inglix _{/ ˈɪŋ glɪʃ /}

English done right.

An opinionated, better system for spelling words in English.

Preamble

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The English language is wrought with inconsistent uses of letters in the alphabet for spelling out sounds. This is a source of confusion for just about everyone who has ever read and written any amount of English, learners and native speakers alike.

Imagine reading some text and coming across a word you haven't yet learned. In elementary schools in Canada, children are taught to "sound it out" in order to make an educated guess as to what the word might be based on some rules about generally how letters should sound. This works in a handful of cases, but becomes less useful for more complex words. There are exceptions to seemingly every rule, and for many words it almost seems as if the metaphorical authors of the English language, God rest their souls, were absolutely inebriated when coming up with these arbitrary spellings.

Now imagine writing an essay and believing that you have a vast vocabulary amongst your peers, when suddenly you try to write the word "written", as I had just done two paragraphs ago, and you need to stop to think about whether the word has one or two "t"s. "Sound it out..." I hear the faint memory of my grade one school teacher whisper, but frankly that doesn't help in this case. Does a double "t" ever change the sound of the word in English? Does it actually matter? Okay, so google tells me it has two "t"s. Great, but then why does "writing" and "writer" only have one...? The difference in pronunciation, if any, is negligible (this could be my own accent at work though, your mileage may vary).

I could keep going though. What about other words like "gauge"? Why is it spelled that way? What part does that "u" actually play? I hear this word quite often actually at work and just about every non-native speaker pronounces it more like "gowge". This is intuition. I agree it should be pronounced that way given its spelling. But it's not. I don't usually correct people on this because I don't want to be annoying about something that doesn't matter that much. But English, you're putting me in a tough spot here!

What about all of these "O-U-G-H" sounds that are all over the place? I mean seriously: "rough", "though", "through", "cough", "drought"! Enough is enough (:wink:)! That's five different pronunciations for the same four letter combination! This is only the tip of the iceberg though. English is riddled with weird spellings. The ones I've mentioned so far have been quite tame if I'm being honest.

Oh and maybe just as the cherry on top for that rant, even my own name, "Nicholas", is spelled ambiguously. I work with a lot of French speakers. The name also exists commonly among the French population, obviously, but they don't usually spell it with that "h" in there, so it's more often "Nicolas". And that's how people spell my name in DMs even though they can see my name written out right in front of them already IN THE SOFTWARE. If I'm being honest though, I don't usually go by "Nicholas". I usually go by "Nick"... 😐 "Nick"... "NICK"?! A "k"?! You're going to change the "h" to a "k" for the nickname?! So now, when people write to me, the French speakers spell my name "Nic", the English speakers spell my name "Nick", and the rest of the understandably confused population spells my name "Nich"! My own name is a mess! Of course, I'm exaggerating my frustration here. I don't really care at all. In fact, it's actually just kind of funny to me.

Of course, I understand that the origin story of the modern written English language is hairy and complex, and I understand that things will never really change. We need our systems to allow us to preserve our history. We need to keep as much information as accessible as possible. What that means is that we're stuck with the broken system, and probably for a long, long time. I have no real problem with that. It's maybe difficult to learn English, but in the end it is trivial. My complaints are real, but exaggerated.

In spite of all of that, I am starting this project as somewhat of a casual experiment to try to "fix" the English writing system. Somehow, this kind of thing is fun to me, and I think I actually have something quite nicely crafted so far.

The goal is simple: repurpose the letters in the English alphabet to make more sense. Simplify. Remove redundancy. Make it truly possible to "sound it out" with more confidence. I want to redefine the mappings from letters of the alphabet to possible sounds in the English language so that anybody can read or write with relative ease.

Of course it goes without saying that this will be quite opinionated. The dictionary will be entirely based on my own accent (Standard Canadian). It's entirely possible though that the system may be easily transposable to other accents. Hey, it might even just work right out of the box for Brits and I wouldn't know it. I guess time will tell.

So if you read through the first sentence of this preamble and thought to yourself, "Hmmm... what is this word, 'W-R-O-U-G-H-T'...? OHH... 'ROT'! I see. Didn't know that's how you spelled that word. 🤔", or even if you read through this sentence accidentally pronouncing the word "read" as "reed" on your first pass instead of "red", then buckle up because this project is MADE FOR YOU! We're about to fix English and there is no turning back!

