Oh I’ve seen a some youtube shorts like explain some of this stuff. I like seeing all of the possible evolutions of the modern script.
I can’t find the youtuber right now or I would link them.
Oh I’ve seen a some youtube shorts like explain some of this stuff. I like seeing all of the possible evolutions of the modern script.
I can’t find the youtuber right now or I would link them.
We’ve collectively forgotten the horrors of the Millennia of the Sarif Wars. Everyone’s revulsion over Comic Sans is a deep ancestral terror over calamities long buried.
Change the entire script!!!
hangul style! or perhaps similar to arabic (with vowels written) as thats so beautiful!
Hangul is so neat!
I’ve heard about Arabic letters morphing a lot when you add more letters to words
But gee is it incredibly beautiful!
I second the suggestion of bringing back þ and ð. They’re relatively easy to type too! (AltGr+p and AltGr+d on my system)
Plus they’re supported by most fonts since Icelandic still uses them.
And maybe we could also use ŋ for the /ŋ/ sound so we could differentiate fiŋger and siŋer.
Vowels are a bigger challenge. Depending on dialect, English has roundabout 20 vowel phonemes, but only a e i o u and y to represent them. If we wanted to make English spelling phonetic, we’d have to come up with a lot of extra symbols.
But really, the rules for mapping graphemes to phonemes, while convoluted, aren’t the worst part. The real problem is all the irregular one-off spellings.
Things like sugar, thomas, ghost, one, friend, women, wednesday, breakfast, blackguard, leicestershire, etc.
There’s just too many of them for a spelling reform to ever be feasible. Although Australia (almost) tried it once.
Regarding the history of the alphabet: Jackson Crawford and Luke Gorton made a series of videos on the topic:
i dont understand much about linguistics but my first thought is that removing any letter would have devastating effects on the onomatopoeia market

i do like þ tho its nice :)
The thing about altering the symbols we use to represent sounds is that they don’t alter the sounds themselves
Ghoti Tolot
Or how is commonly spelled in English, fish church
add back þ (thorn, the “th” sound) as well as a few letters from the cyrillic alphabet (mostly known for being the Russian alphabet) that has letters for sounds that we have in English, but otherwise have no good way to write them.
Ж - this is commonly written as “zh” when latinizing russian language, its like a “soft J” sound. Its like the sound “ge” makes in “rouge”. Not sure why a “ZH” is what was used for this, unless Z is a “buzzy S” and its supposed to be a “buzzy” sh sound.
I just looked that up. Apparently the "zh" digraph was indeed chosen in analogy to "sh". And it's been in use since the 17th century!
This actually should only cover half of the th sounds as there's two phonemes in English represented by this combination (there's actually a third but it very similar and changed by accent but generally there's briefly the voiced dental fricative and voiceless dental fricative.
Uppercase Þ lowercase þ is the sound in "bath" or "thought"
Uppercase Ð lowercase ð is the sound in "the" or "bathe"
Example sentence
The thief vowed that this was the thinnest thistle they'd ever thought to thread through.
Ðe þief, named Þatcher, vowed ðat ðis was ðe þinnest þistle ðey'd ever þought to þread þrough.
ngl i kinda love ðis
On a somewhat related tangent to the discussion of the thorn letter (þ) and the eth letter (ð), I think it’s very funny that the final nail the coffin stopping us from using them is because the printing press lacked them (partially because many other languages than English didn’t use the letters in the first place[1]). Both were either replaced by “th” or a simple y, since it looks kind of similar when printed out.
On the subject of the difference between the two, it’s also super interesting that this distinction is very recent, actually! The use of thorn and eth were both interchangeable for a very long time, with the distinction being a (not-so) modern convenience[2]. Eventually, we just kind of chose one and ran with it, and even then, both were eventually discarded for the all powerful “th”. Side tangent over!
Personally, I’m not too fond of the idea of bringing the two letters back. Even if we were to magically reintroduce them to the English language, with everyone automatically knowing what they mean, it would be kind of pointless, in my opinion. If the argument is that we would then know how to pronounce a word more immediately due to the distinction between the two phonetically, it’s kind of a fool’s errand. The way that languages develop from region to region is entirely too varied to make a language truly phonetic without compromising in other places. One could argue that individual languages developing is far less common with the existence of the world wide web, but dialects can and still do form regionally.
If everyone wrote a word how they thought it sounded, it’s likely that we would never agree on a common spelling, and then, well, we’re back to the first problem, aren’t we? The point is, to standardize written language you have to accept that not everything is going look how it sounds, and personally, I’m okay with that! I’d much rather things be written in a single way then struggle to read someone’s spelling of any given word.
This is the end of the post, but I have one more thing to say. I see some people around this forum using eth and thorn in their text, which is
really cool
! But I’d also like to inform them that using these letters will mess with screen readers that many blind people use to browse the web. If you care about the accessibility of your posts, you should probably avoid using ðem, hehe.
Thank you for reading!
Yeah you can’t capture an entire diverse language in its written form… Just sadly English written form is crap!! Hehe
The standardised spelling should be well done though, in my opinion, like hangul. Even if it doesn’t represent some dialects we still already have dictionary forms of English with standard pronunciation RP. Just the way we write it should be better done to at least suit RP.