Hello American Inventors and Producers

People dream about a world-wide language. It is not likely but we can and should have a  World-Wide Auxiliary Language. The American dialect of English should be that language and can be, IF we eliminate the inconsistencies of one of the most difficult languages to spell and pronounce. Our grammar and punctuation should be simplified also.

Our alphabet has twenty-six letters and experts disagree on how many sounds. I argue thirty-nine;  any more are diphthongs combinations of sounds.)  Our alphabet needs the same number of letters as it has sounds and each letter must have one and only one sound. Many have attempted to improve our alphabet. George Bernard Shaw, the Nobel prize-winning playwright created Shavian which was almost voted into law in the House of Commons. His, and every other creator’s mistake, was expecting adults to forget our obsolete alphabet and learn a new one with unfamiliar characters, many, most or all of which are not on keyboards.

I am the first inventor to merge familiar-sounding letters to create the necessary additional letters. I began by asking myself: why do we capitalize the first letter of a sentence?  “Because we always have” is not a good reason. What if . . . wherever A, E, I, and O appear anywhere in a sentence and have a “full” sound, we capitalize them? We will always know how to pronounce them.

The letter “a” may have any of five sounds   A, a in cat, a in bar, aw in law and aY in air. Let lower case a have the a sound in cat; a and h merged have the a sound in bar, aw merged have the a sound in law, and aY merged have the a sound in air.  B is upper case because lower case b  is a mirror image of P;  F, K, and V can be upper or lower case and have the usual sounds.(I’ll get back to  the letter c)  Upper case D with a slight >  at the right side to remind us of the Greek letter delta) will have a D sound. Upper case E will have the E sound in Eat and lower case e will have the short e sound in ever.
 
Upper case G will always have the hard sound in gun. What about Germans? They are Deutschers. We should call people’s homelands what they call them, and call people and their language what they call them. (However, I won’t call a country a free republic if it is not.)  h, n, r and s are lower case because they are also part of new letters.

M is upper case to avoid confusing with the ligature which often occurs between r and n.

No lower case descenders (lower case g, j, p. q, and y,) are used because they waste horizontal space. Upper case I has the sound in eye and i has the sound in it. J has the J sound.

Upper case L has an L sound and lower case L is never used because it is confused with the numeral one and upper case I (pronounced eye).Upper case I will look slightly more like an I-beam so it isn’t confused with the numeral  one.   n and G are merged to represent ng in sing.  O has the full O sound in Oh!  oo has the sound in food and stacked os have the sound in foot.  P has a P sound.

There is no Q; use KW. S  and  h  are merged for the Sh sound. T has the T sound in two. Merged upper case TH has the vibrating sound in The  and lower case th  merged has the sound in thing. tch  has the sound in chew.  u and h are merged into uh,  the schwa, the backwards e, which is not on the keyboard. U and r are merged and have the sound in urn.

We have gotten much from the Hellenes (Greeks) but we do not need their letter X which can have two different sounds in one word – Xerox. The x in virtually every word with an x has a Z sound and should be spelled with a z. We can honor Roentgen by calling the rays he discovered Roentgen rays. Y has a yuh sound and z has a zzz sound.

The human mind is a biocomputer. American students lag much of the world in science and math. Maybe they are cluttering their bioRAMS with digital data such as sports heroes statistics they could look up IF they ever it and cluttering them with unnecessary rules and exceptions to rules. Perhaps we are underutilizing the analog portion of our bioRAM. If a picture is worth a thousands words, perhaps analog may sometimes be more efficient than digital.

A retired linguist, Sol O. Wassner, complained there is a conspiracy to kill the English language. He cherishes its needless complexity. Our language is suffocating. We should focus on being understood, simplification and standardization. Noam Chomsky asked “What does ‘The chicken is ready to meat’ mean?” Is the chicken hungry or cooked? Passengers tell me “Turn right here.” “I can’t; there’s no street on the right.” “I mean ‘Turn left, right here.’” “You mean ‘Turn left here’ or Turn left now.’” Remember Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?”

English is a Germanic language. Find online Bishop Lowth was a fool by Scott E. Kapel, Ph.D. Lowth tried to force Latin grammar on English. Split infinitives are not possible in Latin. Splitting them improves some infinitives in English. A sentence in Latin almost never ends with a preposition but frequently does, or should, in English. Remember Winston Churchill’s “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”

In español writers use a question mark at the start of a question and readers know what’s coming and an exclamation point at the start of an exclamatory sentence. . We can use the Xhosa (pronounced KO-suh) click as an audible exclamation point. They have three different clicks. One is enough for us and we shouldn’t overdo it.  We can use enh or huh as audible question marks.

Ligatures look elegant to font freaks but create confusion. Is rn  R M or is it M? click it or dick it? In the credits of Lord of the Rings was someone named FLICK. A ligature made L and I look like U.
  
Parts of speech should have descriptive names. An adverb modifies a verb so an adjective should modify a  . . . jective? What’s a jective? We should call a modifier of a noun an adnoun. Better, they’re a modverb and a modnoun. Is a pronoun a professional noun or in favor of a noun? Pronouns are vague nouns.

Who or whom? Wassner kvetches “I am afraid ‘Who’ is scoring a home run. And there goes the Yankee language.” So? Why fear it? Who needs whom? Whom sounds as if one is showing off. Arguing whether to use  that or which or we or us is for people who have nothing better to do, or can make a living off it.
All plurals should be made regular by adding s or es or z or ez. Our more than one hundred irregular verbs should be regular. Put a did in front of the present tense verb to indicate the past. I will go, I go, I did go. So what if some words sound strange? Thet don’t sound strange to children or English as a Second Language adults.

I going. Who needs am? I dont. You wont. Who needs apostrophes? George Bernard Shaw hated apostrophes. “There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli”

We should minimize our use of homonyms; words which sound alike cause confusion.

Subject-verb “agreement” adds inconsistency. I wonder; you wonder; they wonder; he wonders; she wonders.  We all wonder: where did s, the plural, come from, and who needs it?  

Why am I convinced that my alphabet will become popular?  We have computers with language translation software and programs for designing type faces.and the British Maltron programmable keyboard. People will learn what is easy if they enjoy it and see a need for it. If we want everyone to learn our language, we must make it fun and easy and efficient.

How else can we improve our language? Let us hear from you. .

           TheFriendlyStranger@hotmail.com