Ewell's alphabet

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Ewell's alphabet: Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in German

The Ewellian alphabet (pronunciation [juˈwelʃə]), also called Ewellic (pronunciation [juˈwelɪk]), is a phonetic alphabet for the English language ; the spelling of the English words is strictly based on the actual pronunciation. The font was developed by Doug Ewell in 1980. It is a more recent development of a phonetic script alongside the earlier alphabets Deseret alphabet , Shaw alphabet , Quikscript and Unifon .

historical development

Sentencing examples in Ewell's alphabet: 1. Where is my room? 2. Where is the beach? 3. Where is the bar? 4. Don't touch me there!

Doug Ewell developed the script in 1980 in his senior year of high school as a cipher for personal records (such as address lists and phone numbers). During this time Ewell dealt with various classic ciphers (for example Caesar encryption and Freemason alphabet ), the Morse alphabet (Ewell acquired the amateur radio license ), the Greek alphabet , the Germanic runes and that of the British writer JRR Tolkien for his Novels the runes developed by Tolkien .

After Ewell had not dealt with the alphabet for many years because of his studies and work, he rediscovered it in later years and referred to the previously nameless system as Ewellic from 1998 . He derived the name of the font analogously from Cyrillic (German Cyrillic ) according to the Cyrillic script , which was named after its inventor Kyrill (English Cyril ). Ewell has published the font for the general public since 2002. In 2002 and 2007 he added more characters to the original version from 1980, especially for strange sounds in other languages.

System description

Ewellsches Alphabet: consonants with transmission in phonetics
Ewellsches alphabet: vowels with transmission in phonetics

The characters of the Ewellian alphabet consist of a few basic forms; most of the signs are rotations or reflections of these few basic forms. All characters have the same height as the capital letters of the Latin writing system . There is no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters and thus two characters per sound. Proper names are also not marked. For characters with wide slashes at the top or bottom of the vertical bar, the slanted bars go slightly above the top line and below the base line .

The Ewellian alphabet has no short forms for common words such as the Deseret alphabet and the Shaw alphabet .

Compass and vowels

The Ewellsche alphabet has 29 characters for consonants and 21 characters for vowels . However, since the system was developed for several languages, the user only has to learn the phonetic signs occurring in the respective language for which he uses the script.

To make it easier to learn to read, all concurrent sounds each have a vertical bar and all vowels each have two vertical bars. Shortly spoken vowels have a dash in the middle of the character, long spoken vowels at the top or bottom of their two vertical bars.

Examples of ligatures

Several frequently occurring sequences of letters can form a ligature (amalgamation of letters) (for example [ɔɪ] as in toy ), but these are not mandatory.

The Schwa sound [ɘ], which is very common in English pronunciation and correspondingly frequently also occurs in phonetic transcriptions of words in dictionaries and in the other phonetic systems, is only used to a very limited extent in the Ewellian alphabet. Examples of use are a , an and the , the last syllable of little and forgotten , in the French article le and in German the last syllable of Please and have .

Characters for numbers

Characters for digits

The use of the 15 Ewellic numbers is not mandatory. The development of the numeric characters can be traced back to the original intention of the author to use the script as cipher (e.g. for telephone numbers). Although virtually none of today's font users have learned the font for reasons of confidentiality from data in the meantime, Ewell continues to use the numeric characters for voluntary use.

Acute usage and punctuation

Words with at least two spoken syllables must be given the accent mark acute ´ (not to be confused with an apostrophe ' ) above the vowel on which the main stress of the respective word lies. In the case of word compounds (e.g. undersecretary ), each part of the word is given the accent. The accents are omitted in languages ​​in which the stress of syllables is irrelevant (for example French).

The punctuation corresponds to the conventional punctuation in English texts with the only exception that Guillemets (angled quotes with the tips to the outside) instead of quotation marks are used.

Use of runes?

All characters consist exclusively of vertical, horizontal and oblique lines in various combinations; There are no roundings. Therefore, the appearance of the characters is reminiscent of runes of various Futharks (runic alphabets), the Germanic script , although later Futharks also contained characters with rounded shapes. The American-Irish linguist Michael Everson , in his description of the Ewellian alphabet: “The casual reader will notice a similarity with the Germanic runes at the sight of the Ewellic alphabet ... From the structure, however, it is clear that there are no borrowings from the runes in the Ewellic there. Only the runic ᛏ T and ᛚ L seem to resemble Ewell's t and l; but from the shown basics of the Ewellian system structure it is clear that this is coincidental. "

Application in different languages

The font provides the characters for the sounds in the languages English , French , German , Italian , Spanish and Esperanto . However, since some sounds only occur specifically in certain languages, the user of the script only needs to learn the sounds for the languages ​​for which he wants to use the script. As far as the sounds of other languages ​​are covered by the available character set, Ewell's script can be used for other languages.

particularities

In contrast to the other known phonetic scripts, the Ewellian alphabet also provides its own characters for the numbers. Another specialty is the identification of the mainly stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word.

See also

literature

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - entire text in Ewell's alphabet

Web links

Texts in Ewell's alphabet

View only possible after downloading and installing the Code2000 or Code 2001 font

References and comments

  1. ↑ Everson, S.V
  2. ↑ Omniglot website
  3. ↑ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, pp. V - p. VII
  4. ↑ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. IX
  5. ↑ Omniglot website
  6. ↑ Ewellic website: When do you use the “schwa” vowel in Ewellic?
  7. ↑ Ewellic network side: What are the Ewellic digits?
  8. ↑ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. IX and p. X as well as Ewellic website
  9. ↑ Everson, p. XV
  10. ↑ Everson, p. XVI
  11. ↑ Reading sample and further information on this Ewellic edition