English Alphabet Reform

One of my best buddies in the U.S. Army went by the moniker "Halftrack" Hall*. His feet were so huge they reminded us of the tank treads at the rear of our armored vehicles (with regular wheels in front; hence "half-tracks"). Imagine the mess our buddy would have been in if forced to cram his feet into size-8 combat boots. It would have totally messed up his easy mile-eating stride for sure, not to mention his sunny disposition.

*No relation. There are Halls all over the place, from the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli and the Halls of Wallsburg, UT. Click below to listen.

       From the Halls of Montezuma
   To the shores of Tripoli
   We fight our country's battles
   In the air, on land, and sea;
      First to fight for right and freedom
      And to keep our honor clean;
      We are proud to claim the title
      Of United States Marine.

           Our flag's unfurled to every breeze
   From dawn to setting sun;
   We have fought in every clime and place
   Where we could take a gun.
   In the snow of far-off Northern lands
   And in sunny tropic scenes;
   You will find us always on the job—
   The United States Marines.

   Here's health to you and to our Corps
   Which we are proud to serve;
   In many a strife we've fought for life
   And never lost our nerve.
   If the Army and the Navy
   Ever look on Heaven's scenes,
   They will find the streets are guarded
   By United States Marines.

Note: Let's hear it for the Marines, but us infantryman won the war in Europe without them. Yea, Army! For heaven's sake! Heaven's streets require no guarding and us Army/Navy heroes, mingling unobtrusively with all others, enhance nonetheless their feeling of absolute security.

What happens when the 40 or so phonemes of English are constricted to a chintzy, skimpy 26 letters? Our spelling is totally messed up and we are confronted with a huge problem of illiteracy, semi-literacy and crippled, slowed-down learning.

Every basic sound of our language is a precious treasure of inestimable value. Every single one should have its own separate symbol—with none left bereft of one as at present. This means a few more letters to learn but results in a great simplification. With our present non-system, the 40-plus phonemes of English (varies somewhat with each dialect) can be spelled in 561 different ways. With NuSpel they are spelled in 41 ways—capable of simply, easily and quite accurately representing many foreign words and names commonly employed in English as well. Forty-one ways instead of 561! Not only that, but the 561 ways require lots of rules and exceptions to rules that are befuddling to adults and should not be inhumanely foisted on children

Speaking of "bereft," it seems utterly impossible that our alphabet should lack a letter for the most common vowel in our language, known in Linguistics as schwa*. Totally unbelievable! NuSpel remedies this and much more. Fortunately, inasmuch as most new NuSpel letters are taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet, there is scarcely anything new to learn for the many individuals around the world already familiar with it. Others who have had to learn the Cyrillic or other non-Latin type alphabets in order to read Russian and other foreign languages realize that, by comparison, learning NuSpel is child's play. "Child's play," yes—the term is used deliberately. Children (unless handicapped) are so sharp and quick to learn that it can astound us. It should be noted that for those who already know the traditional 26 English letters and—in most instances—their most common phonetic values (a = /a/ as in /hat/, e = /e/ as in /get/for example), only a few more (15 to be precise) need be learned to reach the total of 41.

A critic of NuSpel who sent an e-mail insisting that he had no desire to offend, insisted also that NuSpel has no future because it is so hard to learn! How many seconds did he spend attempting to master it? How many friends and acquaintances does he have whose names he remembers? What little child doesn't know and easily recall and use the names of at least 41 friends from school or play? These 41 letters are like best friends—among the best friends any child could have, with the potential to open up whole new worlds of knowledge, adventure, pleasure and delight through the written word more simply, easily and quickly than any other way.

Every worthwhile thing takes a little effort. Nonetheless, great care and much time has been taken to provide visual and other learning aids to ease and speed up the task of learning the 41 letters and the sounds for which they stand, converting it to an enjoyable challenge or game wherever possible.

One of the very first fans of NuSpel was a little six-year-old boy from Rockwall, Texas who kept bringing me scraps of paper on which to write down the NuSpel alphabet. Each time, when I had finished, he would scrutinize the new list and let me know immediately whether I had changed the order or appearance of any of the letters. He had not only memorized the shapes of the letters in a flash but also their order. At that time I had not finalized it and remained in doubt regarding the best sequence for a long time. Finally, realizing how extremely conservative people are in general with respect to this, I decided to list the traditional alphabet first (as pronounced, affecting, <e>, <b> and <g>, which, however, becomes /g/ as in ghee or go) and add most of the new NuSpel letters at the end.

A 13-year-old girl from Carrollton, Texas who has skipped two grades in school, sent an e-mail to ask how the NuSpel letters are pronounced, sending as an example the way the Swedish alphabet is spoken. As you will note, for instructional purposes the names of the consonants in the chart below are sounded with schwa*. For example, instead of "bee," <b> is given as <b> plus schwa. The pronunciations used in referencing them is given just to the right—somewhat modified from those sent to the brilliant young lady from Carrollton, who wrote a term paper on NuSpel for her English assignment.

*Note: represents "schwa," the most common vowel of English, which has no letter of its own and may be spelled any number of curious ways: along, open, lesson, cabin, calcium, gorgeous, certain, principle, (principel) foreign, curious, etc. In formal, careful speech, it may be pronounced

(uh). Speech may convey a great wealth of nuances which NuSpel is much more capable of reflecting than OldSpel. Special nuances aside, the normal IPA spelling of <a> in "along," "alone," for example, would be ^—so indicated as

general rule in any good dictionary. Above would be given as

because the first syllable has a weak stress whereas the last one has a strong stress.

Below: The NuSpel Power Alphabet, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and slightly modified to accommodate aspects of English having to do with homophones and homographs—of which there are so many—and psycholinguistic difficulties relating to human resistance to change.

In attempts at innovation, the usual approach is to go all out for all you can get. The graphemes listed above could be reduced in number by employing

for

, zh for

for j , kw for q , ks for x , and additional reductions could be made. This would eliminate an essential mathematical symbol and disfigure the appearance of treasured names—Quebec and Jack, etc. Before long, speech recognition, the automatic conversion of speech to text and vice-versa (lessening dependence on keyboards), will easily enable the use of any number of otherwise "redundant" characters.

For information on initial teaching alphabet books (i.t.a.), click here