Glossaphile
New member
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2014
- Member Type
- Interested in Language
- Native Language
- American English
- Home Country
- United States
- Current Location
- United States
As I promised in my self-introduction, I would like to share my exploration and experimentation on the topic of English orthographic reform. Regardless of your personal stance on the practicality and/or merits of spelling reform, it is at the very least an interesting intellectual excercise, one which may potentially yield useful insights and/or tools for English-language instruction.
First, if you're interested in an in-depth historical overview of English spelling as well as a peak at the work of reform advocates such as myself, I'd like to invite you to peruse my academic paper on the subject (25 pages in PDF format).
As its name suggests, Restored Latinate Spelling (RLS) is essentially a re-Romanization of broadcast English. That is to say, it attempts to emulate the result of applying the Latin alphabet to modern English with an approach roughly akin to that employed by the medieval missionaries who first applied it to Old English, though certain influences of contemporary linguistic science are also present.
A downloadable PDF tutorial and a 1-page cheat-sheet supplement the above-linked website, presenting essentially the same information.
RLS distributes 10 of the 12 monophthongs in English among the five conventional vowel letters in a symmetrical way, assigning two values to each grapheme and using a couple of positional rules to determine when to apply which pronunciation. Diacritics mark any vowels whose pronunciation must break those rules in order to encode correct pronunciation. The remaining two vowels are represented with unconventional characters. That includes the use of <ø> as a dedicated symbol for schwa.
Digraphs are avoided in RLS to avoid confusion with sequences of independently pronounced monographs (cf. the <th> in "wealthy" versus "adulthood"). To accommodate this goal, redundant consonants in the conventional alphabet (such as <c>, whose sounds are already accounted for by <k> and <s>) were reassigned to sounds traditionally represented with digraphs. This reduces the need for additional characters.
All unconventional characters required in RLS are available n the US-International keyboard layout.
I welcome any feedback, be it on the system itself, potential applications, or how it's presented.
First, if you're interested in an in-depth historical overview of English spelling as well as a peak at the work of reform advocates such as myself, I'd like to invite you to peruse my academic paper on the subject (25 pages in PDF format).
As its name suggests, Restored Latinate Spelling (RLS) is essentially a re-Romanization of broadcast English. That is to say, it attempts to emulate the result of applying the Latin alphabet to modern English with an approach roughly akin to that employed by the medieval missionaries who first applied it to Old English, though certain influences of contemporary linguistic science are also present.
A downloadable PDF tutorial and a 1-page cheat-sheet supplement the above-linked website, presenting essentially the same information.
RLS distributes 10 of the 12 monophthongs in English among the five conventional vowel letters in a symmetrical way, assigning two values to each grapheme and using a couple of positional rules to determine when to apply which pronunciation. Diacritics mark any vowels whose pronunciation must break those rules in order to encode correct pronunciation. The remaining two vowels are represented with unconventional characters. That includes the use of <ø> as a dedicated symbol for schwa.
Digraphs are avoided in RLS to avoid confusion with sequences of independently pronounced monographs (cf. the <th> in "wealthy" versus "adulthood"). To accommodate this goal, redundant consonants in the conventional alphabet (such as <c>, whose sounds are already accounted for by <k> and <s>) were reassigned to sounds traditionally represented with digraphs. This reduces the need for additional characters.
All unconventional characters required in RLS are available n the US-International keyboard layout.
I welcome any feedback, be it on the system itself, potential applications, or how it's presented.