Alphabet

🙅 English

26 letters. 2 Versions of each...

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

🙆 inglix

Only 32 letters total, carefully selected to represent all of the relevant sounds of English!

        E     H   J         O       S T U
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p   r s t u v w x y z

In inglix, the concept of uppercase and lowercase letters being alternate versions of one another is completely abolished. Instead, each letter is unique in the sound it is associated with. For example "t" and "T" do not make the same sound. We no longer use the notion of lowercase "t" and uppercase "T". In inglix, they are each their own letter. Hmph, good for them, right? How empowering. 🥲

Given this notion of identity, it follows that some letters in the inglix alphabet will need to be granted new names so we don't have to refer to them as "uppercase this" and "lowercase that". Of course, this is just a convenience. Since it's one more thing to remember, feel free to do as you please and call the letters whatever you want.

If you wish to address the letters by their inglix names, then you may refer to the list below. Most of them will have the same names we already use. The rest will have a name spelled out both in inglix (which you probably won't understand until having read the section on inglix graphemes below) and with an English approximation (I'll try my best with those but honestly you're just going to have to sound it out).

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#	Letter	Name Spelled in inglix	Name Spelled in English
1	a	eE	=
2	b	bE	=
3	c	sE	=
4	d	dE	=
5	e	E	=
6	E	mE	me
7	f	ef	=
8	g	jE	=
9	J	JE	zhee1
10	h	eEc	=
11	i	aE	=
12	j	jeE	=
13	k	keE	=
14	l	el	=
15	m	em	=
16	n	en	=
17	o	O	=
18	O	nO	no
19	p	pE	=
20	r	ar	=
21	s	es	=
22	S	eS	eth
23	t	tE	=
24	T	TE	thee
25	u	yU	=
26	U	hU	who
27	H	hHm	hum
28	v	vE	=
29	w	dHblyU	=
30	x	eks	=
31	y	waE	=
32	z	zE	=

Graphemes

Graphemes are the written representations of the units of sound we can make when speaking, also known as phonemes. In other words, a grapheme is the letter(s) we use to represent a sound.

We will divide the list of English phonemes into two sets, pure and composite, and assign inglix graphemes to those.

We will consider a pure phoneme to be an atomic sound in which the mouth shape remains relatively unchanged or steady for the duration of the sound.

Logically and as the name implies, we will consider composite phonemes to be sounds composed of more than one pure phoneme.

This distinction is useful since inglix aims to only address all pure phonemes, mapping a single letter to each possible pure phoneme. Conversely, the English writing system is inconsistent and commonly represents composite phonemes using single letters (case in point, the word "I"). The composite phonemes are listed to provide examples of how they are to be represented in inglix.

Intuition Over Reason

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You will remark when reading the tables below that there exist some exceptional cases in inglix, some cases contradicting the rules set up above. For example the long "o" vowel sound equivalent, or the "ng" sound, to name a couple. We will explain later how these cases and a few others impose some oddities into inglix.

You may be wondering now if this doesn't go against the primary objective of the writing system. You are right to wonder that.

As it is the aim of inglix to strike a balance between covering as many pure phonemes as possible with single letters and remaining as straightforward and intuitive as possible to anybody with a knowledge of how English words can sound, cases such as these lean in favour of intuition, not perfection.

Basically, inglix opts for slight optimizations, omitting arguably less useful letters which would normally be used to denote implicit or nearly "silent" phonemes. In cases like these, it should be virtually impossible for ambiguity to arise for the majority of English readers (at least, among those who share the Standard Canadian accent).

See the exceptions section for a comprehensive explanation of each case which "breaks the rules" of inglix. If we are doing things right, you shouldn't even immediately realize that these are exceptions at all, until we actually point them out.

