> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?).
Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y.
The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be.
> just press every sound that's in the word
Sounds reminiscent of omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm.
Yeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.)
I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out teaching people to type phonetically, but showing them alphabetic English. Gradually work into the idea that the buttons you press could be their own writing system. And the benefits would greatly reward anyone who decided to work in the system.
I hate to say it, but that's kinda the opposite of a chording keyboard. The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word with a single keystroke (this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm). That looks like using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back from a conventional keyboard, yeah?
I was curious about the "More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto" thing, but from what I can tell it's emphatically not true. The number of fluent Esperantists is somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands, whereas the number of fluent speakers of Klingon is closer to a few dozen.
Here are some sources, including a particularly cool 2009 Salon article on Klingon, Esperanto and conlangs in general:
Thanks for doing the legwork-- when you put it like that, yeah, it's pretty obviously wrong. I think where I ultimately got that from was a claim by Guinness that Klingon was the most widely spoken fictional language, which someone took to mean constructed language, and it kind of snowballed. Oops.
> this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm
Stenography is very fast, but can't replace a normal keyboard (i.e. you wouldn't want to use MS Word with it or code with it). Also it has a large learning curve and can vary from person to person.
> using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back
On the other hand, you don't have to move your fingers around - they stay in one place. And it makes possible a very large number of key combinations (when using both hands) that can be used as optional shortcuts for typing common words.
This is completely wrong. Current machine translation struggles not because languages are hard, but because translation is an inherently hard problem. Humans can only translate reasonably after years of training. Semanticists can only provide a formal logical treatment of very small fragments of language, which indicates that a logical language would be either incomplete or not completely formal.
The bottom line is that translation involves understanding meaning, which involves a lot of interpretation and world knowledge, which is very difficult to put into a computer, whatever the kind of language you're trying to translate.
Compared to this, speech recognition has been relatively successful, so a language with a phonemic alphabet is not very urgent.
Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y.
The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be.
> just press every sound that's in the word
Sounds reminiscent of omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm.
> Chording becomes your standard input device
Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html.