When I had started my Phonetic Phun articles I focused on what I considered the three most distinctive alphabet replacements in the phonetic English spelling movement, but those certainly weren't the only ones. Today I'm looking at the three notable ones left over, Unifon, Ewellic and finally the pre-Deseret system created by the (brief) Mormon Michael Barton, and we can determine once and for all which one is the best and which should be buried under radioactive waste.
Unifon was borne out of a more specific project than most spelling reform projects, the magical realm of airplane communication. In 1957 the International Air Transport Association chose English as the official lingua franca of the friendly skies. The Bendix Corporation had a man named John Malone under contract and he had created his own phonetic alphabet as part of a larger project, but once the IATA made its decision the Bendix people decided to terminate Malone as the project he was working on, including Unifon, had lost its market. Malone shelved his idea until some time later when he found out his Kindergarten-aged son couldn't read, and he dusted off his 40 character invention. Through the '60s and '70s numerous tests were done to teach children the alphabet, which was often called a "training wheels" alphabet, and several articles were published in the '70s and '80s in publications like The New York Times and Science Digest. While that was pretty much it for English applications there was a serious attempt, spearheaded by Tom Parsons of Humboldt State University, to adapt Unifon for transcribing Native American Languages (perhaps as a tonic for the surface horrors of Americanist phonetic notation) but after years of work the idea died with Parsons's departure from the university. Well, 40 characters sounds about right even if not many people cared, so let's see how it fares with our favorite quotes.
Well, I must admit, of all the different alphabets this was the easiest for me to write as a native English speaker, and it would also have been pretty easy to decode the letters if I were given a passage without a chart. Some words, such as "and" and "dump", look identical to their Latin counterparts, and unlike virtually all other phonetic alphabets I've seen there's almost no chance I'll be unable to distinguish one character from another if not looking closely. Part of this is sticking to an all-majuscule format, keeping the letters large and clearly distinguished from one another; this also sidesteps Shavian's tall and deep letter attributes which, while helping a very simple alphabet look more florid, was tricky to get a hang on and almost requires lined paper to ensure readability. This distinguished look for each letter does, however, port over Latin's complexity in writing each letter, especially majuscule versions which often rely on serifs to ensure readability, though thankfully Unifon doesn't require something as superfluous and busyworky as serifs. (Oddly enough, Deseret's lack of serifs was among its criticisms when it premiered, but I found it part of why the alphabet felt solid and ageless, so maybe you just can't please anybody.) For example, the long "e" letter takes four strokes, about three strokes too many that a letter should take to be assembled in a perfect world. It was also tricky writing some of the letters, specifically the ones with lines touching their tops and bottoms, such as the long "o". Believe it or not, it takes a bit of skill to draw those not only straight but just right so that they're clearly connected but not overlapping anything. Also oddly hard to write properly were the sounds for "ch" and "sh", requiring a perfectly centered 45-degree slash so as to look aesthetically appealing and not obscure the letter it is derived from. However, the biggest problem isn't any of those but one particular character that flies in the face of everything phonetic alphabets are supposed to be about. Here's the lineup:
See that letter second from the right in the top row? That vowel is impossible. It doesn't exist in the English language except in combination with "r" to make "ur" as in "fur" and the fact that it was listed as its own grapheme infuriates me. The whole appeal of phonetic spelling is to avoid crap like that from occurring, so what gives? I've seen other Unifon charts which make it a ligature with "r", keeping the orientation as backwards from the short "e" sound just for clarity's sake, and that make a heck of a lot more sense than trying to fob it off as its own essential English sound. And wouldn't it be more phonetically natural to write the "ur" sound as "ur"? You know, with the Unifon letters that are identical to their Latin counterparts? Also, wait a second...is that "ch" sound a "c" with a slash through it? Like how "sh" is an "s" with a slash through it so as to distinguish it from where it came from? There is no unslashed "c" in Unifon, so where did it come from? "C" is exactly the kind of letter that phonetic alphabets do away with because of its inconsistent usage but John Malone thought it a good idea to port it over just to bisect the sucker. Sheesh. And what's going on with "w"?
