Consonant Blends

Consonant Blends

 

Some consonant sounds often blend with others. For example "bl" or "fr." When possible, the symbols for consonants that blend also blend. Here are some examples.

pr , pl , br , bl , fr , fl , gr , gl 

kr , kl , wr , hw, kw , rk , sp , sl 

Note that most words starting with "wh" are actually pronounced "hw" with a few exceptions like "who" which is just "h" plus "oo" without a "w" sound.

Also, "nt" can be written or blended into . The vowels in the syllables "ten," "ton," and "tin" are often indistinctly pronounced, especially at the ends of words (as in "cotton"), and may be heard as just "t+n" which can be blended into as in "cott'n pick'n good."

Another handy blend is to use for "d" or "ed" at the end of a word by making the hook with a counter-clockwise motion as in "and" or "bird" . This differs from the vowel usage of this symbol which is always written clockwise as in "know" .

Alternative Vowel Symbols

If you find that distinguishing between clockwise and counter clockwise circles is too confusing, you could eliminate the distinction at the cost of using two-stroke symbols to stand for single sounds. A large circle in any direction would be "uh" in "but," and a small circle in any direction would be used for the "ih" in "bit." This leaves the need to come up with symbols for the "ah" in "father" and "eh" in "bet" sounds. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses the following symbols for these sounds and similar symbols could be used in Handywrite.

Try out the alternatives and see what feels best for you.

Typing the Handywrite Alphabet

It is useful to assign the sounds in the Handywrite phonetic alphabet to keyboard characters that are quick to type. Since you already know most of the characters, learning a few more will allow you to type words phonetically. Play around with the following and you may find it isn't that hard to print/type phonetically.

Here are typeable characters for each sound based on international usage:

The above usage will make sense if you are familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Since the IPA is the only really good pronunciation guide, I would suggest studying it, and using the above simplified typeable version to break down words into basic speech sounds.

Because our interest is to write using only the minimum number of distinctive vowel and consonant sounds needed to tell one word from another, it would be correct to say that Handywrite uses a phonemic rather than phonetic alphabet. One symbol may stand for two speech sounds provided they differ only slightly (as allophones) and are not used to differenctiate between words. True homophones, of course, cannot be written differently using a phonemic or phonetic alphabet, so "their" and "there" are written the same.

Since "c" is not used for a consonant sound, it is used to represent the vowel in "bull" or "book."

Sometimes a vowel is indistinct or non-existent. The word "nation" could be pronounced "neyshuhn," "neyshihn," "neyshehn," or with no vowel in "neyshn." In such cases, go with the simplest and write "shn"  for "-tion" or "-sion."

Phonetics is phun. As infants we have the ability to hear all possible speech sounds used in any language. With maturity most of us lose the ability to hear speech sounds not in our native language. In some languages, for example, there is no distinction made between "p" and "b" so if you say "pet" then "bet" native speakers will hear both as the same word. With other sounds, English speakers have the same impairment.

The vowel "e," as in Spanish "el bebe," is not normally found in English other than in the diphthong "ey" as in "bait" or Spanish "ley," which is the "e" sound with the slight addition of the "i" in "beet." The "e" vowel is a tensed form of "eh" in "bet," but sounds more like "ey" to English speakers. So English speakers tend to hear "el" to rhyme with "bell (behl)" and "bebe" to rhyme with the first vowel in "baby (beybi), while Spanish speakers hear "ey," they tend not to hear any difference between "eh" and "e." In Handywrite both "eh (bet)" and "e (bebe)" are represented by the same counter-clockwise small loop, even though these sound like two distinct vowel sounds to English speakers. For practical purposes, "eh" or "e" is also the first vowel in "hair," "care," or "air" when followed by "r." In Handywrite, then, "hair" would be .

Here's an example from Spanish:

El mes de julio es un mes de fiestas por todo el mundo hispano.

el mes de hulio es un mes de fiestas por todo el mundo ispano.

Not too many differences, since Spanish is quite phonetic to begin with. An English speaker learning Spanish might phonetically write the above as:

ehl meys dey hulio ehs un meys dey fiehstuhs por todo ehl mundo hispano.

Ah, so that's why I speak Spanish with such a thick accent! Using the international based characters with English would look like this:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs, and that made me laugh.

thuh kwihk braun fax juhmps ovr thi leyzi dagz, ænd thæt meyd mi læf.

Not nearly as close to normal spelling as with Spanish, but English orthography is only marginally phonetic—about 40%. Note that the vowel in "cat" can be typed as "ae" or as a single character "æ" if you have an international keyboard.

The above international typeable version should be used along with a dictionary that uses the IPA system to help you make sense of phonetics. While the IPA may seem confusing, the other pronunciation guides used by many dictionaries are confusing.