frankie's Journal: Reinstalling Humanity (with a new charset)

At an office luncheon last week, one of my colleagues asked our table a hypothetical question: "If you had a round-trip ticket on a time machine, when/where would you go and how long would you stay"? I was able to answer immediately "given sufficient preparation time, about 3000 years ago, probably North America, for about 30 years"(*). This topic (minus the return trip) has been a sporadic pondering of mine for a long while.

One of the smaller details I mentioned was an Esperanto dictionary using a 32 character phonetic alphabet, which was greeted with a mix of laughter and appreciation. That night the idea wouldn't let go of me, so I finally decided to formalize what characters it would have. And since I went through the trouble, I may as well put them up. With apologies to IPA and other professionally generated charsets, here they are.

1. a = short a, bat
2. â = long a, bait
3. e = short e, bet
4. ê = long e, beat
5. o = short o, bot
6. ô = long o, boat
7. u = short u, but
8. û = u-ish, boot, dude
9. i = short i, bit (btw long-i is actually aê)
10. ü = o/u-ish?, book, put
11. l = l
12. m = m
13. n = n
14. q = ng, bang
15. w = hard w, wet
16. y = hard y, yet
17. p = p
18. c = sh, she
19. t = t
20. f = f
21. k = k
22. h = h
23. s = s
24. x = aspirated th, thin
25. b = b
26. j = zh, asia (btw old-j/soft-g is actually dzh)
27. d = d
28. v = v
29. g = hard g, get
30. r = r
31. z = z
32. ð = voiced th, this

Actually, I'd replace several of those symbols with clearer, simpler shapes (similar to Graffiti), but this list is good enough for a beta version. Astute readers will notice the correspondence between chars 17-24 and 25-32.

(*) = without preparation, I'd go to Philadelphia circa 1750 for a week, and teach Ben Franklin the general principles of the periodic table, ideal gas law, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, motors, generators, cellular biology, germ theory, antibiotics, vaccines, genetic inheritance, formal logic, approval voting, balance of powers, ways to phrase a Constitution more clearly, assembly lines, and percussion-cap rifles. I'd also give him my alphabet of course.

O umlaut vs. u umlaut

[benhocking]

I'd probably use an o-umlaut (ö) for #10 instead of the u-umlaut (due to my German bias, no doubt). Of course, if you were going to submit a new alphabet altogether anyway, that'd work even better.