Re: No Vowels?

At http://www.rickharrison.com/language/plan_b.html

Jeff Prothero offers this idea:

We adopt the alphabet BCDF GHJK LMNP STVZ.  (It is
handy to have the alphabet size be a power of two.
Eight letters would be less concise, thirty-two would
be tough to map onto the standard twenty-six char
character set.  The particular sixteen letters
chosen don't matter.)  To encode an arbitrary
bitstream efficiently, we use these sixteen letters
as a hex encoding according to the following scheme.
(The capital letters in the right two columns
give the intended pronunciation of each letter
when used as a vowel and when used as a consonant.)

  LETTER   VALUE    VOWEL   CONSONANT
  ------   -----    -----   ---------
    b        0       bEt       Bet
    c        1       shApe     SHape
    d        2       dIp       Dip
    f        3       fOUGHt    Fought

    g        4       gUY       Guy
    h        5       bOOt      THing
    j        6       bOAt      aZure
    k        7       kEEp      Keep

    l        8       REd       THese
    m        9       pREy      Mom
    n       10       pRInt     priNt
    p       11       pROp      Prop

    s       12       tRIte     Site
    t       13       tRUE      True
    v       14       ROver     roVer
    z       15       bREEze    breeZe

Thus we can encode an arbitrary bitstring into
letters by breaking it into groups of four bits,
and replacing each group by the corresponding
letter according to the above table:

   0001 0110 0001 0110 1101 ...
     c    j    b    j    t  ...

By providing both a vowel and a consonant
pronunciation for each letter, and using
them alternately, we can pronounce arbitrary
strings of letters without difficulty.  This is
important:  It modularizes our language design
by decoupling our word-encodings from the
details of the human vocal tract, letting us
concentrate on other issues.  Other than that,
the particular letters and pronunciations
chosen don't matter much, and might be changed
for a non-European audience.  It simplifies
learning to retain alphabetical ordering, of
course, along with the traditional pronunciations
of letters where practical.  The second eight
vowels are simply the first eight with an 'r'
prepended.  With the suggested pronuciations,
the above example "cjbjt" would be pronounced
"showboat".

stevo   </HTML>

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