Georgian script for English ჯორჯიჷნ სქრიფთ ჶორ იღგლიშ

Latin, Greek and Cyrillic are not the only alphabets in town. Far less known are the 2 unique alphabets of the Caucasus region which are used widely today: Armenian and Georgian. It’s a shame that they are far less known than the Big 3, because these alphabets have turned out to be remarkably suitable for adapting into English with only minor modifications. For instance, both Armenian and Georgian have dedicated letters for /ə/ and /oː/, and other spare letters can be easily used for writing /æ/.

Georgian has a distinctive rounded aesthetic that is very similar to the Myanmar (Burmese) script in many ways. One surprising coincidence is that both the Myanmar and Georgian letters for /t/ are identical: Myanmar တ – Georgian თ. (Convergent evolution perhaps?)

Armenian script for English Առմինիըն սկռիպտ ֆոռ Իղգլիշ

Latin, Greek and Cyrillic are not the only alphabets in town. Far less known are the 2 unique alphabets of the Caucasus region which are used widely today: Armenian and Georgian. It’s a shame that they are far less known than the Big 3, because these alphabets have turned out to be remarkably suitable for adapting into English with only minor modifications. For instance, both Armenian and Georgian have dedicated letters for /ə/ and /oː/, and other spare letters can be easily used for writing /æ/.

Similarly to the more well-known alphabets, Armenian comes in uppercase and lowercase forms. In lowercase, Armenian has a highly uniform, Latin-like aesthetic with its own twist, most of which are very similar to their corresponding uppercase forms.

Tongyang Script – a hanzi-style alphabet for English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien and Vietnamese

Tongyang Script is an alternate alphabetic writing system for English, Chinese topolects and Vietnamese inspired by the major writing systems of East Asia.

‘Tongyang’ (pronounced ‘Toong-young’) is the Chinese and Korean pronunciation of 東洋, a Korean and Japanese term for East Asia.

A few years back, I wondered if it was possible to make a phonemic alphabet for English that was based on the principles of Chinese calligraphy, since there were none I had heard of. You know, the Eight Principles of Yong and all that. After starting off as a weird-looking mishmash of Japanese katakana and fragments of Chinese hanzi arranged in Hangul-style syllable blocks, I made gradual improvements over time to make it easier to write, more aesthetically pleasing and more capable of representing complex syllable structures in an elegant way. Tongyang script was the end result, and I’m pretty glad with how it turned out in the end.

In Tongyang Script, letters are arranged within a single square frame in a similar manner to Korean Hangul. Core letters were derived from selected portions of hanzi characters containing the desired sound – the rest of the letters were based on simple modifications of a core letter representing a closely related sound. Simple letterforms consisting of 2 or 3 strokes were chosen, where possible. Unlike some of the other syllable block scripts out there, each letter has been carefully selected to be able to form syllable blocks with the calligraphically balanced look of Chinese characters.

As an Asian, I like to imagine this as a writing system for the East Asian diaspora, an artform by which one can express Asian identity.

Yet Another Alternate English Orthography (YAAEO) – a clean and consistent alternate orthography with minimal diacritics and additions

Yet Unåþur Olturnut Iŋgliș Orțogrufi (YUOIO) – u klyn and konsistunt olturnut orțogrufi wiț minimul daiukritiks and adișuns

Note – this is deprecated, please check out my latest English orthography RDIO (Random Dotless I Orthography) instead.