I wonder what you'd get if you designed an orthography (like, alphabet and spelling and such) for English that's specifically /for English/, instead of using a bodged-together hack of an alphabet for Latin.
I'm sure people have done it, I'm just kind of curious what choices linguists would make in that process and why.
- 🎒 💭
@packbat i made an attempt here (see bottom for sample text) https://go.kibi.family/Documents/kibben.xhtml
@Lady Interesting! I don't know how intuitive it'll be for us specifically - we noticed a few pretty major differences in pronunciation (e.g. rhoticity) between what the page describes and how we speak - but it looks like an interesting project!
- 🎒
@packbat (ftr i also speak a rhotic dialect natively, it's just that whether you pronounce “far” as /fɑː/ or /fɑɹ/ doesn’t actually wind up mattering much for the spelling. the major thing to get used to is that “all” is “orl”, as in “orl korıkt” (OK), and things in that vein. it's an adjustment but less weird than like, the pronunciation of “colonel” lmao.)
(in the end though having intuitive spellings is much less useful than having recognizable ones for most purposes, which is why english gets on with spellings that are centuries out of date instead of actually fixing anything. it's a thought experiment more than anything, and probably more useful for like, fantasy worldbuilding than actual everyday use.)
(i think the sets of consonant+lenition pairs and of short/long/rhotic vowels are the most interesting and potentially enlightening parts for me.)
@packbat tacking on to this, i WILL say that it bothers me when i see people writing english with, like, younger futhark runes instead of the old english futhorc or something reasonably derived from it (which is to say, taking into account future vowel shifts and changes to the english language); it's like writing English using Spanish spellings and verbs irksome to me
so if you are interested in runes, you might find the latin/runic correspondences in there to be an interesting take as well (they're not what one typically sees)
