This is cool, and I agree that English urgently needs a better script. However, design goal #3 (distinct from the Latin alphabet) makes it clear that this is just a toy, or a proof of concept if you may. If you consciously design a script to be as alien as possible to the target audience (English speakers), then you simply don't want adoption.
I'm no expert, and I bet this has been explored, but I always felt that there's fantastic precedent in the world for using the Latin alphabet for writing sounds that occur in English; especially in the Scandinavian languages.
Eg the word "sauce", which consists of two identical consonants and a single vowel. Why not choose å for that vowel? Sås makes a lot of sense, and accidentally is also the Swedish word for "sauce" iirc. Or what about the two "th" sounds? Icelandic has got you covered: Instead of "this" and "thin", can't we write "ðis" and "þin"?
Note: this is not without precedent. The Norwegians totally overhauled their script until it was pretty much phonetic. This gave them fantastic benefits such as way fewer pupils struggling with dyslexia (at least, until learning Danish or English), and heartwarmingly lovely spellings of loan words such as "restaurang" and "stasjon".
It could be done.
Personally I think it's totally insane to use a phonetic script (as opposed to eg Chinese) but then not spell out the sounds. The Finns, Norwegians, Italians and Russians (and plenty others) got it right.
Eth and thorn used to be used in English anyway. They were removed to make printing easier (the 'old timey' 'ye' for the is because of a practice of printing thorn as y).
Fråm a Nårdik pørspæktiv its nåt riily ænyÞing batt än ædjustment. I assume the same could be applied for German speakers, although their range of local additions to the Latin alphabet differs somewhat from ours.
That's really just using slight modifications, using our own perception of what English sounds to us though. I expect it would look quite alien to the rest of the World, if the Brits started doing it based on their own sense of what written english should look like.
While spoken and written English differ quite a lot, I suspect that to be one of the reasons as to why English has been so successful as a a Global trade language (I'm deliberately ignoring the Brittish Empire here). If English hadn't been standardized, and all English-speaking countries had their own separate written English based on their local dialects, the situation would be quite different.
Mark Twain: A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling:
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter 'c' would be dropped to be replased either by 'k' or 's', and likewise 'x' would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which 'c' would be retained would be the
'ch' formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform
'w' spelling, so that 'which' and 'one' would take the same konsonant,
wile Year 3 might well abolish 'y' replasing it with 'i' and Iear 4
might fiks the 'g/j' anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the
improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with
useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and
the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud
fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez 'c', 'y' and 'x'
-- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais
'ch', 'sh', and 'th' rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov
orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt
xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
If you just want to annotate sounds, it seems like your goals overlap a lot with some uses IPA is designed for. Wiktionary gives /sɑs/ as one pronunciation of sauce.
In any case, you'd have to solve the same problems people already using IPA for English deal with. For one, you'd probably want the same spelling system to be used across all major English dialects, at least necessitating something like using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphoneme.
So for most speakers, different written symbols might be pronounced the same way (i.e. the map from symbol to sound is not injective, and furthermore the map changes depending on which dialect of English you speak).
Additionally, you probably can't simultaneously achieve the goals of
1. use only one character per phoneme
2. use only the 26 characters of the alphabet
If you insist on keeping property (2), some phonemes will be written using (say) two characters, but you'd have to make sure that there's no ambiguity (as there would be if there were three vowels written respectively "e", "i" and "ei").
Restricting yourself to the basic Latin alphabet is a nice feature and digraphs work fine IMO. You could easily solve the this/thin problem by spelling them "dhis" and "thin".
Yeah, totally doable. In Romanian we have a few extra letters but in apps that don't have support for them people just use digraphs: ș is sh, ț is tz (same sounds as I'm English for those digraphs). There's 2 vowels for which unfortunately there's no "standard" digraph, but even those should be doable, something like ă being aw and î being iw (we'd abolish the duplicate letter â, it's a waste of space, anyway, IMO).
Seems like a decent approach for the English alphabet improvements.
It seems pretty common to just type the extra letters in Romanian as their most visually similar Latin character. I've never seen anyone writing Romanian with digraphs when they're sending text messages, for example. "Bună dimineața" just becomes "buna dimineata". As someone learning Romanian, it makes it a challenge - I still learn the word and its pronunciation. Conversely, in German, digraphs seem to be commonly used and understood.
"Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it." -- Erik Naggum
> Eg the word "sauce", which consists of two identical consonants and a single vowel. Why not choose å for that vowel? Sås makes a lot of sense
'sauce' has three consonants in my accent and no 'a' sound; it's a homonym of 'source'. Likewise, in your proposal, would 'pås' be a homograph for 'pass' and 'pause'?
One possibility would be to write each lexical set differently. This wouldn't be too difficult within America -- we already spell "marry", "merry", and "Mary" differently, for example. But extending this to British English might be difficult, because nonrhoticity has restructured the vowel system and Americans would have to learn to indicate the trap-bath split by rote.
Even if each Anglophone country adopted its own alphabet, we'd still have to figure out what to do about words whose pronunciation varies, like (in America) "aunt", "route", "catch", "sure", "coupon", and "been".
The way I would memorize English spelling as a child would be to just say the word as though it were in a Slavic language (say all the letters as they are).
The only trouble was with double letters (I eventually learned to add a pause/stutter, but for years they would trip me up).
"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
A version of that joke has been attributed to Mark Twain, though this source[0] says it was more probably M.J. Yilz, in this[1] 1971 letter to the Economist.
> In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
At this level, it really reads like archaic English spelling before things were really standardized.
George Bernard Shaw often railed against the inconsistencies of English. Its grammar and spelling are unbelievably inconsistent and a constant headache even to native speakers. I love English and think it’s a very expressive language. I used to be an incredibly good speller (AutoCorrect has made that less important). I have a superb grasp of its grammar as both a speaker and a writer.
But boy, do I have sympathy for anyone, native speaker or not, who has to deal with these bugs. They bring a lot of grief and embarrassment, with little return for all the heartache.
Those bugs and inconsistencies are really just manifestations of the complicated history of the language. There are few languages which have as many diverse parent languages as English has.
Heh. "Rumanian" has 2 roots on that list: proto-Indoeuropean and Latin.
In reality, lexical analysis of Romanian shows that it has the following roots:
* pre-Indoeuropean (some words with unknown origins, just a handful, but still)
* proto-Indoeuropean (another small bunch of words)
* Dacian/Thracian (original Indoeuropeans to settle the region; another somewhat small contribution)
* Latin (40% but basically the core vocabulary)
* Slavic (30%, especially nouns, but rarely verbs)
* French (around 20%, imports from the late 18th century onward)
* German, Turkish, Hungarian, English, etc.
So, you were saying? :) Even if you disregard the minor contributions, there's 2 prehistoric origins (pre-Indoeuropean and proto-Indoeuropean), 2 ancient origins (Dacian and Latin), 1 major medieval influence (Slavic) and 1 major modern influence (French).
The European continent had waaaay more invasions than the British Isles, don't forget that ;)
To a certain extent, although that’s a large simplification. There’s a lot more cross-pollination between European languages than on that diagram, most obviously with English nouns being adopted (le weekend, etc) but also in slightly more unexpected ways. For example, Swedish has a fair amount of French vocabulary (’glass’ for ice-cream when all other Nordic languages use ‘is’) because of a desire to integrate with the French court (which lead to Carl ‘Jean-Baptiste’ XIV Johan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_XIV_John_of_Sweden ).
If anything that understates it because there were successive invasions of vikings and Norse after the initial settlement and then a huge second influx of Greek and Latin roots in the early modern period as scholars reintroduced them.
It's not so much an issue of parentage as an issue of orthography. Loanwords are often spelled in accordance with the orthographic rules of the source language, and words are generally not respelled to indicate changes in pronunciation.
This is fairly unusual within Europe, but not so much in Asia -- Thai and Burmese have large numbers of loans that I don't think were respelled. And then there's Japanese.
Agreed, I read a report that children learning English have to devote far more time to learning spelling than speakers of other languages, but this comes at the cost of time spent studying other subjects. I have never seen an argument against standardizing spelling, but I guess there is no political will and academic support to do it.
There are several levels at which these organisations make standards, though.
Sure, the new words they propose often get ignored, though "couriel" was proposed by the Québec organisation, not the French one, and it is absolutely used in Québec.
