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    Single-stroke English (long edition)
    Single-stroke English (long edition)
    Single-stroke English (long edition)
    Ebook505 pages2 hours

    Single-stroke English (long edition)

    By Richard Lung

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    In conservative youth, this spelling reformer attempted fruitlessly to make English spelling regular. In middle age, I tried to invent radical new alphabets, also to no avail. In old-age, radicalism and conservatism combined, to produce, after a good few years trial and error, Single-stroke English (SE).

    I found out the hard way, that only a short-hand based on ones native alphabet, was memorable and therefore usable, without more effort then it was worth. That is why the general public has no hand-writing system as efficient as its speech.
    But this innovation would by-pass the orthography, as a broken English communications medium.

    The anarchy of English spelling has rendered more than a fifth of its users “functionally illiterate.” It is a blight on peoples prospects, with well-known social and economic draw-backs. As HG Wells said, English never learned to spell.
    Attempts at reform have centred on the ill-conceived notion of extending, rather than discarding, additional use of the vowel letter, e, as an accent to signify diphthongs.
    That expedient of the first English printer, half a millennium ago, will never serve in a World Roman Alphabet.
    This long edition of SE also contains many English language learning tips and tricks. Like learning an English alphabet, true to standard English speech, and some of the most common English words, at the same time. Moreover, learning a hundred words that contain half of English usage. Or how to avoid having to learn all the irregular past tenses of English verbs.
    Also, main snags and pit-falls, to confound English learners, are explained, for instance, when confusions of spelling are actually down to a confusion of tongues.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichard Lung
    Release dateFeb 3, 2018
    ISBN9781370799329
    Single-stroke English (long edition)
    Author

    Richard Lung

    My later years acknowledge the decisive benefit of the internet and the web in allowing me the possibility of publication, therefore giving the incentive to learn subjects to write about them.While, from my youth, I acknowledge the intellectual debt that I owed a social science degree, while coming to radically disagree, even as a student, with its out-look and aims.Whereas from middle age, I acknowledge how much I owed to the friendship of Dorothy Cowlin, largely the subject of my e-book, Dates and Dorothy. This is the second in a series of five books of my collected verse. Her letters to me, and my comments came out, in: Echoes of a Friend.....Authors have played a big part in my life.Years ago, two women independently asked me: Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?But Dorothy was an author who influenced me personally, as well as from the written page. And that makes all the difference.I was the author of the Democracy Science website since 1999. This combined scientific research with democratic reform. It is now mainly used as an archive. Since 2014, I have written e-books.I have only become a book author myself, on retiring age, starting at stopping time!2014, slightly modified 2022.

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      Book preview

      Single-stroke English (long edition) - Richard Lung

      Single-stroke English

      (Long edition)

      Series: Democracy Science, 0.

      Copyright © 2018: Richard Lung.

      First edition.

      Creative Commons license for the Single-stroke English short-hand system:

      Creative Commons License

      Table of Contents.

      Single-stroke English

      The good news and the bad news.

      Quick start to rational spelling English speech.

      Single-stroke English alfabet.

      Is Single-stroke English the English alfabet simplified?

      Why solving English literacy is so difficult.

      English Spelling Priorities: the ESP alfabet.

      Life or death literacy.

      The spelling bee in my bonnet.

      The uncivilised privilege of English literacy.

      Who was John Downing and what was his finding?

      Against the e-accent.

      Cut speling.

      The ESP Alfabet and Common Word Code.

      ESP Alfabet chart.

      Half of English in 100 words (coded).

      English Past Tense proposal.

      How a humbl Accent Apostrofe can save English Literasy.

      How to solve the problem of illiteracy in English.

      Consistent consonants.

      Vowels and dipthongs sorted by an Accent Apostrofe.

      How far is compromis speling practical?.

      World Roman Alfabet (WRA)

      The double-bluf of Euro-English.

      World Roman Alfabet WRA.

      Note on a World Pictografic Alfabet.

      Passage from Milton: Areopagitica, and speling reform transcript.

      Single-stroke English examples.

      Gettysburg address in Single-stroke English.

      World poem samples in Single-stroke English.

      English romantic and elegaic poetry samples.

      Prose samples.

      Single-stroke English Word list: a - i.

      Word list continued: j to z.

      Common English Words simplified and shortened.

      Semi-fonetik English sampl.

      H G Wells: For Freedom of Spelling.

      Single-stroke English (Summary edition)

      Guide to five volume collected verse by Richard Lung.

      Guide to two more book series.

      Single-Stroke English

      Table of contents

      Mark Twain.

