I updated the alphabet. What do you think? 

The easier thing to do is just say Q only properly makes the the “kw” sound and drop out the u. Then you just replace q with k in the few words where q actually makes its own sound.

If we are fantasizing we might just make the letter 'C' into the CH sound. C doesn't do anything that K and S can't do.

Cyrillic has pretty much all of your additions covered. Adding new glyphs rather than decorations on existing letters is a more clean approach anyways.

The eszet is a solution to problem better solved by the elimination of the practice. Also, C is just a cut-rate K and a double for S, so chuck it, same for X (sounds like KS or Z). Kwak is cracked, just keep the Q and let it ALWAYS make a KW sound. I really dig the addition of Thorn and the other letters, though I dispute your ditching of the Eth. Instead of Ð, perhaps we could use a larger version of ð, or make a grammatical rule that whenever the TH sound begins a word it's always Þ, and is pronounced as a hard TH (e.g. that), while a th sound that comes in the middle or end of a word is always a soft TH (e.g feather or with) and is represented by an ð. I really think we need new vowels to cover the sounds OO, OI, and OY make and a removal of the EA vowel combination from the language. Just use an E, an EE, or a yet-to-be-determined letter to replace the AY vowel combo. Now that I think of it, can we just get rid of double letters altogether when they don't make the distinct sound of two letters (e.g. unnamed)?

Rob, if you would like to use Ž for "zh", then use Š for "sh" and Č for "ch". Consequence gives ease of learning.

“English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.” - Sir Terry Pratchett

Þis is lovely Nice one Robwərds!

Oh, my! LOVE the new alphabet, the video, and ESPECIALLY the song!!! Rob, you're the best.

If you change the alphabet you are required to also include a workable alphabet song. No exceptions.

For ch, sh and zh I would recommend you the letters č, š and ž coming originally from the Czech language. They are used in most of Balto-Slavic languages.

I was waiting for a discussion about Eth, and you brought it! So beautifully done! Incredible! Thank you immensely for doing that! I am extremely happy and impressed. You really are excellent. Your narration is absolutely perfect. It's clear, slow enough that one can actually imagine and absorb all that is suggested, implied, and told. Excellent. Just excellent. Well done, my good man! Well done indeed!

Þank you for bringing back my favourite letter.

For ch,sh,zh to keep things consistent you could just simply use č,š and ž from the Czech alphabet. These characters or letters are called or known as chet, shet and zhet and they are used to make the ch, sh and zh sounds in the Czech Republic Alphabet and we could have them in English as well.

Hi Rob, I was in first grade in 1966/67. They carved out about 30 of us and got our parents to agree for us to be part of an experiment. We learned to read using the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA). They did exactly what you are doing; they added characters to match common sounds. Every word was written exactly as it sounded. You can Google it and see their alphabet. The results of the experiment was that we, the ITA students, learned to read much quicker and were several grades ahead in our reading ability. However, because we had to then adapt to the traditional alphabet we had the arduous task of learning a very illogical system utilizing a bunch of silly extra and sometimes silent letters. To a first grader the ITA system was superior and made much more sense. I still have a couple of kids books written in the ITA language. As an adult I am a very proficient reader, not sure if I can attribute that to ITA or not.

You know, there are a lot of S variants: school, spool, stool... I wonder what could be done with those phonemes...

"...the sign of Eth is rising in the air," Rush, "By-Tor and the Snow Dog"

The problem with having schwa (“ə”) as a separate letter is vowel reduction. Vowels are reduced to a schwa based on the stress. But sometimes the same word will be used in a different context or in a different form, changing the stress and, if schwa were a letter, changing the spelling. Sometimes the word “a” is pronounced as a schwa, sometimes not. Sometimes the word “to” is pronounced with a schwa, sometimes not. Etc. So we’d have: “To be competətive, Americə is goiŋ tə have tə give American compətişion reciprocity if ə dəzen or more countries pass a reciprəcaşion чreaty.”

