Language
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Background: Generally, the more letters / symbols your alphabet has, the more hassle it is to type on a keyboard. There are ways to mitigate this issue (e.g. Japanese and Chinese manage), but it’s a lot more straightforward if you can just cut down the number of symbols entirely. English, with 26 letters plus a…
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Background: When reading the news, people should ideally form opinions of the events in question based on the actual merits being reported. However, a frequent approach is: “Is this something that my nation or my political party did? Then I’m sure it’s good.” The Issue: Although this is undeniably often a successful heuristic (e.g. “cannibal…
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Background: The specific etymology of most food names is lost in ancient history. But a few foods are named after specific people. One of the most notable is the food/concept of a “sandwich,” named after “John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sandwich). Proposal: This opens up a new possibility for gaining personal fame and fortune:…
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Background: In English, there are names for days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, …) and months (January, February, …). The Issue: But it is not actually necessary for weekdays and months to be named—it’s just a bunch of extra words that serve no purpose! Many other languages (e.g. Chinese) manage with days named “Day #1,…
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Background: When specifying a time, some positions may have either one or two digits (e.g. “1 PM” vs “11 PM”), but other positions always have a leading zero, no matter what (e.g. “1:01” and “1:11” both have three digits). Proposal: The inconsistency in digits is unnecessary and leads to weird sorting behavior. For example, if…
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Background: Two obvious qualities that contribute to making an alphabet “good”: It’s quick to write. The letters can be distinguished unambiguously. (Information density might also be worth considering—we don’t want the letters to take up too much space—but we’ll be ignoring it here.) Sometimes, speed-of-writing and ease-of-reading is a tradeoff: consider the shorthand shown in…
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Background: Written languages have generally been optimized for the most meaningful elements of speech, so sometimes strange workarounds are required to capture certain subtleties: e.g. capital letters for YELLING, alternating capitalization for “thE spEaKer is VEry StUpid,” ellipses for a stilted-last-gasps sort of speech (“tell… them… the… killer… was…”), or the HTML-inspired “/s” for “please…
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Background: Once you know how to read, it’s impossible to see text the same way as you did before—you will inescapably recognize the symbols as letters the instant that you see them. The issue: This “automatic” parsing of written language makes it easy to forget how much effort was required to initially learn how to…
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Stop living in barbaric savagery with the English words “left” and “right.” Ascend to the next level of consciousness and realize your new potential with this new secret wisdom only for the most enlightened individuals.
aa, aard, aardvark, alfa, alphabet, bet, English language, improved words, left, left right, left-to-right, port, right, starboard, vark, zz
The issue: People often confuse the directions “left” and “right.” Additionally, “right” can additionally mean “correct,” which leads to the exchange: “Should I turn left here?” “Right.” This is stupid and must be fixed if English is going to remain competitive with the world’s top languages, like Esperanto (Figure 1) and Loglan. Proposal: Instead…
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Erase all of written history to hide our shameful alphabet-based mistakes from the future! After reading this, you will think Fahrenheit 451 is an instruction manual.
also that X-is-an-instruction-manual is already a joke about 1984, ambiguity, ambiguous letters, Celcius 233, Centipede 233, Centrigrade 233, erase the mistakes of the past, Fahrenheit 451, fix Latin letters, fix the English language, letters, never learn from the past, that one movie Equilibrium I guess
The issue: Latin-based writing systems—like the one your’e reading right now—have a serious problem: many letters and numbers look exactly the same! The most obvious example (Figure 1) is probably “l” (lower-case “L”) and “I” (upper-case “i”). Benefits: Fixing these duplicated symbols, perhaps with the proposed new symbols in Figure 3, has a number of…
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