[monkeybutton]

This reminds me of a coworker who recently immigrated from Brazil asking about the pronunciations of some English words and being astonished that we don't just use accents to differentiate it. Like, just use accents. No more ambiguity and problem solved.

[pessimizer]

We'd have to cover every word with accents. We'd have to have accents for "letter has no effect on sound," "these three letters actually represent this other letter," and "pretend you're French when you say this, but French with a severe head injury."

[darebak]

There was some English guy that tried to create an English alphabet where each letter would correspond to exactly one sound, so around 44 letters in total. Kinda like Serbian Cyrillic.

I can't remember his name or the name of his project though.

[blaxis]

Shavian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

[darebak]

Yeah, that's the one.

[ralferoo]

Not heard of this particular script before (although I see the answer was already posted), but it seems a bit redundant to have created an incompatible system when shorthand was in widespread use in the UK at the time, albeit mostly only used in a secretarial context.

[pessimizer]

That's doomed from the start. There's no way English speakers could deal with a written language with 19 different vowels.

[thechao]

And which dialect!?

[kaba0]

Based on my very phonetically written native tounge, I think I could map most of the English language down to Hungarian letters (there are some exceptions in both directions)

Just for note, it would look something like this:

Bézd on máj veri fonetikalli vrittn nétív táng, áj (sz)ink áj kud mep…

(Sz is a single letter in hungarian in this context)

[tdeck]

> We'd have to cover every word with accents.

Seems to work fine for Vietnamese.

[AussieWog93]

Have you ever tried learning Vietnamese as a second language? Shit's hard!

[abrowne]

But not because of the script.

[b112]

If every word has accents, then don't all words have no accents? Solved!

[SturgeonsLaw]

> French with a severe head injury

There's a word for this: Quebecois

[opan]

I would way rather standardize the sounds like how Japanese does it (mostly) than have accents. I've never liked accents. I'm considering learning Ido over Esperanto because of this very issue.

[ripply]

Most people don’t know this but a lot of Japanese words have pitch accents that you need a dictionary to learn if you don’t learn the word audibly and the accents are not in the English/Japanese dictionaries, only in specialized Japanese/Japanese dictionaries. When Chinese speakers learn Japanese they do well at learning it because it’s similar to Chinese pitch.

[yesenadam]

> I would way rather standardize the sounds

This has been tried.

https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-be...

[monkeybutton]

Zis mad me smil!

[AussieWog93]

Esperanto doesn't have accents that emphasise stress the same way other langauges do. The little markers over the characters indicate that it's a completely different letter with a completely different vowel/consonant sound (and they have their own entries in the alphabet).

For example, "Co" would be pronounced like "Tso", whereas "Ĉo" would be pronounced like "Cho".

Pronunciation is completely standardised, with stress (almost?) always placed on the penultimate syllable.

[monkeybutton]

If you consider each letter+accent combination as distinct, it is the same as having standardized pronunciation for each symbol?

[3836293648]

That's a terrible idea in English. It's fine in languages with more consistent accents, but in English I can do that for my accent, and then americans can't read it at all. It doesn't even work within Britain

[dalmo3]

Except in Portuguese some of the accents can only be used in the strong syllable, so there's still ambiguity in how to pronounce accentless vowels in some words, mainly due to regionalisms.

[LoveGracePeace]

I've been to Italy, it seems hand gestures are also an excellent language facilitator.