Note: In the below, “x” refers to the word x; [x] refers to the phonetic pronunciation x; ‘x’ refers to the letter (or digraph) x.

The first thing to understand about the English alphabet is that we don’t really have an alphabet. Functionally, English is more like a hybrid between a true alphabet and an abjad. A true alphabet has a character for each phoneme of the language. An abjad only has characters for consonants, and vowels are simply assumed. (Think Hebrew or Arabic.) English has a small number of vowel characters, yes, but they are not only insufficient, they are used highly erratically. Meanwhile our consonants are broadly phonetic, and the exceptions are often either consistent (the ‘sh’ digraph always represents [ʃ], for example), or are foreign loanwords.

Our alphabet is also not featural, that is, the characters are wholly unrelated to how you’re supposed to say them. (Actually they are often corruptions of the hieroglyphic symbols for common words that started with that letter in Egyptian or Phoenician: ‘A’ was Phoenician “alef”, meaning “ox”, using the Egyptian symbol for “ox”, and wasn’t a vowel at all but a pre-vowel glottal stop that became used as a mater lectionis; ‘B’ was Phoenician “bet”, meaning “house”, using the Egyptian symbol for “house”; etc.) Even if spelling could be standardised, a new featural alphabet would be of use to new learners anyway, and to help prevent dialect drift. Using a wholly new alphabet would also help avoid confusion where current English spelling has slipped too far: for example, “wait” (and “weight”) is pronounced [weit], while [wait] should be pronounced the same as “white” (and “wight”).

So I have created a new system for English that is both phonetic and featural. It has already been very interesting and useful to me in understanding pronunciation and language.

The start point of the system is that all characters are either consonants, with marks off a central strike, or vowels, with marks off a central oval. Immediately then one can see what kind of phoneme one is looking at. I also like the symbolism of a hard strike for consonants and a round oval for vowels.

Consonants

The consonants are quite simple and I fixed their layout almost immediately. The principle is that the tongue sits in different positions in the mouth for each.

Consonant Phonemes by Mouth Position

Position	Voicing	Lips	Transition	Front of Mouth	Middle of Mouth	Back of Mouth
Nasal		M [m]		N [n]		NG [ŋ]
Top of Mouth	Unvoiced	P [p]		T [t]	CH [c]	K [k]
	Voiced	B [b]		D [d]	J [j]	G [g]
Lower Middle	Unvoiced	F [f]	FTH [θ]	S [s]	SH [ʃ]	H [h]
	Voiced	V [v]	DTH [ð]	Z [z]	ZH [ʒ]	KH [x]
Bottom of Mouth	Approximants	L [l]		R [r]	Y [y]	W [w]

You’ll see that there are some unusual entries. ‘FTH’ and ‘DTH’, as in “thing” and “that”, have their own column, or could have their own row, depending on how you want to view it. The approximants ‘L’ and ‘R’ could be shifted one column right and ‘Y’ could have its own column. ‘CH’, ‘FTH’, ‘DTH’, ‘SH’, and ‘ZH’ don’t have their own character, but are usually represented by digraphs or just by other letters entirely. There are two semi-detached phonemes that are not properly used in English, which I have put in brackets: ‘NG’, which is a sort of swallowing that some dialects use at the end of words like “sing”, though personally I prefer to pronounce the ‘g’ because my native accent is north-west English; ‘KH’, which is how I’ve written the sound at the end of “loch” and “Bach”.

The consonants lend themselves quite neatly to mapping onto a grid. Here is an image of the consonants, using the same mapping as the table above.

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I think that all makes sense and is mostly dialect-neutral, so I won’t dwell on it any further for now.

Vowels

The vowels presented a greater problem. Firstly, they are different across dialects – very different, especially internationally. Secondly, they are very unclear in English, and even a single speaker might pronounce a word differently on different occasions. Thirdly, whereas for consonants the only intimate connections are between voiced and unvoiced phonemes, a majority of vowel phonemes are made up of diphthongs and even triphthongs. The first two issues I decided were outside my scope to solve: I would create the best approximation of English as I could, and so long as it was reasonably complete it should be able to roughly reflect different dialects. And anyone who really hates it doesn’t have to use it! Note though that it means that despite my best efforts you might not follow my vowel notation, as we may have very different accents. The third problem scuppered my first attempt at the vowels, which did not show any connections between diphthongs and their constituent monophthongs, and being familiar with both RP and estuary English I wanted to be able to include those dialects’ triphthongs. So I settled on a system that uses a single mark for the monophthongs, and then two or three marks, in much the same place as the monophthongs, for diphthongs and triphthongs respectively.

