Two thousand glyph script for Southern English English

Eurasia is potentially symmetrical, bracketed as it is by two island nations with obfuscatory orthography and various other similarities. At the same time, English is rather annoyingly spelt, to the extent that we might as well just have an ideogram for each word.

Japanese is fortunate enough to have straightforward syllables which generally consist of alternating consonants and vowels. Consequently, it can employ syllabaries, whereof each syllable can correspond to a character in one of two different sets of characters.

Then there's the Arabic script. Letters have up to four forms each, according to whether they occur alone or at the start, middle or end of a word.

Bear with me: this really is going somewhere.

Now for English. The language spoken using the RP accent can be thought of as having twenty-four consonants and twelve vowels along with eight diphthongs. This yields four hundred and eighty CV plus CVV' syllables, many of which are never used such as “nga”, but that's fine because the Khmer script, for example, includes a number of letters which are never used.

Unlike Japanese, English has many consonant clusters and syllables ending in consonants, so the thirty-six phonemes plus eight diphthongs should also be included, yielding five hundred and twenty-four characters, but we're not finished. Following the Arabic model, each of these characters could have four forms, leaving us with a total of two thousand and ninety-six glyphs.

So the idea is this: introduce a partly syllabic script for English with over two thousand possible glyphs, many of which are useless.

This sounds insane of course. However, it has advantages. It would be more phonetic than English and eliminate most spelling problems at a stroke. It would protect the English language from American influence. Scots would be a more distinctive tongue. Certain words could be written using a single unique character, notably the personal pronoun “i” and its homophones “aye” and “eye” - it could even be written using a stylised picture of an eye such as a circle with a dot at the centre. Any single syllable word of the phonetic form V, VV', CV or CVV' would effectively have an ideogram while the whole script would remain phonetic. A larger number of words could be fitted into a smaller space. Spaces between words could be completely dispensed with. The cardinal numerals “two” and “four” could be written using single characters, perhaps the standard Western Arabic digits. Some characters are already available in the form of the names of the letters, for instance most of the letters of the alphabet.

Finally, British English would be able to retain its distinctive nature by being written in a completely impenetrable way.