Universal Phonetic Proposal

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This one aims to serve as a shorthand, analogous to Shavian, with every sound and dual sound having their own character. Everything is spelled how it sounds. This eliminates the redundancy and inconsistency in some written systems, English especially, and the time wasted learning them.

For example: weight, straight, strait, great, grate. What were you thinking, language scholars? Did you all fall asleep on a nuclear reactor?



The International Phonetic Association (IPA) has already developed a system for each sound having its own letter called the international Phonetic Alphabet, as often seen in how to pronounce things in the dictionary and online searches. My proposal is that we fix this for practical use in the following ways:

• Eliminate the technical redundancies that aren't observed in every day speech.
• Introduce vowels ending in L and R sounds as also having their own separate letters, as well as a letter representing all vowels ending in -RL as in pearl.
• Introduce dual consonantal blends as also having their own separate letters. This is the fun part.
• Omit lazy vowel sounds in consonantal blends like in purple, resulting in two characters just being for PR and PL.
• Assign shortcuts of small common pre/suffixes or connecting words (articles, conjunctions, etc.) in the single letters, and carry these over into their dual relatives.
• Eliminate spaces between words and allowing consonantal blends to work across words. I assure you, reading becomes more fluid.

With this, all languages can be transliterated and read, even if the words are unknown.

I have had plenty of time to determine how many of these characters would be in the new system. Based on the common sounds of the English language alone I have added up 13 vowels by themselves, 26 ending with the R, L, 24 consonants, and 381 dual consonants, totaling 444. This sounds like a lot, however consider the time spent learning spelling in elementary school. With learning this in place of it, spelling tests are ancient history by middle school.

And of course, a nerd project like this isn't complete unless I've introduced my own letter characters. More to come... I had a file with 169 drawn out, but the flash drive became corrupted and an old friend of mine lost the only physical copy. Consequently I will be reconstructing these slowly over time on limited memory and from scratch. So thank the brand PNY and a guy named Daniel.

Given the English alphabet with consonants only:

b c d f g h j k l m n p q r s t v w x y z

We can first eliminate letters that don't have their own unique sound; c, q, and x.

b d f g h j k l m n p r s t v w y z

We can then loosely pair them by hard and soft versions of each other. G will represent the hard g as in get.


Notice that this leaves out h, j, m, and n.

H will represent a "soft" h as in hard, and the harder h as in challah or loch is represented in the IPA as x. We can use this since it has no other purpose, previously meaning ks or z.

J will represent a hard j as in jolt. The letter ʒ from the English Phonotypic Alphabet, also used in the IPA, will represent the soft j as in beige.


Other sounds in the English language do not have single letters to represent them, the sounds in chair, shine, thick, and breathe; ch, sh, and hard/soft th.

C can be used to represent the ch sound since it has no other purpose, previously meaning k or s

Sh has been commonly represented with ʃ (esh) in the Phonotypic Alphabet and IPA

For the hard and soft th sounds, we could use the Greek theta, Θ and θ. However, given the history of the English alphabet already having letters for these sounds called thorn (þ), and eth (ð), I felt these were more appropriate.


The hard and soft j's can be separated to represent softer versions of c and ʃ.


Remaining is m and n, which can loosely be considered a pair, and in this circumstance, conveniently.

c	f	x	k	l	m	p	r	s	ʃ	t	þ
j	v	h	g	y	n	b	w	z	ʒ	d	ð

With each sound having a familiar letter to represent it, consonantal blends can be constructed without confusion.

Someone please make a song with this. I won't because I have no talent.