Phonetic Phun, part 1 1/2 - Unifon, Barton and Ewellic

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

Phonetic Phun, part 1 - Intro and the Distinguished Three

I love writing systems, be they real or fictional, widely used or extinct, deciphered or indeciphered, but at no point will I tell you that I'm any kind of linguist.  My lack of knowledge of the basic principles of linguistics makes me not even an amateur because all that I know is essentially trivia, making each statement made by myself on the subject an intellectual owl pellet of randomly gathered bits and bobs, the moss gathered by my mind's rolling stone*.  In my mind how a language is written and appears visually is a large part of its identity and for a non-speaking linguae viatori patuit** like myself the script makes far stronger an impression than the speech it is made to represent.  Naturally this means the more aesthetically colorful the script the better it is, which is why I put the primary Georgian alphabet, Mkhreduli - 

- at the top of my list of best scripts.  The script of Georgian is as unique and untraceable as Georgian itself (and its minority siblings in the Kartvelian familiy), its elegant loops as alluring as they are deceptively easy to write.  In my crypto-cruising I've found more veins of gold, such as Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics -

- the Coptic alphabet, especially when used for religious in religious texts -

- and most Mongolian scripts, especially the "classical" alphabet, seen here running along the right edge of the picture:

My recent research was spurred on by a tiny fit of asemic writing that I used to kill time.  See if you can see what's going on with this example:

Asemic writing is the same as writing, except that it has no real language content.  It's an artistic practice that creates abstract forms that resemble text but isn't meant to be deciphered or even considered decipherable - it's pure scriptural invention, totally unbound from semantics.  It's the kind of thing that someone with no interest in actually learning languages but a desire to see them come alive for aesthetic pleasure would love, and as such my one-time venture into it acted as a catalyst for me strolling the primrose path of Wikipedia's list of writing systems.  If you scroll down that page past the undeciphered scripts there's a big section called "Other" that includes asemic writing and fictional writing systems (such as Tengwar from Tolkien's works and the script from Codex Seraphinianus, the greatest thing in the history of things) and near the top of that heap is the subject of today's article, phonetic alphabets.  

Phonetic alphabets are designed to get around all the inconsistencies and unnecessarities of natural writing systems to better represent how languages sound, and one of these, the International Phonetic Alphabet (a bit too Eurocentric to be truly international, as most of it is based on the Latin and Greek alphabets), is very widely used for scholarly purposes.  Another one familiar to American readers is Americanist phonetic notation, used largely for representing Native American languages that previously had no literate representation (with confusing letters such as dotless question marks and "l"s with tildes) as well as some Uralic languages in Northwest Russia and Finland.  While both of these have proven useful in the right field the ones that caught my eye were attempts at revising or replacing the Latin alphabet for use with the English language, mostly created as part of a large movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries to reform English spelling.  The way English is written is horribly inconsistent, bulky and confusing to new learners, its history littered with poorly-thought out reforms (such as the trend in Chaucer's time to spell and order words to better resemble Latin, such as the "s" in island and the rule to never end a sentence with a preposition) and tons of borrowed French, German and Spanish words.  For spelling reform to catch on normal writers have to care about the difficulties in writing their own language and make a conscious effort to change their own writing practices for dubious practical gains, and considering how apathetic most Americans are about stuff like linguistics you can guess how excited the average 'Merican was about relearning how to write.  While none of these proposed reforms were implemented on a mass scale a few ideas did stick, such as a half-successful effort to simplify -ck to -c, such as with the words magic (from magick) and tonic (from tonick).  More than half of all the English spelling reforms were simply attempts to use the usual Latin alphabet in a simpler, more consistent way, but many others identified an inherent problem with the Latin alphabet, its inherent inability to accurately represent English sounds.  How many different vowels do we use the latter "a" for?  What about the inconsistent use of the letter "c"?  Why did we keep the letter "q" at all if there's not one instance of its use without "u" right after it in an English word?  Wouldn't it be nice if English had its own alphabet, tailor-made for our sounds and guaranteed to be consistent and easy?  My thoughts exactly.  (Though if this sounds like a bit too much for a foreigner to handle, think again: this excellent article by the award-winning Sci Fi writer Ted Chiang goes over how colossally difficult it is to learn written Chinese with any kind of speed.)

