The SaypYu Project is, and I’ll quote the young man in
question directly here, “a collaborative project that aims at building a
list of words from all languages spelled phonetically using a 24-letter
alphabet”. English is, they say, wildly illogical in its spelling. They
want to remove unnecessary letters (C, Q and X, “because these could be
replaced by their phonetic equivalents: K and/or S”), and add one new
one (Ǝ/ɘ, or “schwa”), which would replace the short A sound in “about”
or “ago”.
Under the new system, it is proposed (although SaypYu
stresses that it is at an early stage of development and likely to
change) the similarly spelled but differently pronounced words "bough",
"cough", "though" and "through" would be written as "baw", "kof", "dhow"
and "thruu". (On a side note, I’m intrigued to see that the TH sounds
in "though" and "through" are different – although, when you say them,
one is indeed “voiced” and one isn’t. I hadn’t noticed before.)
The SaypYuers are not the first to try to reform English’s
illogical spelling. There’s a piece of mocking poetry that made the
point a long time ago, and which Steven Pinker mentions in his book The
Language Instinct:
Beware of “heard”, a dreadful word
That looks like “beard” and sounds like “bird”
And “dead”; it’s said like “bed”, not “bead” -
For goodness’ sake don’t call it “deed”
Watch out for “meat” and “great” and “threat”
(They rhyme with “suite” and “straight” and “debt”)
In 1855 a publisher, Charles Ollier, complained that “fish” could perfectly logically be spelled “ghoti”,
if you used the GH from “tough”, the O from “women” and the TI from
“nation”. The playwright George Bernard Shaw similarly wanted to reform
the language, and left a cash prize in his will to the designer of a
more logical writing system.
Old GBS’s unquiet ghost still roams, of course, since we
still write “martial” instead of “marshal” and so on. But in today’s
paper we report that someone is trying to improve on the written
language in a different way. Paul
Mathis of Melbourne thinks that there should be a single symbol used
for “the”, in the way that the ampersand & is used for “and” -
it’s the most common word in English, he reasons, so we might as well
make it easier to type. He has proposed Ћ, which if it takes off shall
clearly become known as the “bathtap”. (Another side note: I’ve just
learned that the ampersand wasn’t, as I had believed, created by
Cicero’s scribe-slave Tiro. He made his own shorthand system, and had a symbol for “and” which looked like a 7.)
It won’t take off, of course, in the same way that the “SarcMark”
(a mark to indicate sarcasm, obviously enough) didn’t, and Bernard
Shaw’s proposals didn’t, and (sorry, guys) SaypYu won’t. Language,
written and spoken, evolves in remarkably unpredictable ways, and
deliberate attempts to “improve” it almost never work. Pinker, in The
Stuff of Thought, lists a few attempts, notably an artist who decided
that the language lacked a word for “the hi-tech aesthetic” (“as in ‘The
new iPad Nano is really X”), and decided “neen”. It didn’t stick. None
of the jokey “Liffs” from Douglas Adams’s The Meaning of Liff ever got past the comedy stage; Rich Hall’s “sniglets” (including “sniglet” itself) died a similar death. No one campaigned for the word “defriend” to make it, meanwhile, but there it is in the new Oxford English Dictionary nonetheless, following earlier unheralded entries like “blog” and “reboot”.
Would we even want a phonetic alphabet, anyway? Bear in
mind it would mean that we’d have to spell “electric” one way and
“electricity” another, “nation” one way and “national” another,
“malign”/”malignant”, “sign”/”signature”, and so on. They sound
different but fill similar slots in our mind, so it makes sense to keep
them spelled similarly. It’s illogical from a pronunciation point of
view, but a phonetic alphabet would be illogical from a meaning point of
view.
The “bathtap” Ћ, of course, is rather less ambitious than
the Shavian or SaypYu alphabets, and it would save two valuable
characters on Twitter. (It’s more important than non-Twitterers might
realise; I’ve taken to using the single character … instead of three
full stops to mark an ellipsis, for that very reason. Alt-0133, if
you’re interested.) But I doubt that will be enough; if you try to use
it, you’ll have to explain it every time, and that will end up costing
you a lot more characters. I do think, as well, that no one wants to use
a symbol that looks like plumbing.
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