But the orthography changes that they propose are much more accepted, because they usually match phonetics instead of trying to change the course of the language. In the latest reforms in France quite a few accents got "corrected" (from é to è, like événement -> évènement), displaced (aiguë -> aigüe) and silent letters dropped (clef -> clé) and these changes have been widely accepted almost immediately. Quite a few were already in use before that anyway, although incorrectly. A few changes that are more controversial are not much used, and if they don't see actual use the Académie will drop them eventually. They just try to standardise the language, not turn it into something wholly different.
As far as I'm aware, all natural languages are about equally expressive and native speakers can't really make grammatical mistakes when speaking (writing is a different topic).
Speaking from a linguistics point of view, you are wrong. Those people are speaking completely valid English. Who are you to say that those are mistakes? Speaking is different from writing. Native speakers can make performance errors and definition errors, but they won't make grammatical ones.
Further, words such as 'like' and 'um' play an important role in speech.
You can make definition errors where you misuse a word, like a malapropism or spoonerism. A native speaker will not consistently make grammatical errors when speaking. Linguists are essentially in agreement on this.
I urge you to look into the study of language, languages are fascinating and many things are not intuitive.
Perhaps you mean a careful, educated, adult speaker (by definition, since there's no governing body setting English grammatical rules).
The term "native speaker" is ill-defined enough that there's no reason a native speaker can't make grammatical errors in speech. For instance, a child is a native speaker, but children make plenty of grammatical errors. Even adults misuse who / whom and was / were all the time.
Of course they are. The first is about picking the correct case (this being one of the few words where English has cases) and the second is picking the right number (you being a special case since the second person is always plural in English).
I learned the Shavian alphabet a few years ago, and gradually built up a list of transliterations as I read a few ebooks partially converted over (read a bit, add some more words, repeat). I had to make the font characters too (for Deja Vu, but I didn't contribute them back as mine seemed a bit amateurish).
What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be in different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets you read quickly. Unfortunately that would likely be the case for any English spelling reform effort.
I subsequently lost most of my (NZ English) transliterations too, if I remember correctly.
"What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be in different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets you read quickly."
Losing the ability to read quickly is its big Achilles heel of Shavian and Quikscript.
This can be mitigated somewhat as you get used to spelling things mostly the same way and reading your own spellings, but when you have to read someone else's writing it's back to sounding out the words in your head, which will slow down reading speed to a crawl compared to reading traditional English orthography.
I have been using Quikscript in my journals, it saves time and strain when writing by hand.
Still getting the hang of reading it, but that's to be expected with any new writing system.
What did really impress me is that when you read poetry in Shavian / Quikscript, you can SEE the rhymes as repeating visual patterns, because what sounds the same, looks the same.
That's an interesting point. I also speak a language with a phonetic writing system, but I have never read poetry in it, so did not have the chance to "see" these repeating patterns of sound-symbols.
Curiously, it seems to be easier to see rhymes when first learning to read a new phonetic system, because I still see the shapes (see the sounds!) instead of perceiving the words directly.
Identical shapes are "grouped" together visually, in the same way as when I look at some Japanese text (I can't read Japanese), the identical symbols "jump" out of the page.
English used to be a lot more phonetic that it is now, but a lot of pronunciations changed in the past thousand years, not to mention English's propensity to follow other languages down dark alleys, knock them over the heads, steal their words, and pronounce _them_ differently.
"To provide field testing of the new alphabet [Shavian], Read organized a lengthy public testing phase of Shavian by some 500 users from around the world who spoke different dialects of English. Once he had analyzed the results of those tests, Read decided to revise Shavian to incorporate a number of changes to improve the alphabet and make it both easier and faster to write. He called the revised alphabet "Quikscript"..."[1]
The main advantage of Shavian is that it is part of unicode while Quikscript isn't. I'm not sure why that's the case. I'd have expected it to be the other way around.
As much as I think English needs spelling reform, I don't think a brand new alphabet is the answer. In particular, the Shavian alphabet would be a nightmare for people like me who had trouble with reversed letters as a child. (My mother was particularly amused when I once wrote "rubberband" as rudderdanb.) Symmetry between the voiced and unvoiced letters is cool in theory but a disaster for dyslexics like me.
To go in completely the opposite direction, Ithkuil (ithkuil.net) is a constructed language whose script encodes semantic meaning rather than phonetic. A written word may be pronounced in several qualitatively different ways, as long as they have the same meaning.
