If English was written like Chinese

The English spelling system is such a pain, we'd might as well switch to hanzi-- Chinese characters. How should we go about it?

Japanese style

One way would be to use hanzi directly, asthe Japanese do. For instance, we'd write "work" as , and "ruler" as . Chinese and Japanese borrowings could be written using the original hanzi, e.g. "gung-ho" would be , and "tycoon" as .

You can already see that this is going to be tricky. We've just given two readings, for instance-- /wrk/ and /gûng/-- and two as well-- /rulr/ and /kun/.

Proper names will be a problem as well. Again, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names already have hanzi forms-- e.g. for the name of the bodaciously cute singer Faye Wong-- but for English names we'd have no better recourse than to spell things out using the nearest Chinese syllables. For instance, Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.

Chinese style

Maybe there's a better approach. Instead of using hanzi directly, let's invent a new system-- we'll call it yingzi, "English characters"-- that would work for English exactly as hanzi works for Chinese.

The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning. So two, to, and too will each have their own yingzi. (If we were creating a syllabary, by contrast, we'd write all three with the same symbol, the one for /tu/.)

Does that mean we need a completely separate symbol for each of the thousands of possible English syllables? Not at all. We can simplify the task enormously with one more principle: syllables that rhyme can have yingzi that are variations on a theme.

Little pictures

You've been reading for half a page and are probably wondering why I haven't yet talked about pictograms. When do we get to draw little pictures?

Well, now's the time. Let's draw pictures. For instance:



horse

mount

king

man

child

bug

sun

moon

tree



one

un-

per

Let's not go crazy, however. We only need a thousand or so, and we'll restrict ourselves to fairly simple, one-syllable words. We'll derive the vast majority of our yingzi from this basic stock of pictures.

Phonetic classes

Basically each simple yingzi will be the basis for an open-ended set of yingzi, used for a set of rhyming syllables. For instance, the king character will generate the family king, thing, sing, sling, sting, shing(le).

It would be awfully confusing to use for all of these. Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest. Examples:

sing will be , formed by adding the mouth radical

will be , formed by adding the radical sting will be , formed by adding the bug radical (since insects sting)

will be , formed by adding the radical (since insects sting) shing (the first syllable in shingle ) will be , formed using the roof radical

(the first syllable in ) will be , formed using the radical sling will be formed using the spear radical.

"Rhyming" isn't quite accurate. We don't want each family of words to get too large; so we'll restrict a single family to either voiced or unvoiced initial consonants.

So, bring, ring, Bing, wing, zing will form a separate family of yingzi, based on the character wing.

Overlaps and secondary derivations

The yingzi formed from a single phonetic will all rhyme; but not all syllables that rhyme will necessarily have the same yingzi. This is largely because we started with a set of pictograms chosen for their pictorial rather than phonetic qualities; but it also adds visual distinctions to the script, and thus aids the reader. (It rather burdens the writer; but heck, everyone does a lot more reading than writing.)

For instance, the phonetic un- will be used for fun, ton, pun, thun(der), Hun, etc. But sun will have its own yingzi, , and this will be used for son, shun, stun, spun. For instance, sun plus the man radical makes son, and sun with the fight radical is used for shun.

Moreover, a compound yingzi may itself be used as a phonetic with its own set of yingzi. The shun character , for instance, will be used with the work radical to form -tion, used to spell this common suffix, as in section.

Radicals

Where do the radicals come from? For the most part they are either simple characters (e.g king, work), or abbreviations of characters; for instance the character net is abbreviated to when used as a radical.

The set of radicals is not unlimited; there is in fact a fixed set of 214 of them. The total number of yingzi that belong to one phonetic set is thus absolutely limited to 214. No set will actually have this number of yingzi, though some will have a few dozen.

(However, the potential number of yingzi is still unlimited, because we can always choose a compound yingzi as a new phonetic, and generate a new set of rhyming yingzi from it.)

