Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

Gary Shannon wrote:

>Every once and a while spelling reform rears its ugly
>head, and it was one of the first things I looked at
>when starting my project to create mutant English.
>
>But there is a way to _get_ spelling reform without
>_doing_ spelling reform: Replace the Romanji Aplhabet
>with a syllabary.
>
>That's raises the question, just how large would a
>syllabary have to be to semi-accurately represent all
>existing English words?
>
>Is there such a thing as a vowel-first syllabary?
>Some preliminary dinking around seems to show that
>vowel-first symbols (like "ak" and "or" instead of
>"ka" and "ro") might work better for English.
>
>
I think we'd need a Cree-oid syllabary.  That is, we allow for consonant
clusters, not as in Japanese.

Okay, well, English has the following (based on RP, possibly one of the
dialects with maximum distinctions) -

Vowels and Dipthongs(treated the same in English, so I'll treat them the
same here)
-----------------

'Short' Series:

/&/
/E/
/I/
/Q/
/V/

'Long' Series

/Ej/
/i:/
/Aj/
/@u/
/u:/

Others:

/U/ (some dialects)
/@/, /3:/(also syllabic marker)
/A:/  as in 'father'.
/A:/ (/&/ in most dialects)
/O:/


Not conclusive, but a fairly good summary.

Consonants
------------

Stops:
/p/
/t/
/k/
/b/
/d/
/g/

Fricatives:
/f/
/T/
/s/
/v/
/D/
/z/
/h/

Nasals:
/m/
/n/

Approximants:
/r/
/l/
/w/
/j/


Combine as appropriate.

For instance,  'grass' would be spelt with three characters. 'g',
'rA:'(Pronounced as /&/ in most dialects) and 's'.  That would work, right?

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