One Approach to a Universal Alphabet

Human speech has always been limited by anatomy to the sounds capable of utterance. Languages illustrate this.

Recorded documents consist of words written in character sets, or alphabets, reflecting traditions of thousands of years of practiced scribing in the context of each culture’s then-current consensus. Alphabets of existing cultures today bear only slight resemblance to the original scripts; and only if those forms are known.

Relatively recent attempts have been made to identify a proto-language from which all others descended. But that backward search is not what this article is about.

Another recent pursuit recognizes the similarities in human thought in most of the northern Eurasian languages. Esperanto attempts to make documents and speech easily understandable among most current cultures. But that attempt at taming today’s Babel is not what this article is about either.

The new wave of international science coupled with the brute force of the internet, both predominantly in American English, have made that language probably the most accessible in the world today. But English is still at best regional, and at most a second language to the majority of the world. So, this article isn’t about making that language a world language either.

Although these recent attempts have merit, they do not recognize the reality of human beings’ resistance to change. So any proposed change has to be minimal and has to make sense to everyone hearing about it.

Any change must also be fundamental in order to improve communication on a global level.

So the real concern here is to provide a fundamental change in how we all think about language, that will at the same time be minimal in impacting the structures and organizations that currently exist.

I propose a new alphabet that can be used by all cultures. This new alphabet will consist of pictographs as characters. The new characters will illustrate the outward positions of the lips, tongue and teeth, as sounds are produced. Just like current languages, this alphabet will be limited to sounds, and therefore meanings, in context. But it will reflect each current language’s sounds.

Let me show how this will be done.

In each language, characters signify sounds. In Chinese, pictograms represent sounds and words. In English we have the letters:

AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz

There is no way of knowing which letter signifies what sound unless you’re taught, with much repetition.

Along with the difference between character shape and sound, comes some superfluousness. For example, both “B” and “P” make similar sounds. And since “X” is a combination of the “K” and “S” sounds, it will be left off our new list. In fact, if you eliminated the redundancies in this alphabet you would reduce the 26 letters to 15, thus:

A
B for B and P
K for C, G, K, and Q
D for D, J, T, and Th
E
F for F and V
H
I for I and Y
L
M
N
O
R
S for S and Z
U for U and W

We could write the vowels “A”, “E”, and “I” as the letter “O”, and the vowels “O” and “U” as the letter “o”, based on how open the mouth is when pronouncing them. With pronunciation further based on context and locality, the alphabet could be reduced from 26 letters to 12:

B
K
D
F
H
L
M
N
O
R
S
o

Now, using the positions of lips, tongue and teeth as a guide, as we did above for the vowel sounds, the new alphabet could be illustrated using current fonts. These new characters would portray the mouth in speech from a sideways view reminiscent of emoticons. An emoticon is a series of characters representing a specific mood; like the colon, dash and closing parentheses characters representing a smiling face on its side, :-).

If this alphabet became widely used, fonts could be created which illustrate the mouth positions better.

All vowels are made with the mouth open. Vowels “A”, “E”, and “I” are sounded with a wide open mouth. They can be indicated by the letter “O”. Vowels “O” and “U”, are sounded with a less open mouth, and can be signified by the letter “o”.

“B” and “P” sounds are made by producing an audible puff of breath from tight lips. The “i” character would remind one of those light lips.

The hard “K” sound of consonants “C”, “G”, “K”, and “Q” can be illustrated with an open mouth and tongue shown at the back of the mouth. Using the “(” character for the upper lip, the “)” character for the lower lip, and the “” character for the tongue, all in emoticon style, that hard “K” sound would look like this: “()”, but without the quotation marks.

The similar hard and soft sounds that the letters “D”, “J”, “T”, and “Th” make, with the tongue above and behind the upper teeth, could be shown as “.3”. The number “3” is used for the upper teeth. The period, “.”, signifies the aspiration occurring when these sounds are uttered. The new character illustrates the tongue above and behind the upper teeth.

The “F” and “V” sounds could be illustrated as “3)”, with the lower lip shown in contact with the upper teeth.

“H” could be shown as open lips, like “()”.

“L”, with tongue placement like “D”, but the tongue is slightly “rolled” in this case. This can be illustrated as “>3”.

“M” can be shown by the character “” alone, since the “M” sound is made with the lips together.

“N”, also with tongue placement like “D”, can be illustrated as “3”.

“R”, has tongue placement like “K”, but the tongue is “rolled” with outside edges touching the teeth and above middle area, can be shown as “(>)

“S” and “Z”, with tongue behind the lower teeth, can be shown as “E”, with “E” signifying the lower teeth.

Thus we have all the sounds in American English shown with characters that look like the mouth parts that are used to make them.

As suggested above, this method can be used for all languages, to make a universal alphabet, so anyone in the world can read in any language. So let’s try it now.

First, we now have twelve new characters for all the sounds in American English. They are:
· O for A, E, and I
· o for O and U
· i for B and P
· () for C, G, K, and Q
· .3 for D, J, T, and Th
· 3) for F and V
· () for H
· >3 for L
· for M
· 3 for N
· (>) for R
· E for S, and Z

Since these letters are written using existing fonts, they have to be illustrated sideways, emoticon style. So, we’ll have to employ a kind of Chinese way of reading them. That is, we’ll have to read them on their side, but left to right, which from the side, would be top to bottom, to see how the mouth changes shape to make each sound. Using current fonts, we have to rotate the page 90 degrees clockwise, to read top to bottom, from left to right. For example, if I were to write my last name, NIELSEN, in this format it would look like this:

3,O,O,>3,E,O,3

The comma used above is to separate the characters.

Our new characters are readable, and make more sense since they show how the parts of the mouth are used in speech. But as you can see, this would take some practice. There are also superfluous vowels; the two “O’s” signifying “I” and the first “E”. Losing the redundant vowel character the word NIELSEN could be expressed as:

3,O,>3,E,O,3

With new fonts created to make each character assigned to one key, words in this new alphabet could also take up less space; just as the seven-letter word NIELSEN, would become equivalent to a six-letter representation.

What are your thoughts on this topic?