After looking at Kingsley Read's effort with the Shavian alphabet and Quickscript (Quikscript), and then surfing the net and coming across other versions of phonetic/phonemic alphabets for English like Unifon, Truespel, Spanglish, and the Deseret Alphabet, I decided to come up with my own version, which I call Clearscript. Here are the symbols chosen: I'll explain the methodology behind their selection afterward.
The 12 pure vowels and 25 consonants of the Clearscript alphabet, along with an English word containing that sound:
In the diagram above, the top row are vowels, the second row are mainly unvoiced consonants, and the bottom row contain voiced consonants. To get a better feel for where the symbols fall on the phonetic chart, here is an illustration:
As shown on this diagram, all plosives have one or more loops. Nasals and approximants are drawn with a single stroke. Fricatives all have 2 strokes, though some like the "3" shape can be drawn without picking up your pen. If there is a voiced and unvoiced version of a letter, the unvoiced one is "tall" and the voiced one is "deep." The approximants form a special case. I placed the "w" sound - unvoiced as in "which" and voiced as in "witch" -- as a bilabial approximants, even though they have a secondary velar articulation.
For the vowels, their shape depends on where they are on the chart. I originally had high, middle, and low letters, until it was pointed out that the distinctness of the vowel shapes made this unnecessary. During normal writing, I would assume that the level of the vowel symbols would change depending on what was easiest to use to connect the characters immediately before and after it. For printing, both by hand and mechanically, I would make the top four characters on the left, the center "=" character, and the top character on the right "high" letters - their tops lie even with the top of the "tall" consonants. The bottom vowel on the left, the schwa, and the bottom four characters on the right of the diagram are "low" letters - their bottom is even with the bottom of the deep consonants. Other methods can be used, but at the very least I would use complimentary distribution (low-high or high-low) for these vowel symbols: (eat-alms) (if-on) (egg-oath) (ebb-hook) (ash-ooze) and (ado up).
One of the aims of the Shavian and Read alphabets was to speed up writing by having characters flow from one to another, a kind of alphabetic shorthand. My alphabet has a different goal: distinctness of form. Speed of writing is important in certain circumstances, but speed and ease of reading is more important - an item may be written once but read dozens (or in the case of books, thousands or millions) of times. But how do we maximize the distinctiveness of letters?
There are four major methods that can be employed:
1: Varying the size of the letters (as in capital S and lower case s)
2: Varying the position of the letters (as in capital P and lower case p)
3. Varying the orientation of the letters (as in the letters d and p - which are rotations of each other - and d and b, which are reflections of each other)
4. Varying the shapes of the letters (e.g. P and R, which are distinguished by a short diagonal line) .
I ignored the first method. My alphabet does not have different cases, and a letter should be distinguishable even when there are no other letters around to tell its relative size. I combined the second and third methods - if two letters were the same shape but different orientations, I attempted to change their vertical position as well to make them even more distinguishable for those just learning the alphabet.
There are several methods that may be used to maximize the last characteristic on the list, but I decided to use the ubiquitous 7-element LED:
The 7-element LED can recreate some letters admirably (e.g. C and S), some problematically (B and 8 look the same), and some not at all (M and W, for example). For my alphabet, I required the following three characteristics:
1. Each letter much have a unique representation on the 7-element LED (with regard to translation - rotations and mirror images are ok).
2. All elements must be connected (violated once for the vowel in "up" which is shaped like an equal sign)
3. Each element of the LED was to be used roughly as often as any other in an equivalent position.
I started out with 55 shapes (56 including the "=" shape for the vowel in "up"). After removing unnecessary mirror-images, I came up with the following 36 symbols:
A bit of re-sorting to group the letters the way I like, adding an "8" symbol, using reflections around the vertical and horizontal axis for a couple of characters, and then a bit of adjusting on some of the forms to increase the difference between letters, and you end up with the alphabet given at the start of this post. There are three remaining distinct characters that can be used -- one that looks like a reverse "y" (which would presumably be a voiced fricative), one that looks like a reversed question mark (?) without the dot, and another like the reversed question mark rotated 180 degrees. If one wanted to remove characters that are typically not used in English, one could remove the symbol that looks like the Greek lambda (ch sound in loch, ich, and chutzpah) and the 8 symbol (the glottal stop).