Re-Envisaging English...

There was some article in the papers that was reported on the BBC news at the weekend about stream lining the english language.  Making it more sensible and approachable.  It did lead to a rather interesting conversation which may have been more fuelled by only half of it's participants having actually seen the thing on BBC directly.

I got to thinking about how you could re-invent the English language to make it work better.  I always remember the example Stephen Fry gives about the eccentricity of the language.  When saying a web address we start with 'www' but we say the capital letter which is pronounced 'doubleU'.  Say that three time and you hit six syllables whereas, if you lowercase the letter, and use 'wuh' instead, you only need three.  A more economical way of saying it.   wuh, wuh, wuh instead of doubleU,doubleU,doubleU.

So in the midst of this conversation, I came up with a more phonetic version of the written english.  I've not completely ironed it out, but I have a couple of examples of TFpinglish.

You take the the standard set of letter and use only the sounds be they upper or lower case sounds plus the combination sounds such as 'oo' as in 'look' or 'sh' as in 'shop'.  So for example, the second letter of the alphabet can be used in words as upper case B where the 'bee' sound is required or lower case b where a 'buh' sound is required.

The meat you get from cows could be spelt 'Bf' in TFpinglish.  Alternatively, the conjunction word 'but' could be spelt 'bt'.  'scene' could be spelt 'Cn'.

cood sAv sO mch tIm and Fort!