ingLix _{/ ˈɪŋ glɪʃ /}

English done right.

An opinionated, better system for spelling words in English.

Preamble

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!

              H I J   L     O       S T U
a b c d e f g h i j k   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).

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

Pure Graphemes

Vowels

Short Vowels

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 a composite phonemes further below.

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

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. It 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 worsley 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 "I". 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.

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. It 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.

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 "merI" and "mmerI". 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 "mmerI-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?