[Interspel] "Instant English"

As none of you-all know, I am a proponent of Interspel, a proposal by Valerie Yule to standardize the subset of English spelling which even literate native speakers have perpetual problems with. I'll link to Interspel's Wikipedia entry below.

Anyway, I recently heard a comment about how Instant Message English -- I'll call it Instant English -- tends to be far too "cooked down" to be much use beyond vapid grunts. The example given was:

u r, u no (i.e. you are, you know)

It's quite terse. Too terse, too ambiguous beyond very simple replies. However, the principles are sound: remove useless letters. And if the vocabulary grows, perhaps it will grow alongside 20th-Century English Spelling, or even replace some of it.

Hopefully for the better.

Interspel entry in Wikipedia

[Baybayin] Toying with E and I

I played around with variant forms for E and I today. E is closer to Sanskrit's vowel carrier, and I started from E's 'wave' over the Sanskrit /I/, adjusted to account for Baybayin 'style'. It ended up using the /YA/ character, which makes some sense to me. It's potentially a win-win. It also makes me wonder if /YA/ is distantly related to Sanskrit /I/.

I also thought about an /R/ based partly on the form borrowed from Bugis by Paul Verzosa, and partly on the Bisaya Hervas font's character for D/R.


I think it could work nicely.