March 21, 2008

• Nephyo’s Guide to the Way English Oughta Be

  There’s a big problem.  It’s huge! We’ve gotta fix it right away!

  English has too many letters! And it takes too damn long to type. In the age of mobility that’s killing us. We have these clunky devices with full keyboards build in that take up way too much space. We have all this annoying software to try and make it easier on us.  It’s all so troublesome.

  There’s a better way. Let’s just fix English. We can make it simpler! We can make it smaller!  And all we have to do to achieve this is embrace the principles already inherent in that most beautiful of spontaneous inventions of man – textspeak!

  Step one. Get rid of extraneous letters.  First of all we don’t need “c”. We also don’t need “x” or “q” either. The sounds represented by these tokens can be represented by other tokens and token sequences.

  “c” is a special case though. We will get rid of the concept of the letter “c” but we will keep the token “c” and the word “see”. Instead well will get rid of the letter s. The c will now make the s sound. Period.  We could have replaced k instead, but k is used in common pseudo-words like “okay”. So the x become “kc” in most cases sound and q “kw”. I know that’s more letters which runs contrary to our goal but we’ll find more savings elsewhere and this makes the keyboard smaller.

  Step two. Replace number symbols with letters or vice versa.  Basically since letter and number contexts are virtually impossible to confuse, we don’t need two sets of symbols for them. Let’s just use one and depending on context you can tell whether someone means a letter or a number. If it is ambiguous at any time let’s just use the # symbol prior to any invocation of a number. Just like we use $ to denote currency.

  I suggest the following equivalence:

  0 == o
  1 == l
  2 == r*
  3* == e
  4 == a*
  5 == c*
  6* == g
  7 == t*
  8 == b*
  9 == p*

  Note 5 is “c” since there is no “s”. And note 1 is always “L” never “i” and 7 is always “t” never “L”.  This is one way this differs from l33t. 

  We can pick either token in any of these cases. And we should pick the easiest to write. I’ve starred the one that seems so to me.

  (Ideally we’d just start from scratch, have precisely 16 letters each of which denotes a number from 0 to 15 and just do all our math in base 16 which all know is a fairly useful base. We can pick which 16+ sounds  to be represented by these characters by studying the phonetic alphabet and coming up with a reasonable distribution. Or any base will do so long as it’s a power of 2.  Even powers of 3 would work since we can do yes/no/maybe logic.  But 10 and 26 are madness!)

  Step 3. Eliminate capitalization as a “rule”.  That is you don’t capitalize names or places or the beginning of sentences. Why would you need two place holders to indicate when a sentence starts. The ending punctuation has more utility and is sufficient. And of course you don’t have to capitalize the word “I”!

  Step 4.  Eliminate separate tokens for capital letters versus lower case. Instead letters just have different sizes. Small letters represent normal speech. Larger exact replicas of those letters represent emphasis or “shouting”. The larger the letters, the bigger the emphasis.

  Step 5. Eliminate unneeded punctuation and symbols.  The semii-colon byes the dust. As does the colon. Get rid of “&” cuz “+” is good enough.  We keep single quotes and drop double quotes. And no more apostophes or accent symbols. And do we need four different grouping indicators? Let’s drop curly braces and leave [], (), and <>.  Maybe we’ll drop braces too.  Long hyphens and underscores get the boot too. As does the tilde. In logical notation “not” will be “!”.

  Step 6. Eliminate words fully represented by existing single tokens. We will determine meaning based on context.
  So the word “and” ceases to exist. It’s just “+”.  Likewise the words “number”, “dollar”, “times”, “minus”, “percent”, “at”, “equals”, “greater”, “less”, “not”, “star”, “see”, “plus”, “be”, “too”,  “to”, “pee”, “are”, “oh”, “you” and “why”. Similarly with all the numeral name words and all of the alphabetic character name words. And so on and so forth.

  Step 7. As with step 6, replace parts of words or phrases that have single character representations based on sound with their short word equivlaence.  So “before” becomes “b4″  or if we recall our number replacements “ba”.

  Step 8.  Whenever single character words appear in sequence it will be a rule that you can eliminate the space and just write them together. As in you can write “and you too” as “+ur”

  Step 9. Any word or expression that can be represented by an emoticon is replaced by the emoticon if  and only if the smallest form emoticon is smaller than the word.  So “smile” becomes “:)” and “frown” become “:(” and “love” becomes “<3″ More elaborate emoticons represent subtle shifts in meaning and these should all be in standard dictionary.s

  Step 10. Replace multi-letter sequences that represent a single sound with the single letter that represents that same sound wherever possible.  So “ph”  becomes “f”.

  Step 11. Add all contractions as actually words to the english language and remove their now defunct apostophes. If nothing else this will get rid of the confusion called by the abomination called “won’t” and allow me to play words like “dont” in scrabble.

  Step 12. Add a set of words to the english language that represent acronyms for very common expressions.  So “lol” will be a real word. So will “idk”, “brb”, “lmao”, “rofl”, “ty”, “imo”, “afk”, “wtf”, etc. etc.

  Step 13. Drop off common letters on words that are commonly failed to be pronounced without ambiguity resulting.  So most words that end in “ing”  can just end in “in”.

  Step 13. It will be acceptable to chain abbreviation words together and together with single character words dropping the spaces. So I can say “and I don’t know what the f*** you are talking about”  something like “+idkwtfur talkin about”.

  Step 14. Eliminate cursive representations of characters. Really does anybody still use that stuff? And no I don’t care about signatures. The practice of requiring signatures should have died long long ago.

  And there you have it. 14 steps to make English cool and fun, easier to use, easier to learn, and more effective for hand held communication!

  • 12:30 pm
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