One of the things that happens to you, if you work around geeks long enough, is you sits and thinks too much when you're, say, flying to or from a client's location. For example, on a recent return flight, I invented a new alphabet.
In my new alphabet, words are spelled like they sound. So, bug would be spelled...well...bug, and house would be spelled hows.
Redundant letters of the current alphabet would be reassigned to something more useful: c, since it is already covered by the k or s sounds, will become the ch sound, as in church. q, since it is already covered by the k or kw sounds, will become the sh sound as in shout. x, since it is already covered by the ks sound, will become the th sound as in the.
Now, each of the five vowels will be written as either short or long, depending on its sound in a word. So, kat (cat) will have a half-u over the a to indicate that it is a short-sounding a. But kat (Kate) will have a horizontal bar over the a to indicate that it is a long-sounding a. No more useless dot over the i. Yes, this will mean having to change keyboards, but think of all the new jobs that will be created. :)
OK, now the benefits of the Alphabetter™:
- Children will learn to read much faster since, as long as they know the sounds in the new alphabet, phonetics becomes FUN-etiks. (Get it?)
- No more spelling tests. If you can say it, you can spell it.
- Foreigners will learn English much faster and without the typical heavy accents since there would no longer be a mismatch between written and spoken English. For example, Lincoln would become Lenkun, with a long symbol over the e, so foreigners will stop erroneously pronouncing it lin-kowln.
