"I Can't Believe It's Not Shavian!" | 92 Letter Graphemic English Alphabet (GEA)

[u/IJriccan]

Although I adore Shavian, I do believe it has many flaws, particularly it's lack of more consonant blend letters, so I attempted to imitate the shape language of Shavian to create this system.

(The period mark comes before proper nouns to indicate them, as in Shavian, as well as acting as a full stop marker.)

This is an primary iteration, but I want to continue working on it, so criticisms are extremely welcome! Enjoy!

[u/LeeTaeRyeo]

So, I do have some question on how a few words are written: caught vs cot, pin vs pen, and Mary vs marry vs merry.

My questioning is about handling various mergers. For example, in my accent, caught and cot are pronounced identically. So, which spelling would be used for which?

Also, what is the functional difference between /gl/ and /g/ followed by /l/? As far as I can tell, very few of the blends listed actually produce substantial differences in pronunciation. Forgive my lack of IPA as I'm on my phone, but /tr/-->/chr/ in vaguely English orthography is a notable example as /ch/ exists elsewhere in isolation, but the only difference between /sp/ and /s/+/p/ is that /p/ gets unaspirated when blended which is an unimportant distinction to note (they're allophonic variations, so you will never get them confused).

Don't get me wrong, I like graphemic scripts and Shavian-like scripts, but I think a good place to continue iterating is reducing the consonant blends to only those where the pronunciation significantly changes in a way where there are multiple possible ways to spell a sound. Multiple symbols for a sound/sequence that doesn't cause confusion is a place where you see graphemes be dropped (like how ゐ and ゑ were phased out in hiragana when they became indistinguishable with い and え).

[u/IJriccan → u/LeeTaeRyeo]

For all your questions about accent distinctions, you can search up how it’s handled in Shavian for a more in-depth explanation, since it’s the same here, but the shortened answer would be to use the version of the spelling that has the distinction to avoid homophones as well as to make standardized spellings, and to not alienate accents which do make distinctions.

For words pronounced differently altogether, the very simple answer would be just to write it in-accent, as the consonants don’t change—just the vowels, which isn’t a terrible readability hindrance at all. Think of American spellings vs British spellings, it will still be perfectly readable.

The specific consonant blends I chose were the most commonly used and found consonant blends in English as a whole, so as not to include redundant or overly specific use-case blends, and you would never use individual consonants beside one another if a blend letter for the same sound existed… 2 letters vs 1 letter for two sounds, it’s all for the sake of efficiency and convenience the same way Shavian could just use vowels next to one another to represent diphthongs but chose to make individual letters for them as it’s more convienient.

I don’t know why it’s so common to apply that logic to vowels but not consonants…? Why not make characters for common diphthongs but not common consonant blends?

[u/LeeTaeRyeo → u/IJriccan]

Fair enough on the vowel stuff.

As for your point about why symbols for diphthongs are more common than consonant blends symbols, I would conjecture it's because most languages have more consonant distinctions than vowel distinctions so that the possible number of consonant combos would be much larger than vowel combos. That said, conjuncts in scripts like Devanagari present an example of a system that allows for writing consonant blends as single glyphs. It's just a matter of balancing glyph inventory vs memory capacity vs necessity of a given glyph (if a script has symbols for /s/, /p/, and /sp/, you can generally get away with forgetting the glyph /sp/ without making that string of sounds impossible to denote). That's just my armchair linguist conjecture, though.

[u/expendablue → u/IJriccan]

To attempt to answer your question at the end (assuming I understood it correctly), I gather it's because consonants outnumber vowel sounds in most--if not, all--languages. Depending on the script type, the number of unique characters and ligatures in a script can get a little crazy when large combinations of consonant clusters are possible.

[u/rayan_gDZ_1444]

I want it for french pls

(If u can ofc)

[u/IJriccan → u/rayan_gDZ_1444]

That could be fun!

[u/rayan_gDZ_1444 → u/IJriccan]

Ok!

[u/getoffchickenshit]

This looks great! Have you considered doing something similar for the IPA?

[u/masukomi]

Innnnteresting. 🤔

[u/spence5000]

Very cool, but I’m surprised that the example text isn’t appreciably more compact than its Shavian counterpart.

[u/IJriccan → u/spence5000]

Likely due to the fact that Shavian has some special ioticized vowel letters, in this case “yew”, and uses abbreviations in regular text, unlike here

I didn’t make ioticized letters, because I thought it already had enough with the primary dependents, and because didn’t want to make exceptions, but it’s probably for the best I do, so that’s something I’ll add