One major problem with giving the schwa a letter is that, as you mention, English speakers often reduce other vowels to schwa. This means that, if you're spelling words how they're pronounced, you might need to accept that nearly every English word has multiple correct spellings.

I really admire and appreciate your deep knowledge on languages and linguistics. Specialized knowledge can make things interesting even if it’s as dull as alphabet.

See Idk if this was deliberately meant as something you're supposed to notice on your own while watching this video, but especially the part at the end where you haphazardly slap the extra letters into the Alphabet song without even attempting to change the notes of the song perfectly demonstrates what I believe to be the big problem with these attempts to make a new english alphabet. Syllables that are created using two letters aren't linguistic "waste" as many act like they are, they are actually the simplification. Replacing them with other unique symbols makes the words of the language have less letters, at the cost of the alphabet you need to memorize and recognize becoming significantly more complicated The great thing about stuff like TH and SH is that they are super intuitive because the syllable they form is a hybrid of the syllables of their constituents. If not in how they sound, then in the mouth movements used to create it. If you try to make the T sound and the H sound at the same time, you get the exact syllable that TH makes. The less letters your alphabet has, even if you have to combine some of them to make certain sounds, the easier it is to read and even write words. (Note that easiness is not to be confused with quickness.) Then there's stuff like Ñ, which even just listening to it you can tell is two syllables, so combining it into one letter would only serve to make words like "Union" less intuitive due it jarringly having less letters than it does syllables. An actual double-N would make more sense, even though in the specific case of things ending in "-nion" it wouldn't apply because it's created from the combination of N and I, not two Ns. Also since the only thing wrong with W is its name, I'd suggest changing its name to "Wu"

How about Š for "sh" and Č for "ch" from Czech and Baltic alphabets? This solution is a bit more consistent than adopting a Turkish and a Cyrillic letters for this purpose. EDIT: and now after I discovered that you propose to adopt Ž from Czech, this idea looks even better.

in all seriousness, would love to see thorn make it's comeback

I sent a lot of the with this "stealing letters" concept. However, I found that having doubled letters represent single sounds and doing away with capitalization in order to use capitals as different letters works with current keyboards as well as handwriting standards.

You can replace /ku/ sound with a C and replace every word using a C with a K like ‘ciet’ ‘quiet’, ‘cest’ ‘quest’, and ‘cotient’ ‘quotient’. And the other words: ‘kome’ ‘come’, ‘komplete’ ‘complete’, and ‘kan’ ‘can’. With words that end in ‘ck’ like ‘quick’ and ‘kick’, you can just drop the ‘c’. ‘cik’ ‘quick’ and ‘kik’ ‘kick’

The alphabet is not the main problem. What English needs is consistent spelling so people don't need to remember the pronunciation and the spelling of each word separately. It's so much easier to write stuff when the same letter (or a combination of letters) represents the same sound everywhere. Even the ridiculous German spelling of č (tsch) is ok, because it's consistent.

I’m fully here for binning C… it seems more confusing than useful, having two potential sounds that are both duplicates of other letters in the alphabet.

Recent subscriber, and you've brightened my day when I needed it. Cheers, Rob. :)

One of my local sports teams is named the Thorns. Before one match a few years ago, the scoreboard had the two team names as "Thorns" vs. "þ". Obviously some kind of text input/encoding error, but it was funny. My biggest Tweet (before deleting my account) was posting a photo joking about it "Why are we playing against ourself" and getting RTed by a bunch of word/letter/type/language/etc enthusiasts.

The problem with using phonetic alphabets is that not everyone pronounces words the same way, for example, "crayon" has 5 different pronunciations, but as long as people understand what people are trying to say, I guess it works.

I'm a native Polish speaker and "kwak" made me laugh so much. I don't mean it in a mean way, haha. "Kwak" is the sound that a duck makes, and if I'd write the proposed name of the letter using Polish letters, I get "kłak" what means a single hair. Fun fact: in the elementary school they teach to pronounce "ł" as "ły" but after graduating most of people is spelling it as "eł".

