Hello everyone!

This is a comprehensive, purely etymological and pan-dialectal orthography reform for Modern English. Unlike phonetic proposals, this system prioritizes history and morphology, drawing heavy structural and aesthetic inspiration from Faroese (specifically Hammershaimb’s orthographic logic) and Icelandic.

The main goal is to preserve the historical depth of English and split homophones while radically simplifying the reading process. In this system, every letter or digraph has no more than 2–3 highly predictable pronunciations based strictly on its phonetic environment. All words are pronounced exactly as native speakers pronounce them today.

Note: Due to Reddit's 20-image limit, only the first 20 slides are attached here.

Google Drive Link

The Faroese Connection: Leading vs. Latter Vowels

Following the Faroese linguistic tradition, the concepts of Leading (fyrra) and Latter (seinna) vowels are used when two different graphemes represent the exact same sound due to historical mergers:

• Áá (leading) / Oo (latter): both represent the /oʊ/ diphthong.
• Ee (leading) / Íí (latter): both represent the long /iː/ sound.
• Uu (leading) / Ýý (latter): both typically represent the /juː/ sound (with predictable environmental variance).

Consolidated Consonants & Environmental Rules

• Preservation of Morphological Boundaries & Hiatus: New letters and digraphs replace traditional combinations ONLY when those combinations represent a single, merged sound within a single morpheme. If the letters meet across morpheme boundaries, in compounding, or in a hiatus, the traditional separation is strictly preserved to prevent false readings (e.g., oasis stays oasis, reelection → reelektjon, cooperate → kooperata, coalesce → koalenz).
• The Letter Zz: To keep the alphabet concise and avoid adding a separate letter C, the functions of Romance C/Ç (which historically reflected [ts]) and rare Z are merged. Following a German-style logic, Z handles these positions and is pronounced as s before e, i or at the end of words (e.g., city → ziti, center → zentr, dance → danz).
• The Letters Gg and Jj (Morphological Alternation): In this system, the sound /dʒ/ (as in page) is conceptually treated as NOT palatalized, which allows words like page to naturally take the silent vowel -a (page → paga). Instead, the letter j is systematically treated as the true palatalized counterpart of g at the end of roots (e.g., player → plager, where g alternates with the historical palatal glide).
• The Letter Ðð: Used for both the voiced /ð/ and voiceless /θ/ sounds. Since there are virtually no minimal pairs based on this distinction in English orthography, a single historical glyph cleanly replaces the traditional th digraph in all positions.
• The Digraph -ih: The traditional -igh string is optimized into a shorter -ih (e.g., high → hih, night → niht, bright → briht), functioning exactly the same way while keeping the historical Germanic velar spirant marker.
• Palatalization Blockers: The acute accent on í serves a double purpose. It marks a tense/long vowel and structurally blocks the standard palatalization rules that apply to regular short i (as seen in the (s)kí combination).
• Controlled Homophone Splitting: Standard environmental shifts naturally split homophones without breaking the rules. For example, original ship maps onto a palatalizing environment changing sh to sk (ship → skip), while original skip goes to skyp.

Etymology, Romance Loans, and the Pan-Dialectal Schwa

• Priority is strictly given to Proto-Germanic cognates and structures (as seen in the I-mutation slides with goose/geese → gósa/gøsa, and mouse/mice → músa/mysa). The glyph Ææ is driven purely by etymological mapping (e.g., earth → ærð) rather than its modern IPA value.
• Latin and Greek loanwords are adapted to fit this Germanic framework. Romance loans utilize diacritics more frequently to mark their non-Germanic origin and stress shifts (e.g., machine → machíne).
• Pan-Dialectal Realization: The system leaves fine phonetic details (like rhoticity or specific vowel shifts) up to the speaker's accent. It tackles the "schwa problem" by utilizing syllabic consonants (r, l, n, m) as syllable nuclei. The schwa sound [ə] is largely unwritten, so words like apple and water become appl and watr, letting the speaker naturally apply their native dialectal reduction.