The problem with making spelling more phonetic is that not everyone pronounces English the same. Even a single country like the United States or the United Kingdom counts a range of accents and dialects. A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers.
"A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers."
Only if there is a single "correct" (or canonical) way to spell each word.
If every speaker uses a phonetic alphabet to spell their words the way they speak them then there will be no problem reading them back phonetically.
Now, understanding these phonetically spelled words might be a problem for some readers, but that's no different from the problem in understanding they'd have when they heard someone speak in a different accent.
Ugh, no. You'd gain the very minor benefit of being able to read in the author's dialect but at huge cost in reading speed. I cringe whenever an author forces an accent or dialect into their writing rather than simply noting that a character speaks with a particular accent. It forces me to read at the speed I can vocalize, which is about half my normal reading speed.
I can see this being useful for specific cases but not as a general practice.
There's even plenty of precedent for the same word having different spellings based on region, like with color/colour. I imagine it would be similarly normal to learn that "tomahto" is the British spelling of "tomato" (or whatever it would end up being).
We have that in south slavic languages. For example this word meaning time (or weather) spoken and written differently based on dialect/language: vreme, vrime, vrijeme. [1]
Maybe a regional spelling reform could lead to English starting to break apart into several different languages?
I'm afraid that phonetic alphabets are useless for English because pronunciation is not stable [1] and because it has a lot of local variants. I suspect that English will fossilise its current orthography and turn words into logograms composed of Latin letters, similar to Chinese.
Every single living language out there has unstable pronunciation and a lot of local variants. A language is a living thing and is constantly in the flux, both through time and space.
One problem with English spelling lies in tradition, with many pronunciation changes not being followed in spelling -- it used to have quite a phonetic spelling: if you read today's English phonetically it will be quite similar to Middle English. Another problem are inconsistencies added just for the sake of it: e.g. "queen" was originally spelled "cwene" (it's an Anglo-Saxon word) but the spelling was changed according to rules of French orthography used by Norman scribes.
English could adopt phonetic variant of Latin alphabet quite easily -- there is a clearly defined set of phonemes it's using -- but it probably won't because there it is too widely spread across a large number of countries (it's an official language in 59 countries, twice as many as the second language, French, at 29 [0]), and there is no central standardisation body whose decisions might be accepted by all of them.
Except English pronunciation, just like the pronunciation of every other human language hasn't been stable for centuries and English has so far failed to "fossilize its current orthography". And there are plenty of other languages with local variants and unstable pronunciation with phonetic alphabets. Japanese has two.
The point has been made that different people pronounce English differently. I don't think that's an insurmountable obstacle: if you made a sort of union of RP and standard American pronunciation, probably the rest of the English-speaking world would be happy to use a spelling system based on that, if they were willing to accept any change at all, that is.
A more serious problem, I think, is how the pronunciation of a single word element varies between words even for a single speaker of the standard language. How would a reformed English spelling cope with the vowels in "photograph" and "photography", for example? Perhaps there's a neat solution, but I don't know what it is. At least I'm fairly sure that phonemic transcript isn't it.
Honestly I'm not sure what difference there is between "photograph" and "photography" (now I looked it up and I would never have guessed) but most languages that have sound changes like that just change the letters between variants of a word, instead of keeping the same letters and changing their pronunciation.
In Dutch, long vowels that turn into short vowels make things like meer/meren (single/plural). In German, you would have Land/Länder (single/plural as well). French also does it with say, régler/règlement (verb/substantive).
English does it too in some cases, with say wife/wives. So it could very well be something like photögraph/phötagröphy. I don't see why it wouldn't work.
If we only added the schwa (ə) to the script, then in my Received Pronunciation accent, it would be "photəgraph" versus "photogrəphy". On the other hand, English has an astonishing ability to replace vowels with schwas; pretty much every sentence remains comprehensible with every vowel syllable spoken as "ə".
The biggest drawback of a new alphabet is that we burn word shapes into our brain (we don’t read words by letter unless they are unfamiliar), so we would have to get used to a bunch of new shapes (a major disadvantage) even if pronouncing unfamiliar words was easier (a minor benefit).
As spoken language evolves we have to eventually adapt the written language. The alternative is written English. That beast managed to incorporate a whole body of words from another language without adapting the spelling of those words. It ended in the tears you get every year afresh when you try to teach kids the broken state that is English orthography.