Praiseworthy work, Rob! Last year I had a go at developing an accent system for English to try to make it more phonetic by simply "decorating" existing spellings, but these are some thought-provoking changes focusing on making it more efficient, too! It was great that you presented so many examples from different languages across the globe searching the globe, but I agree with many others that Czech's háček accent (Č, Š, Ž, even Ď and Ť potentially) is particularly neat -- they made it into my system.

Someone made this as a Artistic Alphabet. wow.

The letters 'X', 'Q' and 'C' always seemed like something you could comfortably nuke out of our alphabet and replace with other letters or pairings of letters. I guess there'd be one Twitch streamer who might not be overly happy about it though.

Hi Rob, my late father researched this very topic for over 30 years. However his focus was vowels and their many sounds. IE many more than 5 in English. He was developing what he called "12 Vowel English", specically aimed at people learning English from Asain decent to have an intermediary step in understanding how to navigate English. If you would like to know more, lemme know. Great content!

The best thing about English not having any "special" characters like "ñ" is that foreign/borrowed words and names are easily recognisable. This is what allows people to know that words like "fiancée" or "Pokémon" have particular pronunciations... That they will probably have to look up

I think the new alphabet should be like this: Open vowels:ā ī ū Ē ō Closed vowels: â î û ê ô

The way you use ß is actually different from the German way. In German, it is used to signal that the vowel that comes before it is a long one. So "graß" would be pronounced in a British way and "poßeß" would just be weird😂 Edit: I just realized that the first ss in possess is actually not voiceless (which ß always is) so that makes it even worse🥲

I think there was a better solution for 'sh' 'ch' and the "zh" sound like the 'su' in 'pleasure'. In my language (Bosnian, a south slavic language), they're written like š, č, and ž. It makes it super consistent and easy to understand. Much simpler than taking the letters for sh from turkish, ch from cyrillic, and zh from czech. After reading the comments I see a czech person has already suggested what I just did lol. Our alphabet is based on the Czech one so it makes sense lol

I’m still trying to convince myself that this could be the new English alphabet.

I think it's kinda funny how a few centuries ago scholars removed all accents from the English language in hopes of simplifying spelling and it just made it more complicated from a certain perspective

a better character for CH would be the Czech Č because it resembles the C and does not get confused with the digit 4. Instead of shwa you could use the Romanian ă which is pronounced like shwa, and it resembles the letter A

one of my favourite things is that we have an 'f' in english and yet we still use ph to create the f sound

Font creator lobby got to you ! Swing the axe. Change it ...forever. Pick 24 letters.

reusing letter is always better than random new letters.

I'll never forgive English for getting rid of the runic letters 😔

It would be nice if the new alphabet was also in an order that made sense. Like maybe all of the vowels are grouped together and then the consonants are in their voiced/unvoiced pairs.

Dude I LOVED the letter “kwak”. It’s so good. And the letters “thorn, eng, and ente(including kwak) made efficiency of the English Alphabet a 100 times better.

ah yes, the 34 letters of the new alphabet we should call it rob-wordian

Fun fact: ẞ and ß were originally two different letters, ẞ is a digraph of ſ+z, and ß is a digraph of ſ+s. Eventually they became interchangeable, but without a capital, so ẞ is sometimes used as a capital ß.

Dude, I've been using your kwak for the symbol of myself for decades. My first name begins with W and my last name K, so it seemed quite logical. When asked for my initials, I write this symbol. Additionally, as a student of language, and in particular orthography, I've been pondering this task, also for decades. I do more replacement than creating & deleting, as you do. I won't go into my own replacement ideas here, because everyone and their sidekick have engaged themselves in this fun little game.