Enter supposed salvation from three wildly different but equally unlikely sources: Benjamin Franklin, Brigham Young and George Bernard Shaw.  I'm just as shocked as you how those three people could make it into an English sentence that wasn't "here's three famous people who spoke English:..." and the stories behind their alphabets are just as fascinating as the scripts themselves.  Part 1 of this article aims to examine all three of them to see if they hold water or were crummy from the get go, and in order to make both parts of this article palatable I'll try to be as George Plimpton-esque as possible, detailing my failures as much, or more, as my accomplishments and actually relevant information.

The oldest of these, old enough to predate the major reforms of the 19th century, is Benjamin Franklin's, created in 1768 in his essay A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling.  Rather than entirely replace the Latin alphabet Franklin opted to reassign and remove letters as he saw fit and augment them with letters borrowed from the Greek alphabet and some new graphemes that can be as hard to write as they are unappealing.  Personally, I can't stand it.  Just look at this:

Positively awful.  One of the most obvious ways to reform spelling is to remove the need for doubled letters, as English doesn't have varying lengths in the same way that Finnish does and they mostly serve to make words longer and bulkier.  Franklin's "solutions" to vowel inconsistencies add as many doubled letters as they remove and the additions from the Greek alphabet do little except make the whole thing seem derivative and eccentric, which is exactly what it is.  Click the link to the article and you'll see a grapheme missing from here, a ligature of "a" and "u" for the "aw" sound that looks almost impossible to accurately write in longhand.  I'll get to the good parts later but for now you can feast your eyes on my attempts to write in this nonsense.  I decided to do test drives on the three most distinctive scripts using a pair of moderate-length paragraphs of quotation, and for the sake of ease of scrolling I'll only post the originals once.  Because of how bulky the letter-to-sound charts are I haven't included them here; I suggest opening the articles on the alphabets in a different window so you can look back and forth.  Here's the first paragraph I used, and you might notice something a little off with it:

No, you're eyes aren't failing, that really is what that looks like.  When I started working on this article I was writing in the dead of night and mistakenly used a blue colored pencil of an unusually soft quality, so not only was it unnecessarily hard to write the first page it doesn't scan well, either.  You can blow any of the images up by clicking on them and I guarantee that less than half of the transcriptions are written using that pencil.  In fact, that's so unreadable I'm going to show it as it appears typed:

Much better.  Franklin's alphabet was actually the last one I tested, long after the other two, and so I used a proper pencil for a script that might not be worth writing in:

While some things turned out fine the result is a bit less than compelling.  This example has plenty of doubled vowels as per Franklin's resistance to making different letters for different versions of the five basic vowels, such as the use of "ee" to represent "ay" as in "bay", a decision that never looks right no matter how much I see what he was thinking.  This also results in an overuse of the short "o" combo letter of "c" and a dotless "i" and other awkward choices, some of them due to how different English pronunciation was in the Colonies in the 18th century as compared to now.  For example, Franklin bothers to distinguish "w" and "wh", marking the latter as "hu", and the minority usage of that sound today makes trying to write using the alphabet as a modern American English speaker more difficult that it needs to be.  Let's take another example:

Right off the bat there are too many "i"s.  Seriously, how hard is it to have one letter for the "ee" sound?  Also, "boy" should never have to be spelled with five letters.  Vitriol aside there are some good things Franklin did, such as creating graphemes for the sounds "ng", voiced and unvoiced "th" and the unvoiced "sh".  I know that I should have at least tried to get used to the "c-dotless i" for "oh" sound but it just never happened; there's just something wrong about having to make the "ow" sound with something that looks like "ciu".  I'll also admit that when I was writing this I forgot the letters the least frequently as with the other two because of how similar the alphabet is to Latin.  I think it's time that we just admit what we all now understand: not every invention of Franklin's was good.  Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest minds of the 18th century, co-engineering the United States and making pioneering advancements in a striking variety of scientific fields, ultimately inventing things such as bifocal lenses, the lightning rod and his own kind of glass harmonica.  He was also a raging eccentric, and while eccentric renaissance men are my favorite kind of person it's safe to say that Franklin was a bit out of his depth.  I probably don't have to tell you that this alphabet didn't make it much farther beyond the pages of Franklin's essay collections and I have to say that it's probably for the better.