The Shavian alphabet is attacking this from the wrong end though. For one thing, we already have a phonetic alphabet. There is no point in inventing another. The main issue though is that you want your alphabet be stable against vowel pronounciation changes. Vowel pronounciation changes quickly and carries little semantic meaning. If you try and encode that in your alphabet it's going to need an update as you move from city to city.
The abjad (consonant alphabet) approach of just leaving the vowels as an exercise to the reader may seem a little extreme. It has the distinct advantage of staying stable over centuries though.
The word mostly in here is easily an overstatement... have you ever seen how semi-illiterate write Spanish? If you do, you will understand that there are lots of ambiguities in Spanish orthography. Almost any word can be written in many different ways and be read nearly the same. Moreover, the same symbol is often used for different sounds (but not for different phonemes). For example, the "n" in "cangrejo" and "no", or the two "d" in "dado".
Turkish is also mostly "WYRIWYP". We like to say that it's pronounced as it is written. As a rule, there are no exceptions in pronunciation, but there are some exceptions to that rule. :)
Dialects within the country and in Cyprus use the "Istanbul" Turkish for formal communication, so there exists only one "correct" way to spell each word. But of course, for casual talk and texting, each dialect writes certain words the way they pronounce them.
\* One cool corollary of the WYRIWYP rule is that there's only one correct spelling of any given sequence of sounds. If you take some native Turkish speakers and have them listen to a made-up word, 99% of them will come up with the same spelling independently of each other.
It's interesting that Turkish is bidirectionally phonetic. That's not always the case. Some languages have strict text->speech rules but ambiguities in speech->text. Some are the other way around. I seem to recall that 'z' in Italian has some ambiguity like that, but I forget the details.
If your only points of reference are, say, English and French, Spanish might seem unusually phonetic, but most languages are written equally or more phonetically than Spanish is. English has had a long written tradition with lots of time for pronunciation to diverge from spelling without consistent or successful spelling reforms.
Many other languages haven't been written for long enough for these divergences to take place, or have had spelling reforms in the meantime.
Really? Interesting... whenever I am in Poland I stand in awe and bewilderment before a (seemingly) never ending successions of consonants (mainly c,s,z,r,l,w and k) -- and I am never able to tell how a word is pronounced. Its probably a bit like in german, where a group of consonants can form exactly one phoneme ('sch' -- [∫]).
Yes, digraphs involving z are quite common in Polish so it's not as bad as it looks. Still, English would never have a string of them like "szcz" ("shch" in English orthography).
German, or like mark twain said: "The only virtue of the language: After one short lesson in the alphabet, the student can tell how any German word is pronounced without having to ask;"
I can highly recommend shorthand. I had the same desire. It's only been 2 years and some change for me, but I can write at about 80% of my typing speed last I measured it. It's wayyyy faster than my normal writing and my hand "switches gears" automatically when I start to write fast.
Here's a blog post that's unrelated, but you can see a little bit of my shorthand writing in the first photo.
Ah, I believe I'm familiar with this thinking. I have discussed it with other writers of shorthand. Were you aware that you can extend Quikscript into a shorthand system with some simple steps?
In my case, I have added my own extensions to Ford, such as representations of words and phrases, and have added on some conventions from Gregg as well.
IMO the distinction some draw between "shorthand" and "script" for example can make it needlessly difficult for beginners to get started.
Are there any examples of people trying to make a change to the English language and being successful? It seems to me that most of the changes occur naturally rather than by directed effort.
I don't believe it's possible to make a clear distinction between "naturally" and "by directed effort" in the case of language. The degree to which a person is conscious of the change they are making might be a theoretical criterion, but it would usually be impossible to apply it in practice as in most cases we don't know who the person was, let alone what their mental state was at the time. Even if we know who made a change and they are still living they usually wouldn't be able to tell us reliably what they were thinking.
There are plenty of individual English words whose spellings were deliberately changed by some person for one reason or another. Perhaps the only major change affecting a large number of words promulgated by a single person was Noah Webster's reform of American English that created most of the differences between American English and British English. There's a book called Does spelling matter? which has a lot of information about English spelling and historical reform proposals (though the book is perhaps not entirely reliable: there are some weird non-sequiturs in it that made me suspicious).
