Glorious English Orthography (GEO) – an easy-to-read alternate orthography that uses minimal diacritics and additions

Glorius Iŋglish Orthogrufi (GIO) – an yzi-tú-ryd olturnut orthogrufi dhat yúsus minimul daiukritiks and adisiuns

Note: This orthography is identical to the newer Yet Another Alternate English Orthography (YAAEO) in all aspects, except that this one uses digraphs for /θ/, /ð/, /ʃ/ and /ʒ/.

The English orthography is widely known to be inconsistent and troublesome, with its many silent letters (such as ‘gh’ in the word ‘though’ and the ‘b’ in ‘debt’) and exceptions to the rule (‘gh’ is also pronounced ‘f’ in words like ‘laugh’ and ‘cough’). There’s surely a better way to write it phonetically, isn’t it?

Introducing GEO (Glorious English Orthography), a phonetic Latin script orthography that utilises 2 additional diacritic-capped letters (‘á’ and ‘ú’) and 1 additional letter (‘ŋ’) to complement the existing 26 letters of the alphabet and allow them to be able to cover all 43 English phonemes without relying too much on diacritics. In addition, GEO uses common digraphs that are widely used in current English orthography, such as ‘sh’ for the /ʃ/ sound in ‘sure’, and diphthongs such as the ‘ay’ sound in ‘say’ are directly represented with their constituent vowels, not as something else.

Cherokee Script for English ᏤᎶᎩ̣ ᏍᎧᎵᏋᏘ Ꮙ̤Ꮈ ᎢᎿᎬᏟᏍ̤

Cherokee is the first Native American language to have their own writing system, invented by a Cherokee man named Sequoyah. Its history is somewhat like that of Korean Hangul, as they are both invented scripts created by individuals to write their native languages accurately for the first time, raising suspicions from the establishment before they were widely adopted and embraced by their compatriots.

As the only syllabary besides Japanese kana to be widely supported on major OSes, I decided I had to learn the Cherokee syllabary. And with 86 characters total, it was definitely a worthwhile challenge to learn.

Adaptation process

To adapt any script for a different language for English, we must consider its features and limitations. As English language consonants are somewhat different from the Cherokee language’s consonants, I had to change some things around for maximum efficiency.

Greek script for English (Γρίκ σκριπτ φωρ Ιν̣γλισ̣)

Greek was one of the first alphabetic writing systems to be created, and its letters are widely used as symbols in the mathematics, science and engineering fields. This is my take on using Greek script to write English phonetically.

Adaptation process

When adapting Greek, the biggest challenge was finding a way to distinguish the /b/ and /v/ sounds, as the letter that once represented /b/, beta ‘β’, is now pronounced /v/ in Modern Greek. The same issue arises with /d/ and /ð/ for delta ‘δ’. (This is not the case for gamma ‘γ’, as its modern Greek pronunciation /ɣ/ does not exist in English.) And then there’s the problem of differentiating /s/ and /ʃ/ without resorting to digraphs.

My solution was pretty simple: put a dot underneath the aforementioned letters (U+0323 Combining Dot Below) to indicate the fricative version (that is, /v/ instead of /b/ and /ð/ instead of /d/, since the stop consonants are more common than the fricatives). I selected this diacritic because it was able to display on many devices in a highly consistent way (other diacritics did not render properly), and ended up using it to distinguish the following phonemes:

• β /b/ -> β̣ /v/
• δ /d/ -> δ̣ /ð/
• ν /n/ -> ν̣ /ŋ/
• σ /s/ -> σ̣ /ʃ/
• ζ /z/ -> ζ̣ /ʒ/
• κ /k/ -> κ̣ /tʃ/
• γ /g/ -> γ̣ /dʒ/

Note: depending on your font, the dot diacritic may not show as intended, especially on older devices.

(Old) Cyrillic script for English (Саирилик скрипт фор Иңглиш)

I created a newer version of this adaptation, which is more compact and unique than this one. Feel free to check that one out instead!

Cyrillic is one of the most widely used alphabets in the world, besides Latin, and it was only a matter of time before I had a go at using it to write English phonetically.

Adaptation process

Adaptation was fairly easy, as many Latin letters can be easily substituted for their Latin counterparts. For some of the letters, I used digraphs or Cyrillic letters from the Serbian and Bashkir orthographies, and also took some inspiration from an earlier Latin script orthography called BEO.

In Cyrillic for English, ‘ь’ is used as a vowel to write the schwa /ə/. Although it is primarily used to modify the sound of consonants in most Cyrillic orthographies today, it once represented a vowel a long time ago, and it seemed more natural that I use it as a vowel in my adaptation. Also, since there appears to be no letter for /w/ in Cyrillic, I used the vowel letter for ‘U’ as a stand-in.

(OLD) Hebrew script for English היבּרו סקריפּט פָר ינּגליש

After adapting the Arabic script for English in my previous post, it was only natural that I have a go at the only other widely used right-to-left script in the world today: Hebrew.

Adaptation process

Like the Arabic script adaptation, I used the consonant letters for ‘y’ and ‘w’ as vowels. Unlike Arabic, though, Hebrew has a larger set of vowel markers that I could use to represent a wider set of vowels without digraphs. Some consonants were also derived from others using the dagesh diacritic ּ , which indicates a different but closely related sound (e.g. /f/ פ -> /p/ פּ). Also, some features were also taken from other Hebrew orthographies – the use of ע to write /ɛ/ originated from Yiddish.

(Old) Arabic script for English ارابيك سكريڤت فُر يعگليش

I created a better version of this article called ‘Yet Another Arabic English Alphabet‘, feel free to check that one out instead!

The Arabic script is one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world, together with Latin and Cyrillic. Its main distinctive characteristics are that letters are written right-to-left, and letterforms merge with each other in a cursive manner.

Adaptation process

Most consonant letters were fairly straightforward: ف = /f/, ر = /ɹ/, etc. Still, some changes had to be made due to the different consonants – ط, ص and their dotted variants were excluded as their sounds did not exist in English. Additional letters were also added: ژ /ʒ/ and گ /g/ come from the Perso-Arabic variant, while ڤ /p/ and ۏ /v/ come from the variety of Arabic script used to write Malay, called Jawi.

Nanyang Script – a featural writing system inspired by the scripts of Southeast Asia

Nanyang Script is an alternate writing system which is inspired by the abugidas of Southeast Asia.

The word ‘Nanyang’ 南洋 is an old Chinese term for the Southeast Asian region, hence the name.

Like Hangul, Nanyang is a featural alphabet, where letters are derived from other letters with closely related sounds. Unlike Hangul, Nanyang letters only need 1 or 2 strokes to write at the most, which makes the script easy to learn, easy to write, and more adaptable for writing a wider variety of languages than Hangul. The end result is a unique alphabetic script that visually resembles the Myanmar and Thai scripts and uses subscript consonants to cluster consonants together, but is distinct enough to stand on its own.

Letters

These are the letters and numerals for the English version of Nanyang Script.