alphabet
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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. But that’s about it! There is no specific…
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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: 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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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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Background: Our current alphabet is derived from an ancient system of representational icons. These icons were once pictures of actual objects, but have been simplified to an easier-to-write form over the millennia. For example, according to the inerrant source of knowledge known as Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet): The letter “Q” used to be one of these: This…
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