The next alphabet chronologically is the Deseret alphabet (pronounced precisely as it says on the tin), and even explaining its name opens up vast and fascinating alleys of history, the end of which we can't get anywhere near to in this article.  I had mentioned that Brigham Young had a hand in its creation, but that's not entirely true.  The alphabet was created in the mid 19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret, now known as the University of Utah, as well as leaders in the LDS Church.  In accordance with the fervent Mormonism of the alphabet's designers, the name of the alphabet and university comes from the Book of Mormon, supposedly the word for "honeybee" in an ancient language in Mormonism's sacred history.  The project was undertaken largely to create an English alphabet that would be both accurate and simplifying so people learning the language from another writing system or a non-literate culture would be able to learn the writing system easier, a fitting goal as at the time a large number of Scandinavian immigrants were settling in Utah.  While the project wasn't pitched as a religious exercise the practice of creating new writing systems for use in missionary activities has a long and dense history, including the adaptation of the above Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics by French missionaries - the image for that script is a depiction of the Lord's Prayer, one of the most translated bits of writing in the world.  It's also just like early Mormons to want to invent a new writing system, as the whole point of settling in Utah so firmly as to build a university there was to create an autonomous Mormon state, and a "State of Deseret" was proposed without actually getting off the ground.  The very individualist spirit of Mormonism in creating its own alternate history and interweaving Christianity with Colonies folk magic was the same thing that got them thrown out of New England in the first place, so it's easy to imagine the new script as being part of LDS nationalism.  While one of the main architects, Parley P. Pratt, was an LDS leader, the man who made the biggest contribution was George D. Watt, the first person from the British Isles to be baptized Mormon and a professional stenographer and expert on shorthand.  Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Deseret started with the right foot forward by being largely designed by someone with linguistic expertise, as well as having a committee to develop it rather than just one guy.  Let's take a look:

(Shadow of the Vampire)

(Carlin, which is hilarious to write in a Mormon-designed alphabet)

Deseret's designers got the first step right in correctly identifying all the sounds in English common enough to need representation by a letter, resulting in an alphabet with 40 letters rather than the usual 26.  This number wasn't reached by accident, as we'll see later, and help, as well as inspiration, might have been supplied by an earlier attempt at a new alphabet by fellow Mormon Michael H. Barton.  Barton converted to Mormonism from Quakerism and ultimately would leave LDS for Shakerism, and in 1830, during his Mormon period, published "Something New", detailing his own phonetic alphabet and featuring all the sounds featured in Deseret.  I'll be testing Barton's alphabet in a later, third article but as it made the least impression on people compared to the other three I forewent (is that how you say that?) testing it for now.  The greater influence on Deseret, at least in terms of inspiring the act of its creation, was the Cherokee syllabary, invented by the Cherokee Sequoyah almost out of whole cloth and an immediate success among his people.  Unlike the Barton alphabet and the Cherokee syllabary, Deseret does a great job at looking almost totally unlike the Latin alphabet both close up and far away.  The letters all look like they were carefully designed, fitting as the alphabet went through three major revisions in its early years, though I agree with the script's contemporaneous critics in that the uppercase and lowercase (called majuscule and miniscule in linguistics) versions of the letters should've looked different enough from each other that people shouldn't have to totally rely on making the majuscule versions larger than the miniscule.  The striking visual identity of each letter made it relatively easy for me to remember which one was which when trying to transcribe from memory, and the stockily florid feel of the script gives whatever is written a noble, official flavor, much like an ancient religious text***.  While some letters, such as the letters for "n" and "l", resemble their Latin counterparts, Deseret does a good job of shaking up our associations of shapes with sounds as to further force the reader to reorganize how they construct words in their head to fit a more appropriate English text.  The fact that the script is easy to read both close up and far away is more important than you think, as our brain accomplishes much of reading by guessing from cursory glances, and because of that the easier the letter identification the easier it is to read the script quickly.  It's also easy to see how many fewer letters I had to use to get the sounds I needed, and this was before I found out the custom in writing Deseret to use single letters for words that sound exactly like the name of the letter, meaning that "the", "and" and "you" all get to be represented with one grapheme.  Isn't it lovely when you create extra work for yourself by not reading the instructions?

