e sistem ev (mósly) fenétek ríteŋ fer emáreken ingleß

English spelling is a beautiful mess, and it seems as though it is the system that is here to stay. Despite this, there have been innumerable attempts to change English spelling throughout history. A few have succeeded -many of the spelling differences between American and British English are the results of attempted spelling reforms.

What inevitably thwarts any overhaul of English orthography is what I refer to as the fundamental problem of spelling: people pronounce words differently. Any spelling reform would either result in English writing fracturing into hundreds of competing systems to accomodate different dialects, or it would enforce one way of speaking as the "standard" at the detriment of all others.

That is all to say that I have no grand aspirations for this system. I think it is a fun exercise to try to write down my own way of speaking (my "idiolect"). It won't work perfectly for anyone else, and it will fall apart quite rapidly for anyone outside the central or western United States. My main goal for this system was to have one letter for each sound in a word. This is not a phonetic transcription system, like the IPA. Each letter can stand for multiple sounds, though it should always be unambiguous which sound a given letter in a given position should make.

Stress and Schwas

Perhaps the most important concept that supports my system is vowel stress. English is a "stress-timed" language, which means that (usually) one syllable in every word is given more emphasis than the others, and also is given more time than the others. For example, in the word "pepper," the stress is on the first syllable. Not every language has this stress pattern. Many languages do not have a concept of stress at all, while others are called "syllable-timed" languages, which means that the stressed syllable isn't given any more time than unstressed syllables. Spanish is an example of such a language, and its why the rhythm of speech is one of the first things that gives away a native Spanish speaker when speaking English (or vice versa).

In general, in casual speech, the vowels of unstressed syllables reduce to a "schwa" sound. Schwa can be thought of as the neutral vowel sound, and it has no letter in standard English writing. It is the "a" in alone, the "e" in incident, the "i" in pediment, the second "o" in opposite, and the u in "faculty." As long as you aren't taking extra care to pronounce the words as written, in most words, all vowels other than the vowel in the stressed syllable become schwa (or sometimes "ee" such as in monkey or merrily). Foreign loanwords and words with at least four syllables tend to get more complicated.

For the purposes of my system, the stress of a word is assumed to be on the first syllable. If the first syllable contains a schwa (e in my system), then the stress is on the first syllable that is not schwa. If all syllables contain schwa, then it is still assumed to be on the first syllable. If this rule needs to be broken, such as in the word dichotomy, where the stress is on the second syllable, the stressed syllabe has the vowel letter doubled. Therefore, dichotomy becomes "díkootemy."

The Vowels

Vowels vary tremendously between different dialects of English. Several historic vowel mergers have resulted in my dialect having only ... The IPA Vowel Chart has audio for each IPA character in this table.