The Shavian alphabet was designed specifically for English, and to accommodate some differences between British and American pronunciation. There's also a certain logic built into the letter shapes (unvoiced consonants have ascenders, voiced consonants have descenders etc).

Az an Ingliş spiker, hu risently lerned Turkiş, I was fasinated bay haw isi ther raiting sistem is. As you could see I was trying to reflect Turkish letters and way of writing up, and I think it makes a perfect sense, some of your new letters makes perfect sense, while others were complicated things, but I still think Turkish is way kore straight forward and I could literally write any Turkish sentence I hear even without knowing the full meaning which is so beautiful in my opinion.

The Latin Turkish alphabet has been developed quite recently, about a hundred years old in fact so I believe that is why we have ı i, cç, sş, oö, uü, gğ letters refer to different but similar sounds. It makes it much easier to mimic other languages in Turkish because we already have the written concepts of the common pronunciations.

Love this! I get that the bigger issue with the English alphabet is that we use just 5 - 7 letters to represent about 20 vowel sounds.

i do want sounds that have letter combos (Th, Ch, Sh, etc) to get their own sounds, while making x and q combos. This is because the ks and kw sounds are way less used then the afromentioned ones, but they have their own letter for a sound thats rarely used in the english alphabet

č for the ch sound (i guess) and for the /ə/ schwa or any e with a diacritic

About the ß: in proper German, it has little to do with efficiency. ss or ß determines whether the vowel before it is short or long. Masse (mass) has a short a, Maße (measures/dimensions) has a long a.

Why not just remove the U after the Q? We all think of Q having a QU sound anyway.

This thought experiment was a lot fun but while watching I came to realise that in our day and age some things aren’t open for change.

This really made English look like a foreign language, but kudos!

The problem with having a separate letter for schwa is that most people don't consciously perceive it as a different type of vowel but rather just a weaker version of other vowels. I think it would be better to consistently use a letter that is already used frequently for schwa, like "a" or "e", to write it in al cases. In Dutch we also have schwa as an unstressed vowel, but it's always written as "e".

Nice! My recommendations: Instead of the new letter, just use Q for the “qu” sound. Australia has been doing this for years with “Qantas.” Seems more efficient than a new letter. And for “ch,” I prefer Ç because it follows the same logic as Ş and makes sense in English. I wouldn’t worry so much that Ç is used differently in other languages, because we’ve already seen such rule differences and we just need to establish the rules for English.

I'm going to have nightmares about that new alphabet song

10:00 In Germany and Austria, if you write “Strasse”, the teacher will mark it as incorrect - because it is. ẞ serves a very good purpose: It’s an undoubled consonant, whereas ss (obviously) is. The A in Maße is long and the A in Masse is short; the single/double consonant indicates that. possible → poßible hostess (stay) fitness (stay) bass → baß (at least for the fish) grass (stay) possess (conflicted) stress (stay) chassis (stay)

There is actually a difference between "ß" and "ss" in German. "ß" is used in the middle or at the end of a word after a long vowel, indicating its length. "SS" is used when the preceding vowel is short. The use of "ß" or "SS" is not interchangeable, even though "SS" is occasionally seen in older texts due to outdated spelling rules. "ẞ" is also called "scharfes S" ("sharp S"), especially in Austria.

Well, since the point is trying to simplify the orthography, eliminating confusions, I think it'd be important distinguish the "th" sounds, using Ð (only for /ð/ sound) and Þ (only for /θ/). Plus, despite loving ß, it'd more efficient just turning all the SS into S (when sounded like /s/), using Z when it's /z/. I also think that J should be used with all the /dʒ/, and G only for /g/. C could represent /tʃ/, once K would be used for all the /k/, while Q (without U) could stands for /kw/, so it wouldn't be necessary a new letter. I really enjoyed the other solutions though, like Ə, Ŋ, Ñ, Ş and Ž.

Great videos regarding letters. Such a specific topic, yet so interestingly explained.

