ec2-3-133-144-197.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic Campaign to reform English spelling. The basic idea: they keep English pronounced exactly the way it is now (more or less), and fix English spelling so it actually matches what we say. They introduce 5 new vowel symbols (based on those from the InternationalPhoneticAlphabet?) and choose one standard sound for the 5 existing vowels. They choose one standard sound for all of English's multiple-pronounciation consonants or consonant-pairs.
Eg: G: get vs george. TH: than vs thank . S: saw vs was. C: cat vs cede vs vinci vs...
Very isolationalist - why use non-standard IPA symbols, rather than using accented versions of existing letters? It works fine in a lot of other languages with stupidly large numbers of vowel sounds... it also would be a lot easier in terms of not needing to completely redesign ascii :)
They used to have some posters and things on their website, http://www.nuspel.org . Now they only appear to have a couple of PDF documents. At the end of one of them is the proposed new alphabet. (Or at pages 5 and 7 of [Peter Rabbit].)
"twin swords of Caring, Concern, Determination and the NuSpel Power Alphabet." Classic.
Which English pronuncation? RP? Scotch? West Country? Belfast? The Texan drawl?
They look like they're Americans, the nation that has already made a travesty of spelling because they're too stupid to cope with real English. This is hardly a surprise (and they're hardly even GBS).
They chose to standardise on General American Pronounciation, as indicated by some standard American dictionary IIRC. And maybe the rivalries over variations of spelling between American and English would be eliminated by a switch to NuSpel ;) ...leaving only those rivalries over pronunciation... --AlexChurchill, who really hates hearing "al-oo-minnum"
It's not as silly an idea as it sounds, because really quite recently Germany actioned a successful (?) reform of German spelling.
German spelling started off a lot more phonetic than English, though. I believe that mostly what they did was to remove the redundant s-zet character, remove a whole lot of silent h's and Germanicise the spelling of foreign-origin words.--MikeJeggo
And change the number of repeated letters in the middle of compound words. The example I remember is "schifffahrt" (boat trip), but I can't remember if it ended up as "schifffahrt" or "schiffahrt". I suspect the former, as that way you get to keep all the "f"s from both words. --M-A
NuSpel, of course, is the way that "New Spell" looks in the new alphabet. Fortunately, it doesn't end up needing any new symbols, so it can be written in current ASCII.
Sumwht 0vrtakn bi txting, srly?
F u wr a tru txtr, ud rit "sumw*o*t 0vrtakn bi txting". or rthr, f txtng ws a tru rplcmnt fr NuSpel.
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