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by mjevans 2678 days ago
It seems close to my goals, but violates one of the main ones related to lowering the entry barrier.

All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages. That means that when an otherwise uneducated (in languages/reading the squiggly version of words from a dictionary) user in one of those languages tries to read one of the words it should sound like only a slight accent, not a major flub.

J should never have been used.

"14 Latin letters, a e i j k l m n o p s t u w, are used to write the language. They have the same values as in the International Phonetic Alphabet:[38] j sounds like English y, and the vowels are like those of Spanish or Italian. Capital initials are used to mark proper adjectives, while Toki Pona roots are always written with lowercase letters, even when they start a sentence.[39]"

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Edit about the difference in vowels/etc: If there isn't a common ground in notation for symbols, then the writing for the language CAN'T map back to any existing phonetic symbol system either. It MAY use existing non-phonetic symbols and assign new uses for them, but it MUST NOT reuse such symbols that have conflicted mappings in existing languages.

3 comments

> All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages.

Do you mean all the phonemes need to be present in all of the referenced languages, or that they need to be indicated by the same letter or letter combination in each language? Because, the former doesn't leave a lot, and the latter is even worse, even if you choose the most popular current transliteration for those languages for which the Latin alphabet isn't the usual one.

> All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages. That means that when an otherwise uneducated (in languages/reading the squiggly version of words from a dictionary) user in one of those languages tries to read one of the words it should sound like only a slight accent, not a major flub.

This constraint effectively removes vowels from your phonetic inventory.

And it's going to be tough to find common ground with the Russians and East Asians, whose native writing systems don't even use the Latin alphabet.
Ever look at Esperanto? Every word is pronounced how it is spelled.