Because the set of radicals is limited, a really good radical will not always be available to distinguish the yingzi in a rhyming set. We'll just choose the best one we can. In addition, when choosing radicals we will rely on the etymological meaning of a word, which may not always match its current meaning. For instance, the word villain originally meant peasant, and so the sign for vill- uses the field radical (added to the phonetic bill).

The yingzi that use a particular radical will form a class of their own-- a sort of meaning class. We can consider the entire English language to be divided into 214 meaning categories. For instance, every yingzi that uses the bug radical will have something to do (at least etymologically) with insects or reptiles. However, since the number of radicals is so limited, and because the choice of radical is sometimes quirky, the resulting sets will be rather vague and eccentric.

Guessing at an unknown character

There will be tens of thousands of yingzi; but we must not let this frighten us. There are tens of thousands of conventional spellings, too, but despite what the wiseacres say, it would be absurd to say that there's no logic to English orthography at all. Likewise, the yingzi themselves are not the basic graphical units or graphemes of the writing system; the phonetics and radicals are.

Readers can make use of this fact to guess the pronunciation of an unknown character. For instance, is a straightforward combination of the speech radical with the phonetic purse. A type of speaking that rhymes with purse-- curse, of course.

Or, , a combination of the plant radical with the guilt phonetic . Something about plants that rhymes with guilt? This one is a bit harder-- wilt.

-- a plant (radical plant) that rhymes with speech-- is easy: peach. But note that speech, which we used as a radical above, is used as a phonetic here.

Since there are many more phonetics than radicals, the information content of the radical is much less than that of the phonetic. If you knew only the radical for an unknown character, you can only narrow down the meaning to 1/214 of the lexicon; if you knew only the phonetic, you could narrow it down much further, since there are more than a thousand phonetics.

Polysyllabic words

Where possible we will divide a word into morphemes. For instance outsider breaks into out + side + -er; reshipment is re- + ship + -ment.

How do we handle morphemes of more than one syllable? We simply create a yingzi for each syllable. For instance, person would be expressed as . The first character is based on per, with the addition of the man radical; the second is sun with the addition of the same radical.

A polysyllabic morpheme, in fact, can generally be recognized because all the syllables have the same radical. For instance, insect consists of in and sect, each with the addition of the bug radical. (Note that sect is itself a compound character, formed from the rite radical with the specked phonetic.)

Inflections

How about inflections that don't form a full syllable, such as plural -s? It would be pretty tiresome, even with the add-a-radical trick, to create thousands of yingzi for syllables that just happen to have a final -s.

Note, however, that the plural morpheme sometimes takes up its own syllable, as in grasses, rashes. So why not use the yingzi for is, which is ? Of course, is and -s are both pretty common, so we should add a little dot to the character to represent final -s: So peach is , peaches is ; sun is , suns is . We can use a similar strategy for other inflections.

Foreign words

Very old borrowings (e.g. the mass of words borrowed in medieval and Renaissance times from French and Latin) will be treated like native words. We've already seen examples like peach, villain, insect, and person.

Words borrowed more recently, however, won't get their own radical+phonetic compounds. Instead we'll represent them, syllable by syllable, using the nearest existing characters. For instance, Peking will be represented as . The first character is the first syllable of pecan (that is, pe-; phonetic see, radical gourd), and the second is the word king. The name Fellini will be written , composed of the yinzi fell, lean, knee. (You may amuse yourself working out what the phonetics and radicals are for these three characters.)

Dictionaries

English dictionaries would no longer be arranged alphabetically, of course, since we're no longer using an alphabet. They'll be organized by radical.

The 214 radicals are ordered according to the number of strokes needed to draw them. Radicals of one stroke (e.g. one or per ) come first, followed by radicals of two strokes (e.g. un-), and so on, up to monstrosities like toad, which has 20 strokes.

The section for each radical is also organized by stroke number. Under the plant radical, for instance, the first entry is plant itself, followed by characters with one extra stroke (like dron, the last character in rhododendron), then characters with two strokes, and so on (up to , the first character in toadstool).