I use six pure single-vowel sounds: ‘AH’, ‘EH’, ‘IH’, ‘OH’, ‘UH’, ‘ʊ’ (as in “foot”); and also the schwa ‘ə’, which appears in weak positions inside and at the end of words like “comma”. I treat a few formal “monophthongs” as being diphthongs, because I think it makes more sense to do so. [ii], for example, as in “flee” [flii], seems to me clearly a long vowel composed of two short ‘IH’ [i] vowels. In addition, these vowels can all end words and have a characteristic following consonant, which the six pure monophthongs can’t and don’t. My diphthongs are divided into three groups: trailing [i], trailing [ʊ], and trailing [ə]. These vowels have a characteristic following consonant of [y], [w], and [r] respectively. The four [*i] vowels are: [ii] “keen”; [ei] “cane”; [ai] “kine”; and [oi] “coin”. The three [*ʊ] vowels are: [ʊʊ] “boot”; [aʊ] “boat”; and [oʊ] “bout”. The six [*ə] vowels are: [iə] “fear”; [eə] “fair”; [uə] “fur”; [aə] “far”; [ʊə] “four”; and [oə] “for”. Yes, those latter two are very similar – again, I take the attitude that anyone else who wishes to use this system but doesn’t see them as different can pick one and be unaffected by the hidden existence of the other. Then the triphthongs are the six pure monophthongs and the [*i] and [*ʊ] diphthongs with a trailing ‘ə’.

Here is a table of the vowels.

Vowel Phonemes by Group

	Monophthongs				*i Diphthongs			*ʊ Diphthongs
* Vowels	i		e		ii	ei
	u	ə	a			ai			aʊ
	ʊ		o			oi		ʊʊ	o
*ə Vowels	iə		eə		iiə	eiə
	uə		aə			aiə			aʊə
	ʊə		oə			oiə		ʊʊə	oʊə

And here is an image of the vowels, using the same mapping as the table above. You can see that the monophthongs are blue, the diphthongs are red, and the triphthongs are purple. External markers are initial vowels; internal markers are ending vowels. Since ‘i’ and ‘ʊ’ are used at the start and end of vowels, they have a separate but linked marker for being at the start and the end: top-left and top-centre for ‘i’; bottom-left and bottom-centre for ‘ʊ’. ‘ə’ is only used at the end of a vowel, so it can be added to any other set of vowels as-is without confusion.

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I hope this is clear. My vowels may not match yours, but I hope that the principle is explicit and you can figure out what is meant. Now we can put words together.

One especially interesting thing to come out of thinking about pronunciation is the observation that “a”/“an” is not the only word that changes ending before a leading vowel. All English vowel-ending words – “Thai” [tai], “you” [yʊʊ], “paw” [poə], etc – are, before leading vowels, followed by the characteristic consonant I mentioned earlier: ‘y’ for ‘i’ to become [*iy]; ‘w’ for ‘ʊ’ to become [*ʊw]; and ‘r’ for ‘ə’ to become [*ər]. (On the rare occasions where it’s relevant, monophthongs seem to be followed by a [h].) So “Thai is my favourite” is [taiy iz mai feivrit], “you are my friend” is [yʊʊw aə mai frend], and “the paw of the bear” is [ðə poər ov ðə beə]. (Notice that I found instances where the word has a trailing letter that does not match its characteristic consonant, to show that the rule is phonetic, not based on the grapheme.) In addition, at least two other words that I’ve spotted change their form entirely, like “a”/“an”, before a leading vowel. “the cat and the ant” is [ðə kat and ðiiy ant], and “go to India and to China” can be, at least when said quickly, [goʊ tʊʊw indiiyə and tə cainə”]. You can see that the entire vowel changes. My North-West English accent also adds a ‘g’ sound after [ŋ] when it precedes a vowel. Again, this is all using my dialect: yours may vary.

As you’ll’ve spotted, I have also cobbled together a transliteration back into broadly recognisable English characters. I have used the IPA characters for ‘θ’ (“fth”), ‘ð’ (“dth”), ‘ʃ’ (“sh”), ‘ʒ’ (“zh”), ‘ŋ’ (“ng”), ‘ʊ’ (“ouh”), and ‘ə’ (“er”) because there weren’t any better options. I have used ‘c’ for “ch” and ‘x’ for “kh”. I have used ‘y’ for [y] instead of IPA’s ‘j’ because I’m writing English. I write out diphthongs as two graphemes because that is more like English. I will use these symbols in this website for convenience because I can type them rather than having to always draw them, but for avoidance of doubt I’m always thinking of the new characters.

This page is part of a short series. You may also be interested in my thoughts about Numeric Reform and Grammatical Reform.