Pure Graphemes

Vowels

Short Vowels

IPA Grapheme(s)	Common English Grapheme(s)	inglix Grapheme	English Example	inglix Example
æ, ɑ2	a	a	cat, bag, fan3	kat, bag, fan
e, ɛ	e	e	leg	leg
ɪ	i	i	sit	sit
ɒ, ɔ	o, a	o	top, tall	top, tol
ʊ	oo, u, o, ou	u	book, put, wolf, would	buk, put, wulf, wud
ʌ	u	H	rub	rHb

Long Vowels

It is commonly considered that there are 5 long vowels but the "ay" as well as the "ie"/"igh" sounds are very clearly compositions of two different vowels. As such, those are omitted from the list of pure phonemes and instead listed as composite phonemes further below.

IPA Grapheme(s)	Common English Grapheme(s)	inglix Grapheme	English Example	inglix Example
i	ee, ea	E	bee, beat	bE, bEt
ou, oʊ	oe, ow	O4	toe, flow	tO, flO
u	oo, ue	U	moon, cue	mUn, kyU

R-Controlled Vowels

There exist special case vowel sounds that only manifest in English when followed immediately by the letter "r".

In inglix no additional characters/symbols are spent to express these since it is likely not beneficial to do so. Instead, inglix has chosen some best-fit characters to represent these cases. The chosen vowels are similar enough in sound to what is intended so that the sound to make comes obvious to any reader. There is an argument to be made that due to the simple fact that these vowels are terminated by an "r" consonant, the mouth is almost force into the right shape to make the right sound (so long as the speaker is using the same "r" sound as one with the Standard Canadian English accent... rolled/trilled "r"s are unaccounted for, sorry).

For the sake of structure, these vowel-plus-"r" combinations will be appropriately identified in the section about composite graphemes.

Consonants

IPA Grapheme(s)	Common English Grapheme(s)	inglix Grapheme	English Example	inglix Example
b	b	b	bet	bet
tʃ	ch	c	chain	ceEn
d	d	d	dip	dip
f	f	f	fan	fan
ɡ	g	g	gap	gap
ʒ	ge, z, si, j	J	beige, azure, vision	beEJ, aJur, viJin
h	h	h	hat	hat
dʒ	j	j	Jane	jeEn
k	k, c	k	cap	kap
l	l	l	leg	leg
m	m	m	met	met
n	n	n	net	net
p	p	p	pet	pet
r	r	r	rat	rat
s	s	s	sue	sU
t	t	t	tip	tip
θ	th	S5	thin	Sin
ð	th	T	this	Tis
v	v	v	van	van
w	w	w6	wet, Oswald	wet, ozwold
ʃ	sh	x	ship	xip
j	y	y7	yak, vineyard	yak, vinyurd
z	z	z	zoo	zU

The "w" consonant

There is a case to be made against "w" being included in inglix. Instead, it could have probably simply been replaced by the inglix "U". This would be similar to how the French language uses "ou" in place of the "w" sound (for native French words).

In spite of that, "w" is somewhat elegant, instantly recognizable, and intuitive in its own right. Using a "U" in its place might confuse readers into emphasizing the long "u" vowel sound, making some words sound awkward.

Furthermore, the use of a "w" removes ambiguity in cases where the "w" follows a consonant sound in the middle of a word. Et acts almost as a pause. Take, for example, the name "Oswald". In inglix, we would spell this "ozwoLd" to accomplish the same intended pronunciation. If we were to spell it "ozUold", most would likely read this with the "z" sound leading into the long "u" vowel sound, making it sound like "ozu wald" or maybe even more poorly partitioned, like "ozu ald".

As such, "w" can for now.

The "w" should only be used at the beginning of a word or as in the case above, when following a consonant sound in the middle of a word where that separation between the previous consonant and the "w" is important. In all other cases one might think to use a "w", use a "U" instead.

The "y" consonant

The discussion surrounding the "w" consonant is basically exactly applicable to the "y" consonant. It too could probably be sufficiently replaced by another character, the inglix "E". However its inclusion helps to clear up some potential confusion and ambiguity, preventing the wrong emphasis in some places.

Like "w", "y" should only be used at the beginning of a word or when following a consonant sound in the middle of a word where the separation between the two consonant sounds is to be emphasized. An example of this could be the word "vineyward". Note here that the "y" doesn't actually follow a consonant, but based on pronunciation, it does follow a consonant sound. In inglix, this word would be spelled "vinyurd"

Composite Graphemes

These are primarily for example purposes. Some of the composites listed below are self-evident and only listed due to the fact that they are commonly treated as unique phonemes but in practice sound indistinguishable from their parts. However, there are a few items in the list below which are perhaps good to note, such as the "ie"/"igh" long vowel sound and the "ng" sound.