Anyway, those problems out of the way Unifon is very easy to use and read, though I wonder about the long-term effect of using it as a teaching aid for children, only to have them transition to normal spelling later on. Even though it got more press and testing than most of the other alphabets I still consider it a minor one for purely philosophical and aesthetic reasons, principally that it just doesn't stand on its own as a writing system not indebted to the Latin alphabet. While forcing people to become accustomed to a heap of alien symbols might seem like a lot of work for spelling reform it's this radical restructuring of how words are constructed, not only on the page but in the mind, that helps reform spelling on multiple levels, so a script like Unifon seems incomplete and lacking in self-confidence, perhaps suitable as a transitional script but not as a true replacement for the Old Order. Our next alphabet doesn't suffer from this problem nearly as much but, I gotta say, I'd take a lack of self-containment over having to write out this again:
The alphabet seen here was created by Michael H. Barton, a Quaker-turned-Mormon-turned-Shaker that I mentioned in the last article as possibly having influenced the regents of the University of Deseret in their alphabet-designing. In 1833 (during his brief Mormon period) Barton published a series of pamphlets entitled "Something New" in which he introduced and showed copious examples of his "plain and simple" spelling system, containing, once again, 40 characters and a change to punctuation which I'll get to in a second. His system is the most obscure of the six alphabets I went over for these articles and I can't blame the public for not latching on - they probably couldn't get past the first step, reading the characters. I don't mean reading passages of the text, I mean being able to visually identify each symbol as being different from another. As someone under 40 I've never seen much use in writing in cursive, except in the event that you've practiced it so much you can write whole sentences in a single stroke, and asking people to write longhand in italics is asking for serious trouble, so Barton's decision to slant all the characters to the right and use what should be ornamentation to assist in basic character construction grinds my bones to make his bread. Ignoring for a fact that far too many of them are identical to their cursive Latin counterparts, these graphemes are way too similar to each other and the thick printing makes them barely legible. I made it through both my passages without having found a legible version of the "k" letter, for example:
I later found an example in a thinner font that was clearer, but why couldn't it be legible to begin with?! While the fact that letters are often paired off, such as the "ee" symbol being the "eh" symbol flipped upside down, that doesn't change the fact that the symbols for "n" and "y" are indistinguishable in the hands of a sloppy writer and the letters for "a" sounds, "u" sounds and others blur together into a gradient of annoyance. (You can also tell how old this script is in that, much like Franklin's script, it includes a separate letter for the "wh" sound along with a "w" sound.) The biggest problem, however trumps all those others and is not letters but Barton's baffling decision that normal punctuation wasn't clear enough and therefore had to be replaced by three lines of varying lengths. Yeah, there's no possible way those could be mistaken in context. Also, he does away with question and exclamation marks by replacing them with a dot and asterisk respectively, and then says to put them at the beginning of a sentence without saying what to do at the end, forcing me to "do it live", as it were. He also doesn't think to include markings for apostrophes, semicolons and ellipses, and you might notice in the Shadow of the Vampire quote I had to make up symbols based on what he'd given me. This is colossally short-sighted and I can't imagine how he could've missed it in testing, and might be the single biggest blunder in any of the alphabets I've reviewed. On the plus side everything fits into a neat row of blocks like Unifon but still has a visual sweep, the curves more artistically florid than most constructed scripts I've seen. If you care to read the collected form of his pamphlets, published along with a shorthand script I have no authority to judge, you can see it here, and while I can't recommend reading the entire book, mostly because I couldn't get very far myself, there are some juicy nuggets of archaic and, dare I say, pretentious prose, such as his open letter "To the Inhabitants of the World" on page 18.
One alphabet remains, and I hope you're glad that I saved the "best" for last. Invented in 1980 as a secret script, Ewellic, the brainchild of Unicode contributor Doug Ewell, has a distinctly ancient flavor despite being invented more recently than any other alphabet seen here. See if you can spot it:
Yup, you're looking at the work of a man who likes himself some runes, most likely because he likes himself some Tolkien. There's also another ancient reference point, though one I'm not convinced that he knew about: the much-dreaded Ogham, which you may recall from my last article as being one of the most easily misread scripts in the world. Believe it or not, Ewellic might just be more confusing than Ogham and most definitely harder to write. This script is without question the worst of the lot, the unmemorable, confusingly interrelated graphemes so hard to keep track of that I had to switch between three different charts in order to write these passages. Writing all those straight lines took far more concentration than anything Barton threw at me and it still looks like arseshite, and it compounds matters when half of them require three separate strokes, such as every single vowel. The schwa was okay because it was just two vertical lines, but the listing for the script on Omniglot says that it was designed to have very limited use. Ewell fancied himself a joiner of cultures so the script includes a lot of additional characters for sounds present only in the other major European languages, such as a set of graphemes for nasal French vowels, but that only makes me think that some poor Frenchman had this crap forced upon them by a grating hobbyist friend. However, he doesn't include single letters for some rather common sounds like all the dipthongs and all the affricates ("ch" and "j"), claiming they're actually pairs of letters. I kind of understand the dipthongs, perhaps as much as I wish for Ewell to understand how carpal tunnel syndrome arises, but "CH" AND "J" ARE EACH ONE SOUND NOT "T-SH" AND "D-ZH" YOU FOOLASS. There's also the problem of grapheme recycling - because of how similar all the characters are many of them are simple flips of others, often creating sets of four symbols that are retrogrades and inversions of each other. That doesn't mean that the characters have any phonetic relation to each other, such as how "m", "b", "w" and "v" are all the same grapheme in different orientations. How does "v" relate to "b" in any aural way? Why on Earth is "m" the same as "w" but upside down? I -
- oh, you son of a bitch.
