AN ILLITERATE WORLD — excerpts!Chris MYRSKI, 2013— — —
— — — 0. Introduction Well, this is not what the author really means, or he means it strictly formal, wanting to say that in the whole world there are not well accepted common letters in use, i.e. there is not one and the same alphabet used throughout the globe. And this is a hindrance in communications between different nations, of course, which was not so imposing some thousand, or even hundred of years before, but nowadays it is, because, especially through the Internet, the whole world is turning to one single country. And, strangely enough, there are no special problems for bettering of the situation, because we are not speaking about one language for all the peoples, but just for usage of one and the same characters by all. Still, the problem exists, not only because we are used to make problems where the point is just in rejecting of some old habits, but because there are a great variety of vowels and consonants and not enough characters in the alphabet. This is true, though it is nothing unavoidable, and some combinations of characters can be used, and they have been used from ancient times. The point is that such combinations, and reading rules at all, are not common in the whole world. But well, was it not so with the common measure units, or with the right/left movement on the streets, or with the laws in different countries, etc? But, by the by, the problems were (or are being) solved, because they must to! Similarly, the author thinks, the problem with the common worldwide literation will also be solved sometimes in the near future. And if it shall and will, then why not to make some suggestions about how to do this better? But let us add some more preliminary remarks. With a common alphabet there will be, in fact, no foreign words, and reading of all written texts will be as easy as reading one's own words, and will easily be done by computer, too, but without any dictionary. Of course reading does not mean understanding but it is a way to this, because our world is tiny and the word's roots are simply cruising around the globe; and it is not a good thing when one could not properly pronounce simple foreign words and names, of places or people (and between "Odyssey" and "Ulysses" surely exists "some" difference). But there is no need to plead for the importance of proper alphabet, because that is the reason why there exist so many of them. And just because they are different we need to use here sometimes other letters, so that for an adequate reading of the paper one must have loaded Symbol font (for some symbols) and Greek letters, and some Cyrillic ones. Let us, also, accept some abbreviations for often used names of languages by their first three letters, namely: Lat for Latin, Ger for German, then: Rus — Russian,: Bul — Bulgarian, Cyr — Cyrillic, Eng — English, Fre — French, Ita — Italian, Spa — Spanish, Gre — Greek, Tur — Turkish, Ara — Arabic, Heb — Hebrew, Chi — Chinese, etc. And now, let us proceed with 1. The Set Goals. Our proposition is made with intention to reach the following goals: a. The letters used have to be not more than 32 ... b. There should be three types of letters, namely: vowels (let's write V. for short), consonants (C.), and modifiers (M.), and their functions must not be mixed! By using modifiers all possible vowels and consonants have to be represented by at most two chars (with the exception of some triphthongs, but they are building, in fact, two syllables, hence this even isn't an exception in the proper sense). ... c. The letters have to be read as they are written, if not modified, and if modified then the Ms have to be recognized looking only one char forward. ... 2. The Proposition Now, the author proposes the following alphabet, which will be thereafter explained in more details: Vowels: i, e, ә (like in "her"), a, o, u — 6; Consonants: b, p, v, f, d, t, m, n (=н), r, l (=л), g, k, x, z, c, s, ζ (=zh=ж), q (=ch=ч), w (=sh=ш) — 19; Modifiers: "·", "¨", "º", "ˉ", "ˇ", "ˆ", "~"; "`", "´" (="h"), "|" — 7+3 = 10. All in all this gives 35 chars, but the letters (Vs and Cs) are only 25 (though one may as well count them as 26, because "j" is missing from the letters as redundant, but will be included on the keyboard, to what we shall come later), and as to the 10 Ms, we not only have included the accent ("`") in the alphabet (what is not the case in any of the existing alphabets), but the most of them are old special characters (so that they exist in the char table). In fact, ... All is treated more precisely. 3. Different Languages Now let us observe more closely the used by the author languages. We shall begin with the Eng, which, though very good from the point of view of grammar, is possibly the worst one from the point of pronunciation. ... There are observed further German, Russian, and Bulgarian, and is done schematic overview of some other languages. 