Increase the expressiveness of the English language by adding more alphabets for the exclusive use of specific types of dialogue (e.g. whispering, sarcasm).

Background:

English has a few options for conveying the tone of speech in a sentence by using different letters (Figure 1): italics or bold emphasize a word, capital letters EXPRESS ENTHUSIASM OR ANGER, and a tiny font indicates that, I don’t know, maybe a mouse is speaking.

Fig. 1: English has very limited options for conveying tone in letters: you can basically only express 1) “I AM VERY EXCITED OR ANGRY” (all-caps) 2) “I aM a cOMpLEte iDIOt” (random case—a relatively recent addition) or 2) ”This is a robot speaking.” (monospaced font).

But that’s about it! There is no specific set of letters to convey, for example, whispered or sarcastic dialogue. Comic books have partially solved this with unique dialogue bubbles, like the thought bubble, or “frozen with icicles“ aloof-dialogue bubble

But this doesn’t help us in non-illustrated text.

Proposal:

English already has two related-yet-distinct alphabets (lower-case, upper-case): let’s just add a few more sets of letters to express different sentiments (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: By slightly modifying the letters in a systematic way (which could be achieved by either a new alphabet or, perhaps more practically, with custom fonts), we can convey more specific sentiments in text.

With these new supplementary alphabets, it would be much easier for people to express (and interpret) the tone of speech in printed form.

Implementation Details:

Existing Unicode symbols that resemble Latin letters (but are not already used in English) could be repurposed:

For example, the sentence:

“No, I’m not being sarcastic,” he said, sarcastically.

…could become (using Linear B and Brahmi symbols):

“𑀪𐀏, 𑀡’𑀰 𑀪𐀏𐀫 𐁌𑀚𑀡𑀪𑁭 𐀸𐀁𑀜𑀝𑀏𐀸𐀫𑀡𑀝,” he said, sarcastically.

Now, a reader will know that the dialogue is sarcastic immediately upon starting the sentence, rather than having to read through to “…he said, sarcastically.”

Since there are tens of thousands of symbols in the Unicode character set, it’s likely that appropriate supplementary alphabets for several different tones of voice can be constructed without having to actually invent any new symbols.

PROS: Should greatly increase the expressiveness of English.

CONS: People might never actually learn how to write these letters, and would only recognize them. For example, probably less than 5% of the population can actually write a lower-case “newspaper text-style” letter g: (this thing: 𝘨).