      "The Simplifiers had risen in revolt against the hieroglyphics. An uncle of Cadmus who was out of a job had come to Egypt and was trying to introduce the Phoenician alphabet and get it adopted in place of the hieroglyphics. He was challenged to show cause, and he did it to the best of his ability…

      I pray you let the hieroglyphics go, and thus save millions of years of useless time and labor to fifty generations of posterity that are to follow you."

      Mark Twain: Letters From The Earth. (Simplified Spelling.)

      A chart of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, matched with the alphabet (alfabet), shows how some Roman letters might have originated. The resemblance is quite startling, in the case of letter, w, for waves, or the vessel shape of the letter, v. Some other matches require only a little imagination. True, appearances can be deceiving, but there is a real evolution that has been studied. Closer resemblances are evident from the Phoenician fore-runner of simpler modern alfabets. Singe-stroke English continues that tradition.

      Hieroglyphics caused confusion among nineteenth century European deciferers because their pictographs are in fact symbols for a fonografic (phonographic) or speech-based language, not a visual or sight-based language. The book by Oliver Sacks, on deafness, suggests the medium of pictografic sign-language, may be the most efficient means of quick communication, especially between alien cultures. And I mean alien, from this and other planets.

      The good news and the bad news.

      According to Bernard Shaw, the currency of some recognised short-hands owed less to attractive or facile design than to the business ability of their promoters.

      I am not promoting Single-stroke English as a business. It is freely available under legal conditions of the Creative Commons, to ensure the thought, that has gone into Single-stroke English or Single English (SE) for short, is not exploited for commercial ends.

      To repeat, SE is a short-hand, made memorable, by being based on the letters of the alfabet. There is no reason why English cannot be written by all, with an efficiency approaching that of English speech.

      There is the good news and there is the bad news.

      The bad news is that I cannot sight-read my own writing invention, at the time of publication. The fact is that every-one learns to write before they can read the language on sight. (A Dickens character, from Our Mutual Friend, mentions this. And Charles Dickens was an ace short-hand writer.) That is part of the normal process of literacy learning.

      To the unfamiliar, myself included, an SE page, at a glance, looks like any other alien short-hand or alien language, in general, even if you are more or less familiar with English. This is liable to put-off inquirers of SE, without so much as giving the author the benefit of the doubt.

      After all, why should those literate in English have to re-learn English literacy? Well, in the first place, Single-stroke English is meant, as a fast lane to English, for any number of people, who do not have, already, a good knowledge of the language. The learning principle is that it is easier to learn ordinary English, by first learning a much simpler version, a stream-lined or rational English. That is the proven principle of an Initial Transitional Alfabet. At the same time, SE has learned from the mistakes of ITA, as a system, that was introduced into some schools, in the 1960s.

      In the second place, for those already literate, English is such an inefficient tool of communication, that it is worth learning an efficient version.

      Were I still a young man, I would have the time, to let SE mature, before publishng the system. That is not the case, so I have decided to publish, somewhat prematurely, with apologies, what has already taken me a life-time journey.

      OK, so the bad news is that even those literate in English cannot sight-read SE - without some familiarisation.

      The good news is that after a life-time of tinkering with English spelling reforms, and being unable to remember my own alfabet inventions, I can remember the stream-lined English letters, of Single-stroke English.

      I can recognise the SE letters individually and, slowly, work out what I have written, tho I could not recognise the page at a glance, or even many of the words, at once. At least, some mneumonic access to the individual letters is a basis for the script to become more familiar. Whereas my former (and others) radically new alfabets fell into disuse and became a mystery.

      More good news is that I can write SE, from the start, without looking at it. This is more restful, to my old eyes, than staring at a glaring back-lit screen or even having to regard print in natural reflective light. The night-writing snag is that you have to keep your place on the page, to avoid writing over previous words.

      (It is possible to start a new word where you left-off from the previous one, so that you keep going either down or across the page. Tho, that is perhaps less economic of space - if that matters.)

      I do use voice recognition software but it may not completely supplant an efficient hand-writing system, offered by SE. At any rate, I still thought it worth-while pursuing this alternative option. (And it is independent of electronics.)

      It has to be said that SE didn’t stay the same alfabet. It evolved over a long period, with very limited and intermittent use, and considerable changes, which were a barrier to growing familiarity. I had to solve out-standing problems before SE could become a stable system, and my memory have a chance to properly come to terms with it.

      This was not an idle afternoon fancy on the back of an envelope.

      Quick start to rational spelling English speech.