4. An Example As a simple example we will give the new transliterations for just one paragraph of this text (that of the Subject), but in four languages — Eng, Ger, Rus, and Bul — to see how it will work. What also is done. 5. The Keyboard Well, the volume of letters in the books will be the same or even less, but will this not give us more typing, because we have to type all the Ms? To answer this question we will turn our attention now to the keyboard, where we have said till the moment only that, in addition to the normal "i" without a point, the letters "j" and "y" have to be included meaning "iº" and "i·" respectively, but this is not enough. So let us see what we have on the main or letter part of the standard ("qwerty") keyboard. We have first to find some way for easy referring to the keys, so let us name the bottom line (with the "Space" key) as "Z" (from "zero"), then going above we have "A", "B", and "C" lines with letters, then the number line "D", and then the function keys (but they are of no interest to us). Then the number "1" letter will be the leftmost one ("z" or "a" or "q", respectively, not counting "Ctrl", "Shift", etc.), and ... ... And so, using 37 letter keys we make the following proposition for the standard world-wide keyboard, beginning with No. "0" and ending with "12", where our reserved half keys will be marked with "+" sign (and "Cə" is capital "ə"): D: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. C: ~/+5, M/m, O/o, Cə/ә, I/i, Z/z, ζ/ζ, D/d, B/b, V/v, R/r, +8/+7,+?/+? B: ˆ/+4, N/n, U/u, A/a, E/e, C/c, Q/q, T/t, P/p, F/f, L/l, |/+6, +?/+? A: ˇ/+3, ˉ/+2, ¨/+1, "·/y", º/j, S/s, W/w, G/g, K/k, X/x, `/´ Z: "Ctr", "Alt", Tab, "Space", ";/,", ":/.", "Alt", "Ctr" So, and now let us use the twelve keys marked with "+". The trick is very simple: these are 12 places left for the beloved (or often used) national combinations of letters with Ms, making in this way the total number of the used letter keys in each language to 37. Some of them are numbered from 1 to 8 because we think that 8 additional chars for each language is enough for the beginning, and the four positions marked with "+?" are left free (for personal coding). ... There are given examples in the used four languages. 6. Conclusion As you see, we may as well state that our main proposition, and its possible enhancements, is a very important one for the whole world in the 21-st century. It may not start being applied with languages like Eng or Fre, because the traditions there are very strong and the native people have so badly tried to show their national individuality (reading the Lat letters in a different way), that it is not much probable they will want to change the status quo. But there are other folks, like Germans, Italians, Spaniards, etc. who have not great differences from Latin alphabet and could easily adjust to the new proposition. Still, they will not be the initiators and may only be ready to participate in the movement, if it will be world-wide accepted. But there are other more people and some of them use Cyr, which is a very good alphabet for their own purposes, but for, say, an Englishman, it looks like Chi or old Heb, so these folks are almost ready to accept the proposition (if being made to them) and to be included in the civilized western community. And there are also Greeks, also many Arab folks, and Persians, and Hindus, and Chinese, and Japanese, and more and more others. For them an universal world alphabet should be like a manna from the heaven (providing that this alphabet is really suitable for them, as the author expected). Because the letters are just signs, symbols, and as such they could take nothing from the national individuality of the folks. And even if the time when this (or some other, but also universal) alphabet will be applied (and it will be, because when something is obviously bad people never cease to try to better the situation, even for centuries and millenniums) may not be so close to out time, then the ideas exposed in the paper may be used starting from tomorrow. What we mean by this is to use such alphabet for some internal representation of the words in computerized reading, spelling, and speech understanding systems. The existing systems can do wonders sometimes, but they work in one given language, and surely not for, say, Arabic. If some system for computerized reading of texts written in this universal alphabet is made, then texts from all languages may be converted to this internal representation (with national dictionaries and spell checking programs, but there is no need to do this simultaneously) and these files may be copied and pronounced (by computers), and, by the by, this standard will be accepted also for human reading. And it is good also for the usual dictionaries, especially for etymological ones, because there are always differences in writing and pronouncing of the words (especially for old languages). And what about the geographical names? And so on. And do not forget also the corollary ideas about a better design of the keyboard. Hence this draft may be a little bit (or more) distanced from the final decision, but it treats one very important problem. Jan 2003, Dec 2013 — — — |
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