IPA Grapheme(s)	Common English Grapheme(s)	inglix Grapheme	English Example	inglix Example
aɪ	ie, igh	aE	pie, high	paE, haE
eɪ	ai, ay	eE	paid, tray	peEd, creE
aɪt8	ight, ite	HEt	bite, fight, height	bHEt, fHEt, hHEt
ɜr, ər	er, ir, ur	ur	her, bird, hurt	hur, burd, hurt
ɑr	ar	ar9	car	kar
ɔr	or	Or10	cork	kOrk
au	ow, ou	aU	cow, out	kaU, aUt
ɔɪ	oy, oi	OE	boy, void	bOE, vOEd
ɪər	eer, ear	Er	deer, near	dEr, nEr
er	air, ere	er	hair, there	her, Ter
ur	our	Ur	tour	tUr
ŋɡ	ng	ng11	sing, tongue	sing, tHng
ŋk	nk	nk	pink	pink
ks	x	ks	box	boks
kw	qu	kw	quit	kwit
aɪ ɪŋ	ying	aEing	trying	craEing

Exceptions

If we are doing things right, you shouldn't even immediately realize that these are exceptions at all, until we actually point them out.

Short "a" Vowel (And Others?)

Depending on a speaker's accent, the words "cat", "bag", and "fan", as well as many other words with the supposed short "a" vowel sound, may all have slightly different sounds. The inglix system will not attempt to address these differences, primarily due to a lack of letters in the alphabet to form a sensible solution, but also to support expression of different accents.

You may find other peculiarities like this, perhaps for the other vowel sounds, but according to the Standard Canadian accent, this is pretty much the only one of significant note.

Long "o" Vowel

Technically, this is a composite phoneme, but inglix will consider it pure for efficiency's sake. When vocalizing this sound, during the first part, the mouth shape starts in a unique position (which will not be explicitly identified by an inglix grapheme) before transitioning to the shape the mouth makes for the long "u" vowel sound. Try it yourself and see if you can notice how the mouth changes when pronouncing this sound. It is this first position that makes things tricky, because it is (probably) only ever made for this specific combination sound, that is to say before shifting directly to the long "u" vowel sound. It is as if English was built to make it uncomfortable or rare for that sound to ever exist without being followed by the long "u" vowel sound.

One way to address this would be to use a graphene for that first part and then combine it with the long "u" vowel graphene. We could do something like "OU". However, since, as was mentioned, this "O" only ever comes before "U" anyway, maybe it's preferable to make an exception. Toss the "U" and use the "O" to represent this specific composite phoneme, even though in general that goes against the rules which were established above: one letter maps to one pure phoneme.

R-Controlled Short "a" Vowel

Examples "car" and "start" would be spelled "kar" and "start" in the current solution... While this seems more obvious because it is similar to English, it doesn't seem to be consistent with the actual sound being made. The "o" graphene seems to more closely fit the sound (it's true, say "car" slowly and then say "top" slowly and see how similar they are in sound), but in reality, it is technically a different phoneme. The choice is tough for this one, but for now we're sticking with "a" because it will likely be easiest to understand for everyone. This one may change in the future.

R-Controlled Long "o" Vowel

This one is less obvious, but try saying the words "hope" and "port" slowly and see if you can tell that the "o" sound in there is actually slightly different. In "port", the vowel never transitions to that long "u" sound. In fact, a different IPA symbol is even used for the first, more long "o" sound as well, but to my (Standard Canadian accent) ear, they sound equivalent. As such, this r-controlled long "o" vowel sound does not merit its own unique grapheme. Instead it can share with "O", and pretty much everybody should understand.

"ng"/"nk" Consonants

It can be said that the "ng" as well as "nk" sounds make a completely different mouth shape compared to the solitary "n" sound, and thus inglix should not use the letter "n" in this composite grapheme. Rather than the typical "n" sound, which has the front of the tongue touch the top of the mouth, it is the back of the tongue used in these "ng" and "nk" sounds.

