If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
That is…concerning.
I kinda like to play with writing systems, like Avatarian (Script made for Avatar Legend of Aang and Seven Havens), where each glyph is mapped onto a sound in US English IPA rather than just redesigning glyphs in the Latin Alphabet and I sometimes wonder if it would’ve been better if we had this system (with glyphs for “ch” and “Ll” of course).
Now reading that I think it might be a better system.
INB4 that user who insists on using thorn characters shows up to fight the good fight.
JOKES ON YOU, AVATARIAN HAS A THORN CHARACTER IN BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM!
On the contrary…
Here’s the comment I made last time this idea popped up in a thread:
Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.
This has already happened with hangul, probably the paradebeispiel for successful intentionally designed phonetic systems: spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.
So, in addition to the dialect problem, you’d end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you’d be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades which b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.
Not to mention the fact that spelling things the way we currently do preserves etymological information (though imperfectly) about the words in question.
That isn’t to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention that comes with its own significant downsides.
*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense
Nothing beats shorthand. Gregg Centennial is the most versatile. Capitalism is why shorthand barely praxis today.
cc @abbiistabbii@piefed.blahaj.zone
A quick look at Gregg shorthand and I’m not too sure how it would work. I mean it’s great shorthand but as an everyday writing system on things like signs and books it fails because a lot of the glyphs look the same.
Avatarian does a similar thing but with distinct glyphs and putting them into blocks creates something that can be considered symbols for easier reading, especially considering the most common words tend to be the shortest.
if you’ve ever used an abudiga, you were already shorthanding. Gregg was designed for over a 100 years to abudiga IndoEuropean phonetics. What “signs” do you see incapable of being abudigad? Entire libraries already came and went in Gregg.
I’ve read Bryan Konietzko’s conlang. I am literally a conlang.
I just prefer logograms over abjads.