      Table of contents

      The sentence on the cover, of this book, is a phonemic (fonemic or fonemik) pangram, because it gives all the speech sounds, you need, to spell the English language:

      vet ewe tho brown fox high jump lazy ash dawg

      This sentence may remind you of the pangram: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The purpose of the pangram was merely an exercise in ingenuity, to see how many letters of the alfabet could be included in as short a sentence as possible.

      My sentence is less elegant but more practical: it offers fonetic (phonetic), and therefore economic, writing of all English speech. Hence, my summary sentence of essential English fonemes is called the fonemic pangram.

      If you were fast enuf (enough) and your short-hand was efficient enuf, you could take down dictation, like a secretary or a reporter. I know those things are not needed, in this age of various machine recorders. But it is still a time-saver to be able to learn English with an efficient script, such as Single-stroke English (SE).

      My sentence, with all the English speech sounds or fonemes, is not all spelt foneticly. (The lack of consistency, amounting almost to anarchism, is why English spelling is such a nuisance.) So, the real speech sounds, behind irrational spelling, have to be explained.

      Consider each word of the pangram, in turn.

      First word: vet.

      That's alright. vet is spelt as it sounds: a rational one-sound one-letter word is fonetic. Consonants generally come in breathed or voiced pairs. Consonant, v, is the voiced version of breathed consonant, f. These are fricative consonants, made by the sound of friction that air makes, passing inside the mouth, mostly when the tongue is close enough to some point in the roof of the mouth. In this case, the f,v pair, the air friction is caused between the upper teeth and lower lip.

      The breathed consonant, t (voiced version, d) makes a plosive sound or clap. Clapping the tongue, against the dental ridge, is one of the most convenient vocal sounds to make. This explains why it is one of the commonest speech sounds in any language.

      The second word, ewe,

      is pronounced the same as word, you, is rendered rationally by the dipthong, iw, as in: few, view. An alternative rendering is: yw, as in word, yew.

      Notice that the spelling, ewe, is not so far from fonetic, especially if you drop the silent letter, e, from the end. For, the vowels, e and i are neighboring vowel pronunciations.

      Vowel, i, as pronounced in words: i[t]; i[n], is a forward vowel, in the vocal cavity, and close to the palate. Vowel, e, as in words, egg, them, is slightly less forward and slightly less close. It is possible that the spelling, ew[e], reflected an earlier pronunciation of this word, in the history of English speech.

      American English tends to drop the pronunciation, y or i, before w or u. in words, like: sue, new, tune.

      Third word: tho.

      The digraf, th, is for a foneme that has no letter, in the Roman alfabet, which reflects its marginal importance. A short-hand might be: th[ree] = 3. Also, let definite article, the = 3.

      The pronunciation of letter, o, in tho is rendered by the dipthong, ou, as in the words, shoulder, show. (I use the shorter spelling, tho, for: though.) This is another foneme of marginal importance, because English spelling often does not distinguish between the vowel, o, as in on and that dipthong, ou/ow.

      Fourth word: brown.

      The consonants are fonetic. The dipthong spelt, ow, is the usual spelling, along with its closely related version, ou, as in: how, house. The standard spelling of this foneme is not fonetic, in current English pronunciation - tho it may have been in the past.

      Today, the fonetic spelling, au, of this dipthong, is only found in the odd imported foreign word, like: tau. Another fonetic example, as specified by the author and spoken in the movie, is the name of the dragon, Smaug, in the novel, The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkein.

      For purposes of transcribing speech to spelling, consistently, to avoid confusion, it's necessary to resort to the fonetic spelling, au. The reason can be seen from the previous fairly fonetic dipthong, ou/ow, as in: boulder, grow. Notice ambiguous words like: bow (and arrow); row (the boat), and bow (down) pronounced bau or baw; (noisy) row, pronounced rau or raw.

      However, the existing English word, raw, is pronounced with another dipthong foneme, discussed when we come to the word, dawg.

      Fifth word: fox.

      The breathed consonant, f, is fonetic in this word.

      Vowel, o, is also fonetic, as in: on, of, off, odd.

      The letter, x, standing for two consonanrts, ks, makes little-used letter, x, redundant in English.

      Sixth word: high.

      Consonant, h, is a near relative of Greek chi, written nearly like the Roman letter, x. Fonemes, chi and h, are both made in the same rear vocal position, above the throat. But foneme, h, sounds more like a wind-tunnel effect, whereas chi is a more constricted and therefore more frictional or hissing sound.

      Sound, h, is another marginal consonant, disappearing from languages. In English, it

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