (compare "think", "thorn" and "mother" to "this", "that" and "the"), so we'd need two new letters for TH, not just Þ (which is the /th/ sound of "think").
Ultimately, I think a more phonetic approach would be best to make an updated English alphabet easier for people to adapt. I started thinking about this when I first started learning Korean, as their alphabet is mostly phonetic with a few exceptions. The idea of a Korean spelling bee in unheard of. So imagine that being the case for English as well.
I agree with everything you said. Why adopt so many new letters when we have so many redundant letters? We should totally repurpose letters and change spellings. Very few new letters would be necessary.
Yes, I'm very surprised he didn't address the letter sound redundancy. There was a lot more that can be taken out or repurposed before we add new letters. But it was fun!
Instead of removing Q (Qu) why not remove the following u-and yes, have the Q take over for KW (which are phonetically equivalent)?
With a nod to JRR Tolkien, English is
Bizarrely inconsistent with C and K when it comes to soft (s sound-celebrate) and hard (klang). Tolkien used the K sound consistently for all his invented names and places where C is used.
The Hebraic “ch” (produced in the throat, not the palate) is missing; so too are many sounds common to Hindi and Sanskrit-transliterations rely upon diacriticals (some pretty obscure) to indicate the particular sound. Do they need to be in the English language/alphabet? IMO no, but a standardized extension to represent sounds not usual makes sense to me. A good example is Chumos-properly pronounced with the Hebraic ch I previously mentioned but spelled, these days, with a simplified (and incorrect!) Humos.
Silent letters weren’t mentioned in the video-get rid of them! UK English has a number of seemingly unnecessary vowels that American English shed (colour versus color). To what purpose?
Last, diacriticals in general. Some of the changes suggested involved adding a diacritical and calling it a unique letter. Really? To my mind a letter is characterized as being a contiguous character; a diacritical modifies it from the standardized pronunciation. Does the middle n in onion deserve it’s own letter? Probably. Should it be ñ? My opinion: no. A unique character ought to serve. And I wouldn’t necessarily restrict myself to letters from other languages that have the desired sound-although they are a good first choice. Unique, easy to recognize and use shape seem to me to be more important in creating a workable language.
Az an Ingliş spiker, hu risently lerned Turkiş, I was fasinated bay haw isi ther raiting sistem is.
As you could see I was trying to reflect Turkish letters and way of writing up, and I think it makes a perfect sense, some of your new letters makes perfect sense, while others were complicated things, but I still think Turkish is way kore straight forward and I could literally write any Turkish sentence I hear even without knowing the full meaning which is so beautiful in my opinion.
The eszet is a solution to problem better solved by the elimination of the practice. Also, C is just a cut-rate K and a double for S, so chuck it, same for X (sounds like KS or Z). Kwak is cracked, just keep the Q and let it ALWAYS make a KW sound. I really dig the addition of Thorn and the other letters, though I dispute your ditching of the Eth. Instead of Ð, perhaps we could use a larger version of ð, or make a grammatical rule that whenever the TH sound begins a word it's always Þ, and is pronounced as a hard TH (e.g. that), while a th sound that comes in the middle or end of a word is always a soft TH (e.g feather or with) and is represented by an ð.
I really think we need new vowels to cover the sounds OO, OI, and OY make and a removal of the EA vowel combination from the language. Just use an E, an EE, or a yet-to-be-determined letter to replace the AY vowel combo. Now that I think of it, can we just get rid of double letters altogether when they don't make the distinct sound of two letters (e.g. unnamed)?
The X is useful because it helps truncating the word. I would use it in other words with KS sound like axesory, trax, exept, the name Jaxon, etc.
There are so many redundant ways of spelling that truncating words should be done if possible like getting rid of double letters and silent letters.
The letter C is the most useless letter and should scrapped.
Unnamed is a bad example since you drop the voicing temporarily between the N’s. Hyphenated words would be a solution, so un-named. Solves double vowels like re-elected, but I much rather the diarises (reëlected)
@@AntonXul no. it’s useless.
My idea for an alphabet is
26 standard letters ( -c )
ð - voiced th
þ - unvoiced th
ɕ - sh
č - ch
ŋ - ng
ɳ - n with another consonant following
ɫ - l with another consonant following
ƾ - ts
ɒ - o (‘bot‘)
œ - oy
ɤ - er
ʌ - u (‘cut‘)
ʉ - long oo
ʊ - short oo
ɱ - m with another consonant following
ψ - ps
ä - ah (‘father‘)
æ - a (‘fat‘)
ɔ - aw
𐑣 - ow
ɛ - e (‘bet‘)
ɪ - i (‘bit‘)
ʒ - zh
ɾ - ‘rolled‘ r (the t in water)
ʇ - the t in the end of bot
ʳ - ɛʳ = air, ɪʳ = ear
ˀ - the ‘-‘ in uh-oh
I have just 1 small problem with this new alphabet: too many letters look too similar which would be incredibly difficult to read when people have bad handwriting
I believe that to be a minor problem. Words are read in the context of all the letters so one mistake doesn't make a difference. For example: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabridge uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
@@EdgarRoockIt is incredible that I managed to understand that even if I am not an English native speaker (I have a level equivalent to First of Cambridge and B2 in European Common levels), but computer algorithms excluding AI cannot solve that.
@@EdgarRoockI said sloth instead of self on the word “slef”
@@EdgarRoock good one 😅
that's why i hate letters with tails and hats and whatever
This was fun. What I really want to adopt is to punctuate sentences at the beginning and the end. Learning Spanish, this concept made so much sense to me. Reading a child a story, you know in advance how the phrasing needs to sound. No need to back up and read it over.
¡Yes! I agree completely. ¿Can you imagine how much easier it would be to read a script aloud if you knew from the beginning of each sentence if it was going to be a statement, question, or exclamation? ¡Excellent idea!
@@VTSifuSteve ohhh i never quite understood the reason for using punctuation like that in Spanish. Just felt weirdo lol But as someone who was diagnosed with dyslexia, after so much struggling while presenting scientific studies during college, It just made sense to me! I can feel that confidence coming while reading a text. ¡We need alphabet and gramatical revision asap!
As a native Spanish speaker, I think it's unnecessary in English. Using auxiliaries (do, did, will, etc) does the job fine for questions. In exclamations, it could be a good idea though.
@@VTSifuSteveThe "can" before the pronoun tells you it's a question
@@VTSifuStevewhy the upside down punctuation
You should run a Discord to bounce ideas and revise this. There are some redundant letters we could reuse. For example c to consistently use for ch in chip, x to consistently use for sh in ship, etc.
Man, you're just too good... Your videos quality improves wich each and every release. Shout out !!
For "W" I don't think there's anything that needs changing, except maybe for the name of the letter.
Other languages just call this letter "wee", similar to how "V" is called "vee", and I think that's just way more elegant and consistent with the rest of the alphabet lol
I actually call it "dub" sometimes. Very unambiguous. I guess normal people do it in "VW" too.
@@grimfang4 Counterpoint. "wub"
Counterpoint: "wye"
Because Y should be "yot"
Right. The written letter is fine. I was thinking we could just call W "wynn".
@@grimfang4 Ahh, yes. This could work too.