And, yeah, I'm so glad that not only did Ewell create a new set of numerals but also made rules for use with hexadecimal, an integral part of the English spelling experience. What isn't included on the site is the rule that words with more than one syllable require an acute accent over the vowel of the stressed syllable, something that SEEMS KIND OF IMPORTANT BUT THE SCRIPT'S OWN CREATOR COULDN'T BE BOTHERED TO MENTION IT ON HIS OWN oh, never mind, this is hopeless. Never in my life have I worked so painstakingly to write passages that I will have so little hope of remembering because of how poorly designed the script is. Sure, I had trouble differentiating Barton but at least they had more shape to them than a bent milkshake straw. Sure, Shavian was simple line forms but at least they could all be made with a single stroke and the tall/deep contrasts assisted in reading. And sure, Deseret gets hard to read below a certain font size but at least that was nice to look at. Hey Ewell - I gotta message for ya concernin' my likelihood of evah writin' in Ewellic again:
Well! After all that commotion I can finally sum things up a bit. My favorites were Deseret and Shavian, Shavian for its economy, ease of writing, elegance and internal logic, Deseret for its robust, timeless designs and memorability. The one that seems the most likely to actually be used outside of hobbyist circles is Unifon but I can't endorse it too much for philosophical reasons. Franklin's script was nonsense and was treated as such, Barton's was understandably too obscure for use and JEESH-US CRISPY CRACKERS EWELLIC. And the good news is that I'm no closer to being a linguist than I was before - hooray! Anyway, I guess we all know what the next step for me is...
...I gotta make my own, right?
~PNK
Unifon was borne out of a more specific project than most spelling reform projects, the magical realm of airplane communication. In 1957 the International Air Transport Association chose English as the official lingua franca of the friendly skies. The Bendix Corporation had a man named John Malone under contract and he had created his own phonetic alphabet as part of a larger project, but once the IATA made its decision the Bendix people decided to terminate Malone as the project he was working on, including Unifon, had lost its market. Malone shelved his idea until some time later when he found out his Kindergarten-aged son couldn't read, and he dusted off his 40 character invention. Through the '60s and '70s numerous tests were done to teach children the alphabet, which was often called a "training wheels" alphabet, and several articles were published in the '70s and '80s in publications like The New York Times and Science Digest. While that was pretty much it for English applications there was a serious attempt, spearheaded by Tom Parsons of Humboldt State University, to adapt Unifon for transcribing Native American Languages (perhaps as a tonic for the surface horrors of Americanist phonetic notation) but after years of work the idea died with Parsons's departure from the university. Well, 40 characters sounds about right even if not many people cared, so let's see how it fares with our favorite quotes.
