NewEng Orthography

Here is just a brief introduction to NewEng Orthography.

NewEng has its own dedicated site, NewEng Orthography.

NewEng Orthography

My highest-complexity conscript thus far is less a script and more a con-alphabet: it combines letters from Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, and uses copious diacritics to modify both vowels and consonants. It is perhaps acceptable to call it a conscript because, even though it uses existing letters and diacritics, it is an entire alphabet and orthography. An orthography is a way of transcribing the sounds and concepts of a language into the written form; it is the step between a spoken language and its chosen script.

This conscript I have dubbed NewEng (someone else made one with the same name), and at its peak phase it is a lossless orthography — that is, it loses no etymological or grammatical data. Additionally, it increases informational resolution, by replacing identical English letters & digraphs with phonetically and/or etymologically accurate letters.

For example, ⟨th⟩ in English has three sounds: the common two of /θ/ and /ð/, and the rare third of /tʰ/ . In NewEng, /θ/ is ⟨Þ-þ⟩, /ð/ is ⟨Ð-ð⟩, and /tʰ/ is ⟨th⟩.

The digraph ⟨gh⟩ has two sounds: silence, and /f/. Historically, the letter was yogh, ⟨Ȝ-ȝ⟩, seemingly representing a sound similar to modern Greek's gamma ⟨Γ-γ⟩, /ɣ/. Over time, this sound was lost in English, becoming a diphthong closer /j~w/, sometimes aspirated /ɸ/. This is how we have words like sigh /sɑj/, bough /baw/, dough /dɜw/, cough /kɔf/. NewEng represents these two sounds with the letter yogh again, silence as ⟨ȝ⟩ and /f/ as ⟨ȝ̌⟩, as such:

• sigh → sīȝ

• bough → bauȝ

• dough → dȣ̄ȝ

• cough → cȣ̊ȝ̌