In English, it is incredibly rare to have that back of the tongue "n" sound appear without being followed by a "g" or a "k" sound. This is something that comes naturally to English speakers. As such, for this case, rather than associating a new letter to the sound for the inglix system, we will trim the fat and leave it up to intuition.

Homonyms

To express homonyms, inglix chooses a unique approach. This is where the real trivia starts to emerge.

The inglix dictionary will identify homonyms uniquely by duplicating the first letter of the word for each instance of a homonym.

Take the words "to", "too", and "two", for example.

In inglix, we might write these as "tU", "ttU", and "tttU", respectively. Et will be up to you to remember "wic wwic iz wic" (which witch is which). However since it is uncommon for there to be more than 3 homonyms for a given sounding word, this approach seems quite clean and elegant being the only case of double letters permissible in all of inglix.

Plurals

The Problem

The question of how to handle plural nouns is a difficult one, as it introduces the dilemma: should we favour grammar rules at the risk of introducing grapheme usage exceptions, ie. spellings which don't exactly match how a word should be pronounced; or should we favour spelling consistency according to pronunciation at the risk of complicating an already elegant grammar rule?

In English, the rule to make something plural is rather simple: add an "s". 👏

Of course, it's not always that simple. There exist words which need further modification to allow that "s". Word already ends in "s"? Okay, add "es". Word ends in "y"? Okay, change the "y" to "ie" and then add an "s". Then there are special words that don't add an "s" to become plural. Such arbitrary cases consist largely of words who carry their pluralization rule from their origin language. "Cactus", for example, coming from Greek and having a brush-in with Latin before making it into the English language, becomes "cacti" when pluralized. And let's not forgot about the other assortment of seemingly arbitrary cases in the catalog. "Foot" becomes "feet". "Thief" becomes "thieves". "Amoeba" becomes "amoebae". And "sheep" stays the same.

Yes, the English language can never be so simple. Luckily, thanks to the elegance of inglix's design, we really don't have to worry about those cases. The thing we DO have to worry about is representing pronunciation as accurately as possible. And that can be hard when sometimes the "s" is spoken as a "z"...

There it is. The crux of the issue. As beautiful of a rule as "add an s" is, the English language finds a way to ruin it by sometimes having them pronounced like "z". As a simple example that comes to mind, try the word "bees". If you really pronounce that "s" as an "s", I would like to know where you're from and what dialect you speak, because that's no way I've ever heard the word "bees" pronounced. No, that "s" on the end is so naturally voiced, it would sound weird to try not voicing it. Almost like the word "beast" if you were to remove the "t".

So what do we do? Well, this is perhaps the least confident decision taken by inglix out of the lot of them. This may change in the future, given enough solid argument to the contrary, but for now...

The Solution

In inglix, we abolish the "add an s" rule in favour of accurately representing pronunciation. Add an "s" when the plural form of the word sounds like it ends with an "s". Add a "z" when the plural form of the word sounds like it ends with a "z". Fill in the gaps with the vowel that sounds most appropriate. Usually, this will be the inglix "i" sound.

Examples

English Singular	English Plural	inglix Singular	inglix Plural
bee	bees	bE	bEz
cat	cats	kat	kats
class	classes	klas	klasiz
tax	taxes	taks	taksiz

Syntax

The inglix writing system is made for writing English. Therefore, it works basically the same way! However, there are some key differences to take note of!

Casing

In inglix, you do not capitalize the first letter of a sentence or even those of proper nouns! Every version of a letter, that is to say uppercase and lowercase, is reserved intentionally to express words phonetically. This allows for inglix to be much, much simpler than English, and even strip down the alphabet a good deal.

Perhaps the best way to get started reading and writing inglix is to not think of letters in terms of uppercase and lowercase anymore at all, but rather as a set of unique letters each with a resulting sound (some of which happen to only be accessible via a letter on the keyboard in tandem with the shift key 😅).

Proper Nouns

It was just mentioned how proper nouns need not be capitalized in inglix, but in truth, it may serve to confuse people even spelling proper nouns in inglix at all.

