disclaimer: Interstate 55 is a long boring road which i spent many hours on in silence yesterday. that will explain the insanity of this post.
after reading charlie’s (my compadre from cabot) post, i’ve concluded that we need to change a few things about the english alphabet. first of all, let’s not fool ourselves into calling this the english alphabet (which spans more centuries and continents than i can keep up with). for our purposes, it’s the american alphabet.
the other changes mostly involve consolidating some letters. as charlie pointed out, the two primary functions of the letter “c” are being covered by two other letters: “k” and “s,” as in “cycle.” take out the c, replace it with the s and k and it becomes “sykle.” however, this still leaves the “ch” sound, so i propose just changing the letter “c” to “ch” and making that its only function. see what i mean? consolidation is a beautiful thing.
a problem arises when we make the “s” take over the “c” sound. for example, “face” would become “fase” but this is confusing to pronounce because of words like “phase” in which the “s” behaves like a “z.” so this only works if we change much of the use of “s” to “z” instead. i’ve often felt sorry for the “z” anyway. it deserves more. that way “s” is one thing, “z” is another, and “c” is another. so much easier.
likewise, half of the function of “g” is covered by “j” leaving only the hard “g” sound like “goal.” so “Geoffreys” everywhere can stop confusing the world by becoming “Jeffrey”…that is, unless they want to be called “Geh-ffrey” with a hard “g.” so change the “c” to “ch” and change “g” (jee) to (gee, with a hard “g”). and while we’re on it, let’s stop all the “sometimes Y” non-sense. from now on, “y” is only used in words like “yell” or “you.” so words like “why” will become “wie.”
i know i’m in a consolidating mood, but we need more letters like “h.” it has such a unique function being the only letter that is entirely breath. way to go “h.” ‘at-a-boy.
as a shout-out to phonetics, i think we should boot any letter that can be spelled completely using other letters (vowels excluded). this really only refers to two letters: “q” which can be covered with the “k” often paired with a “w” (quiet=kwiet, or racquet=raket), and “x” which most often uses the “z” sound (xylophone which is now zylophone) or the “eks” combo sound (x-ray=eks-ray). goodbye “q” and “x.” scrabble players need some new letters for big points.
my other big objection is in the pronunciation of the individual letters. i can’t stand that there’s no pattern here. each of the constanants is paired with a vowel. so “b” is pronounced “bee” and “d” is pronounced “dee” etc. etc., yet “m” isn’t pronounced “mee,” it’s pronounced “em.” why is this? why is the consonant always paired with an “e” or an “a” (as in bee/cee/dee or el/em/en/es … jay/kay). if we’re not going to follow the same rule all the way through, then why didn’t i, o, or u get in on this action? i motion that the closest preceding vowel for for that particular consonant gets paired with that consonant in order to pronounce it.
so to pull all this together, here’s what we have: A, Ba, Ca (pronounced “Cha”), Da, E, Fee, Gee, Hee, I, Ji, Ki, Li, Mi, Ni, O, Po, (no q), Ro, So, To, U, Vu, Wu, (no x), Yu, Zu.
there, all better.
that’s it. i’ve gone to an all-time low. pray that a new post comes soon…
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