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GL5  Alphabet 

The ideal for GL5 orthography is to assign a single letter (grapheme) for each sound (phoneme). In other words, writing should be isomorphic with speech. But the problem is that although English has a minimum of 36 phonemes (some expand this to 40), we are cramped with only 26 letters to choose from. Accomodating the excess sounds in this disparity can be dealt with by one of several methods:
·       add new symbols to our standard character set, or
·       use letter combinations (digraphs), or
·       modify existing symbols (diacritical markings). 

Non-standard alphabets pose their own problem. Acceptance by the world community can be seriously impaired with the introduction of any character not already represented within the standard keyboard repertoire. George Bernard Shaw, and a few modern reformists, argue for a totally new alphabet. Shaw engineered his version by proxy, including in his will a "contest" to design the new alphabet. Kingley Read won the event which was held in 1958 by producing his 48 character "Shavian" alphabet. But such solutions are so radical, besides the difficulty of rendering the symbols, they became virtually unreadable.

Sample of Shavian Text

Other proposals retain the standard 26 letter Roman character set, but rely on vowel combinations or accents to deal with the greater range of vowel sounds than our standard AEIOU palette can provide. Such schemes keep the familiar letters and impose strict phonetic-spelling conventions that result in significantly different word appearances as well. More importantly, double letters are in conflict with our reductionist goal. Neither would the use of accented letters aid the speed of data entry.

An example of this approach is “Inglish where words like aand, thaat, faact, laangwidj illustrate the use of double letters for short vowel sounds, while accented forms like réd, rít, gó, awá are used to indicate long vowel sounds. Strangely, consistency still seems to be problematic, at least in the examples provided. ‘Th’ is still rendered in both voiced and voiceless forms, ‘and’ appears as both and and aand, ‘u’ appears in both uv and uníted. Fanetiks also uses many digraphs: OU, OI, EE, AE, EE, IE, OE, UE.

A final alternative could incorporate currently available non-letter symbols, such as the digits. Besides the limitations of capitalization, digits could not be used as single letter words for risk of creating ambiguity with their numeric role. One such spelling system that uses numerals as alphabetical extenders is Chekt Speling  which uses 3 (ng), 5 (sh), and 2 (zh).

English Phoneme-Grapheme Ratios

Some phonetic listings for spoken English cite up to 40 different individually identifiable sounds or phonemes. We will consider only thirty-six. These separate utterances form a repetoire of phonemes that are orgnized in various ways. The most common grouping is into vowels and consonents. Additionally, some authorities arrange them into syllabics, non-syllabics, and semi-syllabics. Still others divide them into resonants and non-resonants. 

All told, they can be displayed as follows:

Frontal --------     ------Gutteral
vowels syllabics: w ue oo oh uh eh ooh ah iy ay ih ee resonants
consnants semi-syllabics:    m    n      l              r  y ng
non-syllabics: p b f v t d     s  z           k g non-resonants
     th dh ch j sh zh    xh   h

This leaves unaccounted such common sounds as long /i/ and the vowel sound in ‘wood’, not to mention a number of blended vowels such as the diphthongs ‘oy’ and ‘ow’. Linguistics applies a rich array of terms for the consonants that are based, for the most part, on anatomic considerations and as to whether they are voiced or not.

stops            voiced  voiceless    fricatives           voiced  voiceless

labial

b

p

labial

v

f

dental

d

t

alveolar

z

s

gutteral

g

k

palatal

zh

sh

oral

h

nasals

glides

labial

m

apical

y

l

dental

n

dorsal

w

r

gutteral

ng

affricates

j

ch

Vowels can be catagorized by tongue position using a matrix based on heighth and depth:

    front          central             back      
high   

beet

brook

bit

bait

boot

mid

bet

bite

bull

bat

boss

bowl

low 

bus   

The most common vowel in English: schwa (the sound of the second E in "telephone", A in "about", U in "circus", O in "look", etc.)

Vowels

Multiple characters are used in standard English to accommodate the many additional vowel sounds for which our alphabet makes no provision. For example:

long e long o long a diphthong diphthong long i long u
ea/ee/ie o/oa/ow ai/ay ow/ou oy/oi ei/y ou/oo/ew
read go rain now boy height through
steel board   ray sound boil eye, I boot
receive bowl ate out oyster by new

GL5 proposes to designate a single consistently applied symbol for each sound:

long e long o long a diphthong diphthong long i long u
3 o 8 6 9 y w
r3d go r8n n6 b9 hyt thrw
st3l bord r8 s6nd b9l y bwt
r3s3v bol 8t 6t 9str by nw

Standard English is isomorphic only with the letters e, i, and u:

short e short o short a diphthong diphthong short i short u
e o/ough a/augh ew/ou io/iu/iet i u
bed hot ask you union sit nut
help  rob   fat few yes  give upper
mess  thought  laugh use colonial triple stuff

GL5 preserves these and assigns more single symbols:

short e short o short a diphthong diphthong short i short u
e  q  a  7  2  i  u 
bed hqt ask 7 7n2n sit nut
help  rqb  fat f7  2s giv upr
mes  thqt laf 7z  klon2l tripl stuf

English schwa sound in "wood, look, put" is represented in GL5 by the letter h
to spell these examples as whd, lhk, pht.

English Phonemes      GL5 Characters
b    p v f

b

p

v

f

d t dh th

d

t

4

4

g k z s x       

g

k

z

s

x

h ng zh sh

h

'

5

5

m n j ch

m

n

j

c

l r y w

l

r

3

w

ew iu

7

2

ah ou oow

q

6

w

ih ay oi ooh

i

8

9

h

eh ee oh

e

3

o

a eye uh

a

y

u

 non-standard usage

English Alphabet: 26 characters
      a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

GL5 Alphabet: 35 characters
      a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 '

Default Vowels

Short e and short i are used as the default vowel sound between consonants. Thus,
"Hit his head"  becomes  ht hz hd.  And "terrific" would be rendered trfk.

Default vowel usage is especially indicated in promoting orthographical consistency when vowels precede the letter [r]. English spelling hosts a vast assortment of such spelling variations:
burglar
-ar
teacher
-er
actor
-or
glamour
-our
acre
-re
murmur
-ur
injure
-ure
martyr
-yr
stir
-ir

These examples all illustrate the potential for using an implied default vowel with the glide [-r]. So that in GL5 they become:
brglr t3cr aktr glamr 8kr mrmr njr mqrtr str

Vowel Rules

Beside the default vowel principle, GL5 has a few unique vowel usage rules:

1. Long e sound, though normally rendered with the [3] character, will use the [i] character when it occupies the terminal position in a word. For example:
city siti
ready rdi default vowel used between  'r-d'
family famli default vowel used between 'm-l'
complexity kmplexti default vowel used between 'x-t' 
explicit [e] used for stress
principality   prinspalti   default vowels at 's-p' and 'l-t'
explicit [i] prevents applying a default in 'p-r' position

2. Long e sound is frequently used with other vowels to form diphthongs. GL5 provides dedicated characters (7 and 2) in its alphabet for use in the most common forms. Other forms, such as seen in words like "year", "yacht", and "create" require explicit vowel pairs. While such words would be normally rendered as 33r, 3qt, and kr38t, GL5 also recognizes the use of [i] in this setting to achieve typographical compression:

year  yacht   create
3ir 3qt kr38t
iir iqt kri8t

Next up: GL5 Breviations