It is up to the writer to decide how they wish to spell proper nouns. They may choose to lean into inglix and spell proper nouns in gud inglix, but it is also perfectly acceptable in an inglix text to spell proper nouns in English, even with the capitalized first letter. This is not forbidden.

Punctuation

Punctuation is to be used in the same way as it is already used in English.

Apostrophes

Apostrophes are notable. In inglix, they will be used in the same inglix words as their English counterparts.

For example, the words "there", "their", and "they're" you might think to spell as "Ter", "TTer", and "TTTer" in inglix. Instead however, we can promote comprehension by continuing to use contractions the same way we already do in English. Therefore, "they're" would be spelled "Te'r", reducing the number of our identically spelled words and adding a bit of extra flavour to the inglix.

Hyphenated words

Hyphens can be used in inglix to contract words in the exact same way that they would be used in English, but note that this does not impact identically spelled words in the same way that apostrophes would.

For example, consider the words "marry" and "merry". We might spell them respectively as "merE" and "mmerE". Now, when we go to spell the word "merry-go-round", we still have to spell "merry" the way it is spelled on its own. So this becomes "mmerE-gO-raUnd".

Perhaps an obvious point, but significant nonetheless.

Acronyms

Given that inglix changes the semantics of uppercase and lowercase letter usage, using acronyms becomes a challenge.

The current method to address this (subject to change) is to enclose an acronym in square brackets, and like proper nouns, either use the English acronym in all capitals, the inglix acronym with proper inglix letters, or simply spell the pronunciation of the acronym in inglix if it is normally read that way rather than letter by letter.

As an example, one could denote the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as "[NASA]", or "[nesa]" (since "Aeronautics" would be spelled "erOnotiks"), or "[nasa]".

This is quite awkward and it is not ideal to deviate from how English uses punctuation just for special circumstances, so proposals for better ideas are fully welcome.

To Do

• Transpiler script
• Dictionary
• Alphabet reference
• Write inglix version of this readme file
• Consider how to tackle syllabic emphasis/stress
• Embrace using new symbols/accents? Maybe the plain alphabet can't solve all problems
• Keyboard layout?

Footnotes

1. Like the name of the letter "G", but voiced. Really soften that "G" sound. It's the same way the French pronounce the name of their own letter "J". ↩

2. Some phonetic symbols represent sounds that are very similar. In such cases we will simply list them all together. ↩

3. Wondering why you pronounce these three words differently even though they are supposedly the same sound? See the section about the short "a" vowel sound exception for details about that. In summary, let your accent shine. Consider this your final taste of freedom of expression before inglix takes it all away... ↩

4. This is actually a composite phoneme in disguise. To understand why it is listed here, see the section about the long "o" vowel sound exception. ↩

5. This may seem to be a bizarre choice of grapheme for the unvoiced "th" sound. The fact is that it was chosen simply because a stereotypical "s" lisp tends to make this sound also. So why not use "S" to represent it (different casing since the "s" sound is already taken by "s")? It's almost too perfect! ↩

6. The "w" is a special case to be included in inglix. Read more about the reason for including it and its proper usage in the section below dedicated to the "w" consonant. ↩

7. The "y" is special for similar reasons to "w". See the section about the "y" consonant for a brief explanation. ↩

8. Words with this composite phoneme are represented with a phonetic spelling that does not match the way the majority of English speakers pronounce these words. Most people don't pronounce the vowel sounds in the words "high" and "height" identically, even though their phonetic spellings use the same vowel combination "aɪ". The decision was made in inglix to respect the differences and distinguish them with their own unique spellings. ↩

9. This specific composite phoneme is actually a tricky case and still up for debate for its representation in inglix. See the section on the r-controlled short "a" vowel exception to understand the choice here. ↩

10. Yet another exceptional case. While this one might be somewhat less noticeable, it is in fact a misrepresentation of the true sounds you make when vocalizing this sound. See the section on the r-controlled long "o" vowel exception for an explanation. ↩

11. If you noticed that the "n" in an "ng" or "nk" sound is not the same tip-of-the-tongue regular "n" sound, then you are indeed a keen one. Otherwise, you may be interested to learn just why this is an exception. See the section about the "ng" vowel exception for some explanation. ↩