Things aren't all milk and deseret pollen, though. A major omission from the alphabet is a representation for the "schwa" sound, the "u" in "but", a sound that is often arrived at by being lazy while pronouncing other vowels****.  Their solution is to use whatever vowel letter closest resembles what it would sound like if the stress was on the schwa, as English speakers habitually change vowels in words usually spoken quickly when stressing components of it, and because different readers hear words differently there's no right answer and variations can be annoying to have to read.  If you want a crash course in how Americans from the mid-19th century pronounced everyday words try reading the two Deseret readers from the 1860s (also read them because they're charming as all heckout).  Some shapes are recycled via flipping and rotation but the pairs don't match to related sounds, such as the long "a" being a flip of the "v" and long "e" being a flip of "z".  Some of the letters are hard to write, specifically "k" and "g" - I was never able to write it in a way that wasn't lopsided and disconnected at one end or another.  The "g" is one that's hard to read, especially when the print is small, because of the bang-like curve inside of them; another one is the "ew" with its 45-degree cross in a circle.  All that being said I was very happy with Deseret in writing and aesthetics, succeeding more in autonomy than the Cherokee syllabary it most closely resembles and making up for its shortcomings with little tricks and charm.

One of the most interesting resources I found on Deseret was a blog written by a former University of Utah student who was introduced to it briefly in his studies and later went on to work on Unicode, the programming structure that allows computers to render international scripts.  In the first post he described that at a certain point in Unicode's development the programmers realized they would have to do a major overhaul, and long story short developers needed to choose a handful of scripts to create Unicode for that could sit in outer levels, beyond current support, for an indefinite period of time without getting too many people mad.  Deseret was one of them, as well as Pollard, another script devised by a missionary.  A third was the third major phonetic alphabet that I tackled and arguably the most famous: Shavian.

George Bernard Shaw wasn't at all opposed to writing English in a newer, simpler way.  He frequently wrote in Pitman shorthand, knew Henry Sweet, the inventor of Current Shorthand, and during the 1920s and '30s served on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English which broadcast many examples of phonetic spelling.  In his will, Shaw made arrangements for a campaign to make a new English alphabet that had at least 40 letters, was as phonetic as possible, and looked nothing like the Latin alphabet.  Isaac Pitman, along with the Public Trustee, announced a worldwide competition to design the alphabet, which resulted in four winners, including Ronald Kingsley Read.  Read was appointed to amalgamate the best candidates to create the new alphabet and Shavian was born.  Let's see it in action:

Shavian is a marvel of simplicity and unity.  Most every letter is paired, with consonants mostly paired by voiced and unvoiced, such as v and f, and these pairs are the same symbols rotated 180 degrees, giving the script an unparalleled internal logic.  Each letter can be written with a single stroke and a very quick one at that, aside from the eight ligatures for vowel/r combinations and common combos like "yu", and at no point can I imagine anyone having trouble seeing details in these at any distance.  Both Deseret and Shavian do a fine job at identifying the most common English sounds, though Shavian has an upper hand in that it has the schwa and clears up some of the long/short vowel confusion to better align with modern English.  The ligatures for vowel/r combos were a brilliant idea, especially the "ur" sound that, as I've found with practice, occurs quite frequently in normal English.  However, there is one major issue here, one that I'm sure reading practice would clear up but needs to be addressed...there is such a thing as a script being too simple.  It's easy to see how much of a reference shorthand must have been on Shavian because the letters are often so simple that they become very easy to mix up.  I found myself forgetting which letters were which way more with Shavian than with Deseret and even Franklin's alphabet.  If you think I'm just a complaining simpleton, let me give you some context.  Here's what I consider one of the worst scripts in the world, Ogham:

Used to write ancient Celtic languages, Ogham's notchpiles carved into tree-like lines are some of the easiest graphemes to misread, with one wrong line resulting in a hot mess.  This is one of the least distinctive scripts I've ever seen and Shavian's pseudo-shorthand look strays a little too close to this for my comfort.  

