The dream of spelling reform is often stated as: "One letter, one sound" (1-to-1). I'd like to talk about how that's a little bit misguided. IMO the principle for reform should be regularity, not a 1-to-1 mapping between letters and sounds.
At first regularity and 1-to-1 mapping look like the same thing. IMO that's why many spelling reformers think the principle is 1-to-1: 1-to-1 looks a lot like regularity.
In this document I am going to list some ways in which IMO regularity and 1-to-1 part company.
Voicedness is a characteristic of phonemes. It means whether the voice - ie, the vocal cords - is making a sound when that phoneme is pronounced.
| Voiced sound | Unvoiced equivalent |
|---|---|
| b | p |
| d | t |
| g | k |
| v | f |
| z | s |
| zh | sh |
Voicedness in English tends to vary in ways that do not accord with spelling:
Consonants tend to share the same voicedness as their naybors, regardless of the formal voicedness of the consonant. EG, most people pronounce "eggs" as /Egz/, not /Egs/.
Consonants in the middle of words tend to be either voiced or intermediate, regardless of the formal voicedness of the consonant. EG, most English speakers pronounce both "latter" and "ladder" as /l&*@r/, with a flap in the middle, rather than /l&t@r/ and /l&d@r/.
So voicedness is a lower-resolution phenomenon than consonant articulation. Attaching it to individual consonants, as a 1-to-1- mapping must do, is misleading.
I suggest that the voicedness distinction be signalled by an additional letter, and that pairs of letters currently separated only by the voicedness attribute be combined.
The letter that signals the distinction, represented in the document by '%', would be soundless in itself. Its presence would mean that the consonant group that follows it is unvoiced.
| Word | Spelling |
|---|---|
| backed | pa%ked |
| bagged | paked |
| packed | %pa%ked |
| signals | %signals |
| soundless | %soundle%s |
| itself | i%tsel%f |
| presence | %presen%s |
Design rationale: I chose to signal unvoicedness over the alternative, signalling voicedness, because unvoicedness proved to be a little bit less frequent. I chose the remaining consonants as all currently unvoiced, rather than voiced, because when I tried it both ways, unvoiced was a little bit more intuitive.
I hope that the letters that are freed by this proposal, b, d, g, v, and z, can be used where English needs additional letters, so that English can be regularized without needing to replace ASCII, keyboards, etc.
In English, the sound of a suffix like -s/-es and -d varies according to what it follows. We've already covered the voicedness variation, but the sound varies in another way. When the root ends with the same sound, the suffix becomes another syllable, otherwise it doesn't.
| Syllable | No syllable |
|---|---|
| fishes | fits |
| patted | passed |
| passes | pats |
One answer would be to spell the differing suffixes out. IMO that is not an improvement. It simply moves the irregularity from the junction of spelling and pronunciation to the junction of morphology and spelling. In the case of -s/-es, it's already there.
I suggest the creation of an additional letter, represented in this document by '^'. ^ would have no sound except when the sounds around it matched, in which case it would be a schwa. The -s/-es suffix would become always '^s', and the -ed suffix would become always '^d'.
Co-articulation is the phenomenon in phonetics where a phoneme's sound is modified by the adjacent phonemes. For example, the vowel in "cur" or "burr" isn't exactly a schwa or any other stand-alone vowel, it's colored by the "r" that follows it.
What I want to talk about are those cases where the co-articulation is so large that it effectively creates an extra phoneme. For instance, many Americans pronounce "tuesday" as /tSuzdej/ instead of /tuzdej/. That's a whole extra sound.
Why shouldn't the extra phoneme just be written? Consider British vs American pronunciation: "Tuesday". "Issue". The British palatize the /u/ to /ju/. Americans add a /S/ to make it /Su/, or leave it alone. If the extra phoneme is written, one spelling is not going to cover both.
What do I suggest? Leave it as it is. Let our spelling-to-phonetics mapping understand that co-articulations will cause these extra sounds, and that they will vary according to the speaker's accent.
The IPA ASCII is according to this chart.
For a more accessible chart, see the Diction Domain's IPA to ASCII. The table of vowels was built from that page, but I fixed up the dipthongs and the examples to correspond to American pronunciation.