It is worth considering the suggestions further and finally implementing the best ones. It would be worth. 26 letters are usually not enough to represent the sounds of a language.

I enjoyed this. Phoenetically, "qu" is not one sound but two so, in my opinion it shouldn't be seen as one sound in the alphabet here. I loved that you added schwa. I have taught that to my students every year as we use it so very much in Australia. I liked the addition of thorn, eng, sh and cheh too.

I would make the letter c make a ch sound instead of it making an S or K sound. I would use š for sh, ž for zh(like the su in measure), Q will make a kw sound without the U. I would add both the Þ/þ and Ð/ð(other languages shouldn't impact this at all), I would add the Æ/æ letter. I would add ñ. So the sentence "I love fish and chicken" would become "I love fiš and ciken" as an example Edit: I left out a lot from my vetsion of a revised English alphabet

"Name one job done by Q that couldn't be done by K or even C" well, for one, i solve mysteries two.. uhh i make music? i guess?

Hhahaha omg that is exactly what I was thinking when I saw the "kw" replacement letter too. I laughed so hard when you said that out loud.

A lot of these changes are accent-specific. Would people with different accents spell words differently from each other? (For example: ‘ñew’ works for people who pronounce it ‘nyew’, but others don’t add a ‘y’ sound. ‘Lettə’ works for those who “drop the r”, as they say, but others don’t)

This was almost therapeutic to watch. Like cleaning out an old cupboard, except the cupboard is the English language, and old meaning hundreds of years. I’ve recently been learning a bit of Basque, and was surprised to find out their written language was only formalised in the 1960s. This seems to have made their alphabet very efficient and logical.

Better make a 14 letter alphabet for a smaller keyboard. Then put hats or schillas on top of the letter and double ,or even triple the letters. Even if you don't write the hats ,the meaning can be inteligibile if the letter are arranged by similarity. For ex.. P next to B. It has bin ă plejăr end uiș iur çanăl ă șaini dei .

Now we need to convince Apple and Samsung to add your alphabet to the English keyboard.

When I was learning Spanish, I was thrilled to learn that everything is spelled exactly as it sounds. What a joy!

This is something I've been thinking about for years - just call 'W' WE instead of double-U. Then it fits with most of the other letters (except H, weirdo) and it could double as the word 'we', saving more time. Side note - I'd keep 'zed' as I just like how it sounds.

Q and 'queue' have very similar sounds so 'Q' we can make pairs with 'QP' KP So we can make new words like : Qpiss Which is like kiss so yeah

You should make playlist for Fixing English Language and add this video and other video like this on the playlist

I absolutely loved the chaotic energy this video had

I love the cyrillic alphabet, there is a letter for every sound and once you know the alphabet you can read everything perfectly, as it is absolutely phonetic. It has the sh letter which looks like a cursive W, it has the shch letter which is the cursive w with a little tail, it has the ch letter you displayed and the ts letter which sounds like the zeds in pizza or the ts in lots, bits, etc. And it even has the soft sound to add when you want to soften a letter as in a soft n sound.

I enjoy that Ч is the new 4th letter. Until you properly get rid of C, that is.

I liked your video on Shavian quite a lot. I've always secretly longed for a writing system where glyphs share a relationship if the sounds share a relationship. Specifically the voiced and unvoiced pairs. e.g. T and D, P and B, Thorn and Eth, Shush and Treasure, Cheer and Jeer, F and V, S and Z, Krill and Grill. I sort of wonder based on Old English if our language or dialects of it used to have voiced and unvoiced L. As pronouncing "HL" as a consonant cluster sounds like an unvoiced L to me lol. Also the only language I know of that has anything like "HL" is Nahuatl, with the "TL" sound.

That's the thing I love about latvian - we speak as we write and we write as we speak. The only letter that has 2 different sounds is "o" (in the words that have latvian origin it's pronounced more as "uo" (e.g. "koks", meaning tree), but in words that are from other languages it's pronounced as just "o" (e.g. "radio" and other internationalisms)).