Another major writing change with Shavian is the lack of miniscule and majuscule letters, instead having "tall" and "deep" letters that are either above or below the normal line.  As you can see in the examples I had a hard time getting used to it and occasionally tried starting lines with "capital" versions of the letters or had to respace everything mid-line.  The solution to writing names was to have a "naming dot" precede them, as you can see in the attributions at the bottom of each paragraph.  It's an interesting concept but I'll have to tackle the main problem with it in a later article.  It's certainly better than grammatical changes in some phonetic alphabets *COUGH*BARTON*COUGH* but we'll have to wait until the next article for the worst changes to Latin punctuation.  The good news is that Shavian's successes outweigh its limitations for a refreshing shakeup of the Queen's English.

That above cover for the Shavian (or Shaw alphabet as it's called equally as often) edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was published with funds from the Shaw trust, but because of that very fact it was the only book published in Shavian at the time, aside from a newsletter with fan-submitted Shavian content.  That's a pretty pitiful amount of exposure for a movement to transform the written face of a language spoken by billions, though at four books, newspaper articles, a coin, a tombstone and unpublished material Deseret wasn't that much more exposed, despite the best efforts of the regents of the University of Deseret.  A major roadblock in publishing material in these alphabets is the practicalities of typesetting before the computer age.  Creating all those letter tiles and hiring people to painstakingly set type in an alphabet they might not fully understand, all on top of hiring people to transliterate book-length bodies of English into alphabets with different "experts" arguing over spelling was both unaffordable and headache-inducing at the time.  The good news is that, now with computer software like Unicode it's way easier to create typeset documents in all the scripts you can think of, and as such there are Ebook solutions to your spelling nightmares, though mostly in Deseret as part of a thriving Deseret Alphabet Classics series.  One book that you can find in both alphabets is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, created by the fantastic publisher Evertype, a specialist in using digital tech to publish books in minority and constructed languages and scripts.  Alice has been used by the publisher as a platform for publishing in dozens of obscure languages and alphabets, including Shona, Lombardy and Lingwa de Planeta.  Though skimming of the Deseret Alice revealed many inconsistencies and flat-out errors its great to see so much work put into such a niche practice.  Perusing those various Alices also brought an Ewellic edition to the surface, and one thought crossed my mind - what in the Sam H-I-Double-Hockeysticks is Ewellic?!

...stick around for the next part to find out.

~PNK

*...wait, shit.

**Fun fact: if you put this into Google translate you'll resent me for having to do so.

***Prank idea: carve a quote in Deseret into a large rock and claim it's a thousands-ish-year-old artifact from a lost civilization.

****Uh thuhsuhnd yuhrs fruhm nuhw uhll Uhngluhsh wuhrds wuhll buh schwuhs bruhkuhn uhp buh cuhnsuhnuhnts. (A thousand years from now all English words will be schwas broken up by consonants)

Nonsequitoppers

Some time ago Turner Classic Movies, as part of its excellent TCM Underground series (Saturday nights at 11:00), marathoned the fascinating short films of David Lynch, all of which I viewed with glee.  Lynch's short film work dates back to his early painting days in the 60's (beginning with the aptly titled Six Men Getting Sick) and prove the medium to be Lynch's ideal cinematic platform, unconstrained by mainstream film's need for storytelling and naturalism.  Lynch only intermittently returned to shorts after his film career got rolling, always at the order of commissions for various projects, such as the one-minute creepfest Premonition Following An Evil Deed created for the multi-director anthology Lumière & Company.  In the early 2000's Lynch created a website and realized that he could put up regular video content with no restraints from producers or the public and started making web-only shows, though none of them are still running.  One of them, Rabbits, was a live-action sitcom parody featuring people (including Naomi Watts) in rabbit costumes standing around in a dimly-lit living room spouting ominous nonsense to a canned laugh track.  Rabbits didn't get any play on TCM, though it was featured in Lynch's 2006 feature Inland Empire, but the other web series on DavidLynch.com did, and it proved that that day was a glorious day indeed - it was the day that DumbLand aired on TCM.

This is akin to the Criterion Collection picking up Armageddon (oh, wait...) but far more excellent.  DumbLand is an 8-episode Flash cartoon that is a purposefully "crude, stupid, violent and absurd series" by Lynch's own admission and boy howdy does it not disappoint.  Set in a hueless, monochrome suburban wasteland, DumbLand chronicles the lives of a brutish, wife-beater-clad man, his shell-shocked wife and their annoying, possibly naked son as they take part in such adventures as the dad (identified on the website (once upon a time) as Randy) sticking his finger in an exposed lightbulb filament, getting thrown through walls by a treadmill and spraying Raid in his face.  The treadmill episode peaks when he gets a sledgehammer jammed up his butt and farts it out.  Another episode concerns a man with a stick lodged perpendicularly in his mouth which Randy removes in the most damaging way possible.

