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I think alliteration applies to pronunciation, not orthography. For example, "ceaseless sun" is an alliteration even though it is spelled with both C and S. I wonder if there is a word for the orthographic counterpart, which you describe here (and which I note in another comment, as the benefit of both starting with G).


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Much like how the lowercase a or g can have multiple appearances in the latin alphabet.

I'd be mildly curious to know which language spells it with two "g"s; I've only ever seen it with one.

There've been multiple attempts to simplify English orthography.

the quoted is one scenario if the similarity to words applies (this doesn't always apply in Spanish or French either).

But to your example, I'd feel more comfortable fumbling around looking in a English to Turkish book looking for D followed by i without dot (I'm sure it has a better name than that, but furthering the point where vaguely similar glyphs help), followed by s with a protruding curl at bottom (see previous parentheses), etc.

take "?????? (doctor), not ?????? (baker)" from a comment lower in the page, I can't say for certain that I would have known the first two characters in each of the two words were different with maybe it being an analog to capitalization, cursive, italics or some other modification of an individual character.


Amazing. It’s like their

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”

But with no repeated characters!

Although since characters are words, I guess that “room for interpretation” affords some combinatorial leniency, which you can’t get when spelling latin words.


Nah. It's an affricate - t?? - thus (in my opinion) begging out to be a digraph. If we can all agree to replace 'sh' with 'c', then we can all agree to replace 'ch' with 'tc'.

Always happy to supply bright ideas to eviscerate English orthography!


Totally agree. A simple example: print, princ, echo, cout, ... For god's shake =8-/

I wish the word was spelt "diaëresis" or "ümlaut".

It's spelled ??. There may also be a collection of Latin letters that are pronounced similarly.

I think you mean palindrome it. An anagram suggests that the reformed letters spell out other names/words (though mik oesnij almost sounds Icelandic or something)

Yeah, that's the crux -- two different real words storing the same variant but having omitted different letters.

Another example of a contextually dependent glyph in Latin script is the non-word-final form of 's' that looks sort of like an 'f' in English texts. See for example images of the hand-written US Constitution, where this comes up in the very first word "Congress", which appears to modern readers to be spelled "Congrefs".

This led to an embarrassing mistake when Google OCRed older books that contained the word "suck."


I really like Inconsolata except for one letter. The “g” just looks wrong to me, and it puts me right off!

Combining diacritic marks.

If anything, c should be /?/ and tc should be /t?/. Looks funny but it's very phoenetic.

But people have tried this (spelling reforms/re-phoenetification of English). A lot.

Language drifts, that's just what it does.


This gets even more fun in languages which allow unicode names. Did you know there are dozens of identical-looking ways to spell "true"?

> Maybe a good example of related development is the disappearance of Þ (thorn) from english orthography, being replaced with th.

This didn't have quite the full benefit that you describe, though, because of compound words like "cathouse", "hothouse", "lighthouse", "outhouse", etc. And of course digraphs can be extra-risky whenever languages accept loanwords.


The Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics is another one. It was developed by a missionary that noticed that when aboriginal where written in latin script the result was often long and awkward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics


Do you know some examples of this for French, German or Japanese?

I know about the French Academy, for example. I would have assumed their influence didn't extend much beyond orthographic/spelling conventions.

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