This is something I have thought about a LOT! I like most of the additions, except I propose we just use the letter Q by itself for the "kw" sound. I was surprised you didn't didn't go further since we have too much duplicity. We do not need G to have 2 sounds so "G" is used for the "hard g (guh)" and J is used for "huh" . Same with the letter C, so my proposal is that C is the new "ch" and K is used for "hard c". S is only used for "s", C doesn't get "s" anymore. I don't think we need anything for double S either, just use one S. And use a Z when that sound is "z." I would also prefer to use the Greek letter Theta (O with a slash) instead of the Thorn which looks too much like a P. As someone with very sloppy handwriting it is much easier for me to cross out an O than to get the hump placed properly to distinguish between a P and a Thorn.

Ditch "W" altogether, replace it with a regular "U". If U is no longer picking up schwa's slack it can focus full time on being longer

Bro got rid of Q and paid someone to make him another Q

A couple notes: firstly, I think introducing the number four as a new letter pronounced ch...may be problematic. Instead, there's an incredibly simple solution: C says Ch. S and K can do its old job no problem, or even ß and K. Second, as someone else mentioned, we can keep Q as the QU, while simply dropping the U. Third, if we introduce ß, would it be viable to have S say SH by itself, since ẞ is pronounced as an unvoiced S? I know it typically represents SS, but the sound is the same. So instead of adding Ş to say SH, we can just make S say SH and ß say unvoiced S, while Z says voiced S. Does that make sense to anyone else?

Please add the characters to write cursive. I personally love writing in cursive and find it makes writing both beautiful and informative.

The reason the uh sound is much more common in British English then other English’s is because the British are starting to stop annunciating r so it just fills words that especially end in r with the uh sound.

My idea is the "QU" letter i replace by "K" with squiggle "~" or little double-U " ّ " like arabic diacritics on top, much easier and both look like "W" also...

My favorite "redo the alphabet" exercise is to go back to the Phoenician alphabet and what (we think) the letters sounded like, then trace them forward through time but with minimal sound changes through Greek, Etruscan, Latin, then finally English. You get some interesting results: - C makes the G sound - F making the W sound - G just straight up doesn't exist, and instead Z never moves to the end of the aphabet - Something theta-like comes between H & I for the "th" sound - Some new letter based on samech comes between N and O to make the S sound, and S actually makes the "sh" sound - Something phi-like comes after T for the F sound - etc. There are some sounds that need either the runic letters or a new invention to fill in sounds like "ch" or "v", and you need a bunch more vowel letters, but it's a fun experiment.

18:08 is this how we're spelling chum now 💀

i honestly rlly like this pls make this the new alphabet😭😭😭

1:12 I thought he was gonna say "Which makes sense because Today, we're gonna steal"

The German ß does not actually replace a double s. Old signs are just spelled wrong because there was no type for ß, and for some reason it established itself that way. In reality they are distinct, the regular German s is voiced like an English z, but an ß is unvoiced. A double s on the other hand is unvoiced and additially modifies the vowel prior to it to be spoken faster, just like in English.

The reason polish letter for /w/ looks like , is because historically it represented the sound /ɫ/ (velarized/dark l) and it only changed relatively recently. It also still has correspondences in inflection, like mały-mali (small (he)-small (they)), tło-na tle (background-on the background).

10:30 I'm literally from Spain xD 😂 Yeah, we have the letter Ñ (pronounced GN). We have it in words such as: Otoño (Autumn/Fall) Lasaña (Lasagna) Ñu (Wildebeest) Uña (Nail) Piña (Pineapple) Araña (Spider) Sueño (Dream) Niño (Kid) Baño (Bathroom) Etc...

What if we repurpose the useless letters? Example: Q turns into Ch, X turns into Sh, C would be Kw, the "Magic E" would become an accent, and X would be replaced by Ks(Qin, Xór, Ceen, Bár, Aleksa)