This might sound like a hard sell, compounded by the fact that Lynch is usually at his worst when he's trying to be funny.  Anybody who's had the misfortune of trying to watch all of Twin Peaks nowadays knows of the horrible attempts at humor in the second season, such as when the deputy with the cowlicked hair gets hit in the face with a rake and they just...keep...cutting...back...to...him...wobbling...around.  A deeply pitiable number of people might recall that Lynch created another TV show with Peaks co-creator Mark Frost called On the Air that aired for a whole three episodes on Saturday nights as a mid-season replacement in '92.  That clip I linked to is all that needs to be said about that.  In spite of those horrific first introductions DumbLand manages to find a sweet spot between belligerent crudeness, deadpan delivery and self-aware tackiness that I find weirdly hilarious, though I certainly wouldn't take a first date to it after dinner.  It certainly doesn't reward extended analysis and has a penchant for drawn-out repetition which will infuriate many a viewer.  I rewatched it recently (and bid my last seven brain cells goodbye) and did a bit of research on it, and discovered that the IMDB description of the show compares it to a comic strip Lynch did that I'd never heard of before - The Angriest Dog in the World.

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Running in the L.A. Weekly from 1983 to 1994, The Angriest Dog in the World was conceived a decade earlier when Lynch briefly went to a therapist to deal with anger issues.  While he eventually cured his anger through transcendental meditation (and wrote a book on the practice) he found another outlet years later with his strip about an angry dog chained up in a family's backyard in a bland suburb with a smoke-belching factory in the background.  Every strip follows the same format, beginning with an introduction panel stating:

"The dog who is so angry he cannot move.  He cannot eat.  He cannot sleep.  He can just barely growl.  ...Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis."

We then get four static panels of the dog on his chain, the fourth one at night.  The main action is the conversations that come from the family inside the house, often philosophical non sequiturs, seizure-inducing puns or random scientific factoids of dubious veracity.  The dog hears none of this, glued to his single-minded purpose.

The format broke occasionally, though always with an unsettling alternative:

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There is a clear Absurdist message in this, not just absurd but one similar to the Absurdist philosophy that Camus developed concerning the conflict between humankind's search for life's purpose and our total failure to find one.  The dog is Lynch's Sisyphus, trying endlessly to achieve an impossible goal; the thoughts of the family in the house are equally futile, and the occasional consumption of the strip by fire alludes to the fleeting nature of life itself.  Yet there is an unexplainable comedy to it all and I can't help but find it charming, especially the art style of the dog, more horseshoe crab than canine, and its little speech bubble.  Not many people shared my sentiment when the strip was still running, though, with one angry letter calling it a "useless, idiotic CON GAME of a strip".  One can't help but think about the kind of mind that regularly makes a strip so seemingly lazy, a sentiment felt by Toonpedia when it called it "the all-time easiest comic strip to draw".  It's a bit stunning how long it ran, eleven years of the same five panels and non-jokes, and Joe McCullough of The Comics Journal speculated that the strip's long life could have been due to an easy way to get Lynch's name in the Weekly's table of contents.  As of this writing it's never been collected but it has its fans, among them Ryan North, creator of Dinosaur Comics, which similarly uses the exact same clip art of dinosaurs in the same order for every strip with different dialogue - and one strip revealed that TADITW was a direct influence.  Of course, spare, quizzical comics have been around long before TADITW, such as the bulk of old-school New Yorker comics and the work of legendary Santa Cruzian Futzie Nutzle.  However, the comic it most reminds me of is not even a full comic, but rather an untitled parasite latched onto the belly of one of the most lavish and divisive comic strips of our time.

