Iezi Ingglish

(Updated on May 16 2018)

 A as in Apple? 

Really?
.

We believe that Iezi Ingglish (II) can be learned in a few months rather a few years because it is a highly systematic and reliable system.

Many will be able to learn it in one or two MONTHS, not years.


It is important to note that the scheme should work with the diaphonemes (or a similar process) found on the diaphonemic part of the dialect chart. It is hoped that this use will remove much of the petty patriotic or political issues in choosing matches of letters and phonemes.  In essence, every country will have a little bit of what they want to keep and every country will have to make compromises, but, regardless what schemes is used,  children will learn as they have learned in the past, except it will be much easier now. 

Iezi Ingglish 1

.12 vowels and 22 consonants = 34 letters 



(The 6 R-controlled vowels are not differentiated, as I believe the "r" does influence the pronunciation of the vowels, eventually and naturally.)


VOWEL SCHEME

ANY vowel e = long vowel (usually)

The strength and the defining feature of this system is that it is highly systematic. As a teacher, this was the sine qua non condition for a new spelling system. Yet the system had to retain some of the underlying structure of English phonology (the Vowel+Consonant + e rule like in rat [] rate (the slant is changed into this / and so I will use [] instead) rid [] ride. But I thought this was a bit contrived (to teach and learn) when I taught it (especially when one has to teach the rule when a suffix is added to words like "ing" and "ed" the "e" vanishes). In other words this old system breaks down and this is the reason they have a rule. There is no need for poor systems. I realized that I could combine this idea with the other system: the system of using two vowels to make a new phoneme or digraphs. So was born the vowel+e structure which is the backbone of the system. There are many words in English that have this spelling: glue, blue, sue,... for, toe, hoe,... pie, tie, die,... (ee cannot be used since "e" is the schwa) and "ae" []e[] digraphs are rare, except "reggae' and a few others. The system carefully links short and long vowel phonemes as they are articulated in the mouth.


The use of é and è (which would replace x and k on the keyboard) was again a teaching choice as the accents could be construed as indicating a higher pitch vowel contrasting with a lower one. Not sure if I am just dreaming that one, but I told you I am not a musician. This seems to confirm the hypothesis though:

IPA vowel chart with audio - Wikipedia

The é is linked spatially with the e and the è. It follows how it is articulated.



So, does late and let contrast in that manner to you? Anyway, the use of those two letters also helps keeping the new spelling look quite similar to the old one since we know that “e” is one of the most used letters in English and so their use would make a lot of words look like the old spelling: incredible [] incrèdibel. I chose “c” over “k” because there are many more words that start with “c”.Unlike many other systems, I do disambiguate the short i and the long i. To me they did not sound like they should be related at all and so the link had to disappear. Anything that does not make sense is hard to teach and hard to learn of course. When I heard that the “oy” phoneme sounded almost like the long i, it made a lot of sense to spell the long i phoneme as “ay”. IPA describes it as “ai”. Of course, it will make a lot of words look odd to us, but kids will not even think twice about it. There is no way they will be confused. “boy” and “bay” (= by or buy or bye). The only possible issue that could come up is that the accents are so little, they might be missed if the font is too small, especially. I will have to see if this is a problem for French learners.

Basically,...





SIMPLE VOWEL CHART


The principle guiding the creation of the vowel phoneme scheme for II is based on the underlying English spelling system scheme (the add e system) that makes some short vowel become long: mad > made,.... This system is also present in words like "blue" VS "put", "lie", "foe", etc. The system is not that robust in the current system, but II attempts to regularize the pattern:


The first column shows the 12 (17) II character(s); the second one shows the appropriate symbol from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); the third shows the “SAMPA” equivalent (used particularly for ASCie communications), the fourth one is the diaphonemic choices, and the final two columns show a TS word using the phoneme in question together with its II transcription in the final column. The relevant vowel is in bold. Where alternative symbols are shown in the IPA or SAMPA columns, the former indicates CAD pronunciation.and the latter, RP, except for the schwa.(unreduced/reduced). These are not distinct letters/phonemes as these are made up of existing letters.
*These are not per se new phonemes.

**An alternative spelling could be .”ée” or “éey”.

CONSONANT CHART


RULES

  1. The short final /i/ in words like y-adverbs or nouns like “cookie” will be spelled with a ”i” or “ie”. 
  2. If a "e" (a schwa phoneme were to follow the short /i/ a dot would be place between the two to differentiate it from an "ie" spelling. 
Outside the diaphonemic chart choices, if a word has 2 pronunciations or different placements of the word stress (cereal, barrage,...), we could have two spellings.

                     Iezi Ingglish 2

Vowel scheme

The alternate system does not use diacritics. So the schwa is a hyphen, the "ée(y)" is "ee(y)" and "è" is "e".


Consonant system


Diaphonemic chart 

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects)




3 comments:

glyn said...

Very interesting.
I believe English should be revised too.
I teach English in Thailand as a hobby and just teach pronounciation and go down to below the syllable level to explain mechanics of speaking.
I have no university education but I successfully show my students how to pronounce properly.

Unknown said...

Are you aware that the digraphs "ng" (English) and "gn" (Romance) arose naturally? The sequences of consonants just happened to develop the new sounds finally (English) and between vowels in Romance. Furthermore, there is very little in English that requires [ŋ] to be anything but /nɡ/ with automatic assimilation and loss of /ɡ/. It is words like [ˈsɪŋɪŋ] that provide irrefutable evidence that /ŋ/ is a phoneme - when such derivatives are pronounced that way.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the posts. I was not made aware of them. I apologize.