Unifon - yet another English phonetic alphabet

[trochee]

I just discovered Unifon, which strikes me as Yet Another quixotic attempt at spelling reform.

What I didn't know was that divalea was using Unifon to represent slang in her new Rumble Girls cyberpunk/mechasuits/highschool-drama book. I found that out from Comics Worth Reading, which seems like a good place to find these things.

Comments

Re:

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Ha! most excellent rant. I am convinced. Our current spelling system is atrociously bad when viewed as a phonetic alphabet, but considering English's status as a new global interlingua, perhaps it's more important that

• spelling be (at least roughly) consistent across dialects
• we use the same alphabet as (at least some) other languages (because Unifon not portable to e.g. Spanish)
• spelling not privilege one (modern, functional) dialect over another

Regarding the turned-c vs. a vs. script-a -- British makes a 3-way distinction here, generally (I can never remember the minimal triplet) while generally, American East Coasters have a two-way distinction and West Coasters --especially the Great Plains -- have only one enormous vowel region low and back.

Since I am, dialectally-speaking, an East Coaster, I distinguish between caught and cot, to the endless frustration of my Montana-born labmates, who can't hear it at all.

Re:

[beckyb.livejournal.com]

We can hear it. We just can't produce it without feeling ridiculous.

Re:

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Yay! Hi Becky, & welcome to LJ!

Re:

[beckyb.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the welcome. Now am I supposed to think up stuff to write on my own? Most of my rants have been verbal lately.