Well, I must admit, of all the different alphabets this was the easiest for me to write as a native English speaker, and it would also have been pretty easy to decode the letters if I were given a passage without a chart. Some words, such as "and" and "dump", look identical to their Latin counterparts, and unlike virtually all other phonetic alphabets I've seen there's almost no chance I'll be unable to distinguish one character from another if not looking closely. Part of this is sticking to an all-majuscule format, keeping the letters large and clearly distinguished from one another; this also sidesteps Shavian's tall and deep letter attributes which, while helping a very simple alphabet look more florid, was tricky to get a hang on and almost requires lined paper to ensure readability. This distinguished look for each letter does, however, port over Latin's complexity in writing each letter, especially majuscule versions which often rely on serifs to ensure readability, though thankfully Unifon doesn't require something as superfluous and busyworky as serifs. (Oddly enough, Deseret's lack of serifs was among its criticisms when it premiered, but I found it part of why the alphabet felt solid and ageless, so maybe you just can't please anybody.) For example, the long "e" letter takes four strokes, about three strokes too many that a letter should take to be assembled in a perfect world. It was also tricky writing some of the letters, specifically the ones with lines touching their tops and bottoms, such as the long "o". Believe it or not, it takes a bit of skill to draw those not only straight but just right so that they're clearly connected but not overlapping anything. Also oddly hard to write properly were the sounds for "ch" and "sh", requiring a perfectly centered 45-degree slash so as to look aesthetically appealing and not obscure the letter it is derived from. However, the biggest problem isn't any of those but one particular character that flies in the face of everything phonetic alphabets are supposed to be about. Here's the lineup:
See that letter second from the right in the top row? That vowel is impossible. It doesn't exist in the English language except in combination with "r" to make "ur" as in "fur" and the fact that it was listed as its own grapheme infuriates me. The whole appeal of phonetic spelling is to avoid crap like that from occurring, so what gives? I've seen other Unifon charts which make it a ligature with "r", keeping the orientation as backwards from the short "e" sound just for clarity's sake, and that make a heck of a lot more sense than trying to fob it off as its own essential English sound. And wouldn't it be more phonetically natural to write the "ur" sound as "ur"? You know, with the Unifon letters that are identical to their Latin counterparts? Also, wait a second...is that "ch" sound a "c" with a slash through it? Like how "sh" is an "s" with a slash through it so as to distinguish it from where it came from? There is no unslashed "c" in Unifon, so where did it come from? "C" is exactly the kind of letter that phonetic alphabets do away with because of its inconsistent usage but John Malone thought it a good idea to port it over just to bisect the sucker. Sheesh. And what's going on with "w"?
Anyway, those problems out of the way Unifon is very easy to use and read, though I wonder about the long-term effect of using it as a teaching aid for children, only to have them transition to normal spelling later on. Even though it got more press and testing than most of the other alphabets I still consider it a minor one for purely philosophical and aesthetic reasons, principally that it just doesn't stand on its own as a writing system not indebted to the Latin alphabet. While forcing people to become accustomed to a heap of alien symbols might seem like a lot of work for spelling reform it's this radical restructuring of how words are constructed, not only on the page but in the mind, that helps reform spelling on multiple levels, so a script like Unifon seems incomplete and lacking in self-confidence, perhaps suitable as a transitional script but not as a true replacement for the Old Order. Our next alphabet doesn't suffer from this problem nearly as much but, I gotta say, I'd take a lack of self-containment over having to write out this again:
The alphabet seen here was created by Michael H. Barton, a Quaker-turned-Mormon-turned-Shaker that I mentioned in the last article as possibly having influenced the regents of the University of Deseret in their alphabet-designing. In 1833 (during his brief Mormon period) Barton published a series of pamphlets entitled "Something New" in which he introduced and showed copious examples of his "plain and simple" spelling system, containing, once again, 40 characters and a change to punctuation which I'll get to in a second. His system is the most obscure of the six alphabets I went over for these articles and I can't blame the public for not latching on - they probably couldn't get past the first step, reading the characters. I don't mean reading passages of the text, I mean being able to visually identify each symbol as being different from another. As someone under 40 I've never seen much use in writing in cursive, except in the event that you've practiced it so much you can write whole sentences in a single stroke, and asking people to write longhand in italics is asking for serious trouble, so Barton's decision to slant all the characters to the right and use what should be ornamentation to assist in basic character construction grinds my bones to make his bread. Ignoring for a fact that far too many of them are identical to their cursive Latin counterparts, these graphemes are way too similar to each other and the thick printing makes them barely legible. I made it through both my passages without having found a legible version of the "k" letter, for example:
I later found an example in a thinner font that was clearer, but why couldn't it be legible to begin with?! While the fact that letters are often paired off, such as the "ee" symbol being the "eh" symbol flipped upside down, that doesn't change the fact that the symbols for "n" and "y" are indistinguishable in the hands of a sloppy writer and the letters for "a" sounds, "u" sounds and others blur together into a gradient of annoyance. (You can also tell how old this script is in that, much like Franklin's script, it includes a separate letter for the "wh" sound along with a "w" sound.) The biggest problem, however trumps all those others and is not letters but Barton's baffling decision that normal punctuation wasn't clear enough and therefore had to be replaced by three lines of varying lengths. Yeah, there's no possible way those could be mistaken in context. Also, he does away with question and exclamation marks by replacing them with a dot and asterisk respectively, and then says to put them at the beginning of a sentence without saying what to do at the end, forcing me to "do it live", as it were. He also doesn't think to include markings for apostrophes, semicolons and ellipses, and you might notice in the Shadow of the Vampire quote I had to make up symbols based on what he'd given me. This is colossally short-sighted and I can't imagine how he could've missed it in testing, and might be the single biggest blunder in any of the alphabets I've reviewed. On the plus side everything fits into a neat row of blocks like Unifon but still has a visual sweep, the curves more artistically florid than most constructed scripts I've seen. If you care to read the collected form of his pamphlets, published along with a shorthand script I have no authority to judge, you can see it here, and while I can't recommend reading the entire book, mostly because I couldn't get very far myself, there are some juicy nuggets of archaic and, dare I say, pretentious prose, such as his open letter "To the Inhabitants of the World" on page 18.
