Comments on: All progress depends on the unreasonable man

All progress depends on the unreasonable man

anastasiav — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 10:04:43 -0800

The Alphabet: Meaningless shapes arbitrarily linked to meaningless sounds. When George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, his will provided for the development of a new alphabet for the English language, an alphabet of at least forty letters that could be used to write English without all the oddities of our traditional spelling. Learn more about the history and origins of The Shaw Alphabet, and look at some of its competitors, including the initial teaching alphabet, Inglish Simplifíd Speling and The Unifon Alphabet - a 40 character alphabet resulting from the Shaw alphabet competition. Or, read what Mark Twain had to say on the subject.

By: anastasiav

anastasiav — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 10:05:23 -0800

Related MeFi discussions on Spelling Reform and Freespeling.

By: plep

plep — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 10:20:30 -0800

Thanks anastasiav - I read about the Shavian alphabet some time ago, and was fascinated by concept but couldn't find any more detail on it. Thanks for finding these.

By: SealWyf

SealWyf — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 10:27:36 -0800

For even more writing systems, see Omniglot. (I really like the Yi syllabary.)

By: squirrel

squirrel — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 10:33:08 -0800

Let's face it: we can't even switch to the metric system, people.

By: m@

m@ — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 10:59:21 -0800

"Language is a virus". "We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself." - W.S. Burroughs

By: snarkout

snarkout — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 11:21:03 -0800

I dig the Deseret alphabet devised by Brigham Young myself, if only because it seems like more of a tool for social control than an experiment in graphological efficiency.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 11:41:36 -0800

Heh. ?"GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU" - Dan Quayle

By: tomharpel

tomharpel — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 13:24:14 -0800

Why not a metric alphabet?

By: majcher

majcher — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 20:13:56 -0800

Thanks, SealWyf, for the link to Omniglot. Now, I am doomed.

By: syzygy

syzygy — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 16:00:45 -0800

Interesting links - especially the one to Twain's thoughts on the subject. On that page, the claim is made that English students of German can spell in German better than in English. I can attest to this. Once you learn the sounds assigned to the letters, you can easily spell amost every German word, no matter how long. My German spelling ability is 10X better than my German speaking ability.