comment on abecedaria

http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/07/unifon.html

This blog is very well done. Interesting commentary ...
and a very pleasing layout.

Coulmas says that a phonemic orthography would . . .

-discard morphemic invariances
-cut etymological connections
-respell proper nouns and
-disrupt spelling habits.

As you note, there are hundreds of ways that the traditional writing system could be made more phonemic.

Most of the proposals that I have seen do not respell surnames or any proper noun that has an established symbolic value.

New Spelling (Soundspel) was found to have less morphemic variation than traditional spelling. Coulmas made an assumption that proves to be false in at least one case.

If we respelled the 100 most common irregular words, the public would find many of the new spellings annoying. If we respelled the low frequency spelling patterns, few would even notice.

The problem is that thru constant usage, written words acquire nuances and meanings that are lost when they are spelled in a manner similar to a dictionary key.

*chauffeur spelled "showfur" or "shófr" or "$ÓF3R" doesn't quite cut it.

Kids, of course, would find the shorter more phonemic spellings easier to learn and use.

They could learn a dictionary key spelling in 3 months, transition to traditional children's books and be reading at a 3rd grade level by the end of the first grade.

This was the beauty of a transitory alphabet such as Unifon.

There is a resemblance between Unifon and other scripts but this misses the point.

Unifon is a dictionary key that reshapes 17 letters to extend the alphabet so there is one symbol per sound. The other scripts use unique shapes but Moon and Utopia are not more phonemic than the set of Latin characters.

Here is another script that combines pictographic cues and streamlined letter forms, in a phonemic notation.

http://foolswisdom.com/users/sbett/43pmf-cap.gif

I think it is easier to read than Utopian ... but PMF is strange.