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UNIFON
means "one sound" and implies one sound per symbol. To
achieve this with English the traditional alphabet can be
augmented. UNIFON adds 17 new letters to create an
alphabet with 40 characters. Five of the new letters are
for the long vowels. The sounds that correspond to AEIOU are
assigned to the capital letters on the keyboard. Variants of K,
N, S, Z, T, and D are also assigned to capital letters.
Six letter-sound pairs must be learned. cC qQ xY |
THE
UNIFON ALPHABET All languages are phonemic. A perfect alphabet captures the same features that distinguish one spoken word from another. In other words, it visualizes speech. If an alphabet is a picture of speech, it would also be phonemic. Each letter would correspond to an important distinction in speech. Each letter would be a sound-sign. With a perfect alphabet, there would be no need for a dictionary pronunciation guide. When you write a word in UNIFON, you are basically copying the dictionary pronunciation guide entry for that word. The Merriam-Webster pronunciation guide is almost identical to keyboard UNIFON. When you are not sure about the pronunciation of a word, simply look it up in the on-line dictionary and copy the pronunciation guide entry. One change you have to make is to replace the schwa marker [&] with [c]. M-W does not require perfect spelling: Invented spellings can be used to look up words. The traditional writing system spells each sound an average of 14 different ways. Phonemic writing systems such as UNIFON spell each sound 1 way. [more] Now
you can start to
write in UNIFON! |
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