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Maakies, created by Tony Millionaire, is a true oddity, a gorgeously drawn throwback to the golden age of newspaper comics, set in a lush fabulist universe, yet filled with aggressively dark and crude humor and ghastly characters.  Unlike TADITW, which has a cool tastefulness despite its dark undercurrents, Maakies (don't worry, nobody knows how to pronounce the name) aims to offend and disgust, far surpassing the likes of Ren and Stimpy in its focus on bodily degradation, violence and the worst aspects of the human psyche - though presented with a wonky sense of humor and a great sense for surprise and the unusual.  Also unlike TADITW it runs in a lot of weekly papers and international comics venues, has been nominated for a bunch of awards, was adapted into flash animated shorts for SNL and had a series based on it air on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block, albeit a terrible cartoon that was canned after two months and has never been released on video.  Also, you might notice something running along the bottom of the strip:

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That little comic on the bottom edge is the most old-fashioned thing of all, called a "topper".  Back in the days before WWII Sunday comics could take up a whole page of the newspaper and a common practice was to use a short second banana strip at the top or bottom of the page to fill space, often by the same author as the main strip.  The practice mostly died out after the 30's but a handful of mainstream strips kept them going for decades after that - Jim Davis experimented with a topper with his strip U.S. Acres, the characters eventually showing up on Garfield and Friends.  Lots of strips still fill out their Sunday installments with one-to-two-panel throwaway jokes that don't share the main strip's story.  Maakies is the only current strip that consistently uses a topper and Mr. Millionaire (a title I'd love to have on my business cards someday) has never pretended that the secondary strip, which has no name of its own, could last as a solo act.  While it's function is obscure the structure is always the same - purposefully bad zingers strung out by panels of nature scenes.  The lame, often callous humor of the jokes is a sharp contrast to the elegantly drawn scenes, their style akin to Tintin artist Hergé's work or turn-of-the-century Japonisme art from France that mimicked the sparely expressive linework of Japanese woodblock illustration.  It's a testament to Millionaire's expert technique that he gets so much out of so little, making the inclusion of his cartoon characters all the more bizarre - a contrast mined before in the excellent limited-run fantasy comic Moonshadow from the mid-'80's.  That being said it's just about impossible to recommend the strip by itself to anyone, the format lacking the clear arc of TADITW and featuring much worse jokes, at least in palatability.  I have to admit that I don't know if I really "get" Maakies or its topper but I at least appreciate Millionaire's great artistic talent and commitment to his vision, and if one thing comes from the topper it is revealing the true value of TADITW.

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Here's an instance where two TADITW strips were published at once, each one acting as a "topper" for the other.  Neither one has precedent over the other as there is no more story in one than the other, kind of like two Maakies toppers stuck together:

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Now it all makes sense - a future for The Angriest Dog in the World - a topper for other people's comics!  We'll all be rich!

OK, that's a dumb idea, but there is a way to see it as a topper, in a wobbly, lame-duck-philosophy way.  There's a kind of assurance in The Angriest Dog in the World, its sameness creating a calmly unchanging reality.  There's a reason that the most popular newspaper strips are the ones where the characters never age or change - the readers want that moment to last forever, a daily or weekly assurance that somewhere their favorite people are still young and funny.  In this respect the children in Family Circus's immortality is its entire appeal.  It's why a lot of papers, including our own Seattle Times, still publish Peanuts in reruns, ensuring that at least one part of the comics page will stay the same for the rest of the readers' lives.  It's the easiest, least offensive way to keep in stasis, as comics take about 10 seconds to read and usually end in a light chuckle, just a drizzle of levity on top of a frightening cake called "life".  One that someone left out in the rain.  The Angriest Dog in the World is an ideal rerun topper because it never changes and is no more demanding of your time and intelligence from week to week than the last, a puff of non sequitur air, and perhaps if we can rerun it on top of all the things in life we can be reminded of a placid world where everybody knows what they want to do and think even if it gets them nowhere - ignorance is nonsensical bliss.  What we need is help from website designers for a little project:

1. Collect all installments of The Angriest Dog in the World and scan them into digital image formats.

2. Create a program which will display a new one every day or week at the top of your web browser.

3. Sell, rake in cash.

This way you could see your favorite angry dog at the top of your Facebook feed, reminding you that somewhere there's a steadfast friend who doesn't have to pay attention to someone's food selfies or awful political ranting.  Example:

Our long comics nightmare is over - finally, Lynch's true commercial potential has been fulfilled.

~PNK

Out-of-Context Screencaps vol. 2