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

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Who on earth pronounces "a", as in "a chart written in..." as "eye"?

[moroveus.livejournal.com]

There have been so many attempts to launch a "new" phonetic-based alphabet, and none of them have succeeded. I think we're stuck with our various imperfect but functional alphabets. It's a cool concept, but the US can't even convert to the metric system...what makes anyone think we'll be able to get anyone to convert to a brand new alphabet?


PS: Which author was it that believed we would eventually convert to a phonetic alphabet and even went so far as to build his own phonetic type writer? Was that Anthony Burgess (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author=Burgess%2C%20Anthony/103-8265332-0523825)? I can't remember now...

[isolt.livejournal.com]

Phonetic/phonemic alphabets are discriminatory anyway, as they don't take into account dialectal differences and elevate the mythical Standard American English as the one true way, which of course it wouldn't be, if it really existed anyway.

And another problem with phonemic alphabets is that they assume everyone has the same phonemic inventory, which obviously they don't. For example, the maker of this seems to have the don/dawn merger - I see a sound for the vowel in "all", but none that seems to correspond to my non-merged vowel in "awl" - so I'd have to write what are two different sounds for me with the same letter. Whoops. The problem they were trying to solve reemerges. For some reason, they have separate letters for the vowel in "got" and in "all", but as far as I can tell they're the same vowel for me (/a/) and nowhere do I see anything that might correspond to /backwards-c/.

Our current spelling system is fucked in that it's not especially phonemic, but since the letters don't bear much relation to the sounds, it's much easier to read cross-dialectally. Plus it does have, like Chinese, the advantage of discriminating between homophones in writing, and also, like Chinese, people speaking almost very different dialects can still read and write and understand each other, because the letters in our words bear so little relation to the sounds.

And now of course, we don't have any issues with international English communication, which we *would* if we adopted it and, say, Britain didn't. Or if we both adopted it but Britain used it to write in RP and we're over here writing in SAE? And what the hell would they do in Oceania?

< /rant >