Most American (mis)spellings were a deliberate attempt to simplify spelling by people such as Benjamin Franklin. Some of them took, like dropping the u from colour, honour, valour, et cetera. Others, while not necessarily considered correct, are widely used and widely understood. "Tonite," comes to mind . . . it was even in my phone's autocorrect.
Seems a strange criteria that it should be at least 40 letters - to me it seems like the goal should be to use as few letters as possible while still achieving its other goals?
Lojban baseline was completed in 1997 so I think it's too early to tell whether that effort was completely wasted. Esperanto has had its chance but never really reached its goals I assume. But Lojban or something it might evolve into could be the language of the future.
It's not immediately obvious what the benefit is over Pitman script, which is mentioned in the article. It seems like Pitman is faster to write because the characters are simpler, and afaik Pitman had a wider adoption, I've never heard of the Shavian alphabet before.
As I mentioned in another post in this thread, an advantage of Shavian (and Quikscript) is the speed with which one learns it -- less than a week for me, vs months or years with Pitman (or Gregg).
Also, the wider adoption of Pitman (and Gregg) is an advantage only if you want others to be able to read what you wrote. If you prefer privacy (for, say, your personal journal), then the rarer Shavian or Quikscript are better choices -- though, of course, for more security you should use a code or cipher.
Wow, they made a deliberate effort to design glyphs that all look exactly the same. Every single letter written in cursive would be indistinguishable from 5-6 others.
The fact that many of them are rotations/reflections of others also makes it much harder to recognise when text is in its correct orientation. Not really a problem if you're reading a book, but for things like signage and labeling I could see it being a source of ambiguity.
Looking at the glyphs really makes me appreciate the fact that traditional, "evolved" alphabets are naturally quite redundant --- it adds an important layer of error-resistance.
So after seeing this story I decided to learn basic Shavian and, about 4 days in, I can read like a 3rd grader. I thought this might be a problem for Shavian, as well, but after experiencing it; it's really not.
Go check out something like a copy of Dune (https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_fir...) and turn it on its side (or even flip it over). It's not really an issue to immediately recognize what the right way up is. If nothing else, a single proper noun will give the entire game up.
It's not like Shavian is unique in that different orientations of the text can resemble proper letterforms. Many scripts have that and they're just fine.
Also the characters which are basically larger and smaller versions of the same shape. Now to figure out if you're at the correct apartment, you need to know the font size used on the door.
It's not really possible to write a normal word without using one vowel, so this problem doesn't exist at all. The tall letters are pretty cleverly selected in this fashion.
You think? I've spent a few days memorizing the script to the point where I can read roughly like a grade schooler (I don't see words yet, just letters). Slowly working through Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" [1] and I'm surprised. It's not a substantial problem.
The only place where I struggle with this is a few of the vowels, particularly around A sounds. That's because they're all short glyphs.
A much bigger obstacle is that I don't actually know how to spell most words phonetically. I've always had an excellent memory for characters, so I pretty much learned to read by memorizing whole words. So when I go to write a word like "today" and I struggle to choose between "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑱" and something silly like "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑧𐑘" (because there is supposed to be a Y there dangit!).
I've been interested in making a custom script for a while but I always get stuck wondering if there is any research on most easily distinguishable shapes. Still not found any.
This is generally okay for natural language which already has a bunch of redundancy and doesn't need more. For non-natural language words, that's more important.
I'm no expert, and I bet this has been explored, but I always felt that there's fantastic precedent in the world for using the Latin alphabet for writing sounds that occur in English; especially in the Scandinavian languages.
Eg the word "sauce", which consists of two identical consonants and a single vowel. Why not choose å for that vowel? Sås makes a lot of sense, and accidentally is also the Swedish word for "sauce" iirc. Or what about the two "th" sounds? Icelandic has got you covered: Instead of "this" and "thin", can't we write "ðis" and "þin"?
Note: this is not without precedent. The Norwegians totally overhauled their script until it was pretty much phonetic. This gave them fantastic benefits such as way fewer pupils struggling with dyslexia (at least, until learning Danish or English), and heartwarmingly lovely spellings of loan words such as "restaurang" and "stasjon".
It could be done.
Personally I think it's totally insane to use a phonetic script (as opposed to eg Chinese) but then not spell out the sounds. The Finns, Norwegians, Italians and Russians (and plenty others) got it right.