letters
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Background: The English language has 26 letters. You are reading them right now! The Issue: Some of the letters of the alphabet are very poorly named. For example, “W” is pronounced “double-yoo,” which totally lacks the actual “w” sound (e.g. the leading sound in “what”) anywhere in it. Additionally, it’s absurd that the letter W…
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Background: English has a wide variety of rarely-used short words that are extremely useful in various word games (e.g. Scrabble, Words With Friends, Bananagrams), and not in very many other situations. Specifically, there are (in the 1993 FreeBSD dictionary that comes with Mac OS X), a total of: 139 two-letter words 1294 three-letter words 4994…
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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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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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