One alphabet remains, and I hope you're glad that I saved the "best" for last. Invented in 1980 as a secret script, Ewellic, the brainchild of Unicode contributor Doug Ewell, has a distinctly ancient flavor despite being invented more recently than any other alphabet seen here. See if you can spot it:
Yup, you're looking at the work of a man who likes himself some runes, most likely because he likes himself some Tolkien. There's also another ancient reference point, though one I'm not convinced that he knew about: the much-dreaded Ogham, which you may recall from my last article as being one of the most easily misread scripts in the world. Believe it or not, Ewellic might just be more confusing than Ogham and most definitely harder to write. This script is without question the worst of the lot, the unmemorable, confusingly interrelated graphemes so hard to keep track of that I had to switch between three different charts in order to write these passages. Writing all those straight lines took far more concentration than anything Barton threw at me and it still looks like arseshite, and it compounds matters when half of them require three separate strokes, such as every single vowel. The schwa was okay because it was just two vertical lines, but the listing for the script on Omniglot says that it was designed to have very limited use. Ewell fancied himself a joiner of cultures so the script includes a lot of additional characters for sounds present only in the other major European languages, such as a set of graphemes for nasal French vowels, but that only makes me think that some poor Frenchman had this crap forced upon them by a grating hobbyist friend. However, he doesn't include single letters for some rather common sounds like all the dipthongs and all the affricates ("ch" and "j"), claiming they're actually pairs of letters. I kind of understand the dipthongs, perhaps as much as I wish for Ewell to understand how carpal tunnel syndrome arises, but "CH" AND "J" ARE EACH ONE SOUND NOT "T-SH" AND "D-ZH" YOU FOOLASS. There's also the problem of grapheme recycling - because of how similar all the characters are many of them are simple flips of others, often creating sets of four symbols that are retrogrades and inversions of each other. That doesn't mean that the characters have any phonetic relation to each other, such as how "m", "b", "w" and "v" are all the same grapheme in different orientations. How does "v" relate to "b" in any aural way? Why on Earth is "m" the same as "w" but upside down? I -
- oh, you son of a bitch.
And, yeah, I'm so glad that not only did Ewell create a new set of numerals but also made rules for use with hexadecimal, an integral part of the English spelling experience. What isn't included on the site is the rule that words with more than one syllable require an acute accent over the vowel of the stressed syllable, something that SEEMS KIND OF IMPORTANT BUT THE SCRIPT'S OWN CREATOR COULDN'T BE BOTHERED TO MENTION IT ON HIS OWN oh, never mind, this is hopeless. Never in my life have I worked so painstakingly to write passages that I will have so little hope of remembering because of how poorly designed the script is. Sure, I had trouble differentiating Barton but at least they had more shape to them than a bent milkshake straw. Sure, Shavian was simple line forms but at least they could all be made with a single stroke and the tall/deep contrasts assisted in reading. And sure, Deseret gets hard to read below a certain font size but at least that was nice to look at. Hey Ewell - I gotta message for ya concernin' my likelihood of evah writin' in Ewellic again:
Well! After all that commotion I can finally sum things up a bit. My favorites were Deseret and Shavian, Shavian for its economy, ease of writing, elegance and internal logic, Deseret for its robust, timeless designs and memorability. The one that seems the most likely to actually be used outside of hobbyist circles is Unifon but I can't endorse it too much for philosophical reasons. Franklin's script was nonsense and was treated as such, Barton's was understandably too obscure for use and JEESH-US CRISPY CRACKERS EWELLIC. And the good news is that I'm no closer to being a linguist than I was before - hooray! Anyway, I guess we all know what the next step for me is...
...I gotta make my own, right?
~PNK
No comments:
Post a Comment