BEO – Better English Orthography (BIO – Betur Ingglish Orthogrufi)

Note: This orthography has been deprecated. For something much better, check out Yet Another Alternate English Orthography (YAAEO).

After developing the Latin-based EBEO orthography for English, which uses diacritics and Unicode characters extensively, I started wondering about older electronic devices that do not support Unicode. I asked myself: “How would I be able to type phonetically in the most efficient way on these old things?”

This made me think about ways to write English phonetically and efficiently using just the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. I revisited an older version of EBEO from a while back, BEO (Better English Orthography), and gave it an extensive makeover to make it more suitable for practical use, taking inspiration from an alternate English orthography called SoundSpel to get the most compact form.

Unlike SoundSpel, which contains some exceptions to mimic the existing English spelling conventions without making it more compact (e.g. spelling words ending with /ɔl/ as ‘all’ instead of ‘ol’), BEO provides a more literal way to write English that is easier to understand.

• Easy to type – no need to learn a new keyboard layout
• Many common English words retain their original spellings, such as ‘man’, ‘red’, and ‘hop’
  • Many other words only differ by a few letters and are easily recognisable: ‘can’ becomes ‘kan’, ‘simple’ becomes ‘simpul’, and ‘fire’ becomes ‘faiur’
• 1 letter or digraph represents 1 phoneme, and only that phoneme
• Usually more compact than conventional English orthography

Javanese script for English (ꦗꦴꦨꦴꦤꦷꦣ ꦱ꧀ꦏꦿꦶꦥ꧀ꦠ ꦦꦵꦂ ꦆꦁꦒ꧀ꦭꦶꦯ)

The Javanese script (also called Hanacaraka, from the first 5 letters in the traditional Javanese letter ordering) is one of the most elaborate writing systems in the world. Having adopted Khmer script a few months back, I soon turned my attention to Javanese, as it is a descendant of the closely related Kawi script that was widely used throughout Maritime Southeast Asia a thousand years ago. The common ancestry of Khmer and Javanese is easy to point out, as a few of their letterforms are very visually similar to each other.

Quikscript Sans, a sans-serif font for the Quikscript alphabet

Just over a year ago from today, I discovered Quikscript, a minimalist phonetic alphabet for English that was designed by the British designer Kingsley Read. (Quikscript was a revised edition of an earlier and more famous script also by Read, called Shavian.) Quikscript’s most notable feature is that each letter can be written with a single stroke, and some letters can be written together without lifting the pen up, reducing writing effort. If you want to know more about how Quikscript works, including the associated complex ligature system, click here for the original Quikscript manual by Read. Here’s a chart showing the letters of Quikscript and their phonetic values.

The problem with existing Quikscript fonts

As I delved further into typing Quikscript on my computer, however, I found that the very few Quikscript fonts out there were just plain terrible. For example, here’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Quikscript, using a Quikscript font called ‘Kingsley’:

Note that most of the glyphs have slightly uneven stroke width, squashed-up kerning (glyph spacing) and inconsistent glyph shapes – put together, the whole thing just looks messy and ugly. Damn, even Comic Sans looks way better in comparison!

Installing keyboard layouts

This post describes how to install any keyboard layout files I put up on this blog.