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by getoj 1178 days ago
Thr is anthr wy, whch ws dscvred ntrlly by early intrnt usrs: txt spk essntlly rduces englsh spllng to an abjad lk Arbc. Lk Arbc, Englsh is vry cnsnant hvy, and dialctl dffrnces are almst entrly vriashns n vwl qualty, so an abjad is the prfct wrtng systm fr us.

The perfect English abjad would use diacritics to mark vowels and some clever way to identify syllable boundaries (so you can distinguish ideal from idyll). But alas, we’re probably stuck with an alphabetic script forever.

1 comments

> ntrlly

This one took a moment. (It's "naturally", not "neutrally" or "entirely".)

The rest is surprisingly readable.

Vowels were a later addition to many semitic languages as one example. Not sure that it would work so well in tonal or vowel-heavy languages but information is denser in consonants (no real surprise, I guess, given that they outnumber vowels).
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Vowel signs, not vowels themselves.