Millie Bernard Shaw? - The online computery journal thingy of a turtle
Feb. 13th, 2008
07:55 pm - Millie Bernard Shaw?
In today's Ozy & Millie, Millie tries to improve English spelling, joining a long line of thinkers who have attempted the same thing, including such names as Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Bernard Shaw.
Just for fun, I wondered how the strip would go if Millie followed Shaw's lead and used a different alphabet:
Transliteration: "My language improvement, by Millie. I have invented a new alphabet. Its letters represent the actual sounds of English so it's way better than the Roman alphabet used to be."
Current Mood: 
show-off
show-offCurrent Music: Tom Waits - Cold Cold Ground
"Also it means regions that speak English with different accents are going to spell words differently from one another."
They do that already, but confusingly the words they spell differently are not the ones they pronounce differently. Howcome izzit that we spell it 'tire' while you spell it 'tyre', even though we both say it the same? And meanwhile we both spell it 'military', but we say 'militaaairy' while you say 'militry'. At least with a phonetic alphabet, the spelling changes would match up with the pronunciation changes.
I figure we can just write words the way they appear in dictionary pronunciation guides. Not that I'd prefer that to what we do now.
If nobody else brings this to Define Cynical, I will -- with your permission.
Dictionary pronunciation guides? If we're going to do that, I wish we'd go all the way and use the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Maybe "father" would have been a better choice?
Father, cot, caught.
I say [fAD@`], [kAt] and [kQt].
Apparently in England they say [fAD@], [kQt] and [kOt].
How do you say them?