And It Needs To Change

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]What word is this? The answer will help me explain why this is not English. This is not Korean, and this is not Arabic.

[00:00:06]And that is why these will never be as good as real languages. It's why some real languages don't get recognized.

[00:00:13]It's why I made three new alphabets for English, and also why I hate my L's ending. So, what's the problem? It's not what I'm saying. It's what you're reading. You are not reading English.

[00:00:23]You're reading a representation of English. Writing is not real language, and no matter how close it gets, it will never be perfect. Always stuck a few steps behind the real thing. But, what does that mean? First of all, spoken and sign languages are as natural to humans as birdsong is to songbirds. If we look at animals, we can see many different types of communication. None of them are as complex and capable as human languages. They can't express any concept you can imagine like we can, but some are more complex than others, and that helps us piece together the origins of language. That deserves a whole video on its own, but I'll give you a summary so you can understand why it's important to the subject of this video. If we look at the animals most closely related to us, chimps and bonobos, we do see certain features that are shared with humans in terms of complexity of things they are able to express. For example, non-trivial compositionality, which means different meanings can be added together, not just to give more meaning, but to modify each other. It's still much less complex than the extent to which humans do it, but it is nonetheless another step closer to us than almost all other animals, which suggests that this ability already existed in our common ancestor from about 6 million years ago. Whales, birds, and some other animals also have advanced communication features even though they're genetically more distant from us, but no animals have all of the capabilities we have. But, the point is we see smarter animals with more advanced and complex communication abilities sharing not all, but some of the core features that define human language. Again, suggesting that this ability evolved with a certain level of intelligence and the necessity for a given species social needs. And through fossil evidence we see what would become humans gradually grew brains and mouths more and more like what we have today until eventually humans became capable of language both mentally and physically. Through these features we see in animals in the fossils of our ancestors, we see that language did not just pop up out of nowhere but evolved with us and we evolved to be capable of language just like dogs evolved to be capable of barking, birds of singing and bees of dancing.

[00:02:27]It is part of our very human nature and part of what defines us as different from our relatives. So unique that even Neanderthal probably didn't have language. Writing did not come from that. On an evolutionary time scale it kind of did just pop up out of nowhere.

[00:02:43]It was invented, not evolved. Estimates vary but we probably became capable of language around 100 to 200,000 years ago and started widely using language on the more recent end of that range, even if we were physically and mentally capable earlier. The oldest true writing is just over 5,000 years old with Sumerian cuneiform. We found man-made houses that are 3 to 4,000 years older than that. We found copper arrowheads in Wisconsin of a similar age to the houses and there's evidence that copper smelting might even be older than 10,000 years. And I think we can agree that metal work and building houses is not natural. That's not to say nothing natural can evolve after that but I want to put it into perspective. In addition, writing only developed because of specific tools.

[00:03:27]Early humans weren't finger writing in blood or mud. Even if they didn't use things like clay tablets or other manipulated materials to write on, they needed tools to carve or impression natural materials like leaves or wood and tools that were precise enough to not just rip the stuff apart. Stone carvings you can imagine needed even stronger tools. While there were many earlier stages of things that eventually became honed into writing, it's only through the use of man-made tools that man-made true writing could be developed. It was intentionally invented, experimented with, and designed. It was not a result of generations or centuries of subtle change and natural selection. By the way, with true writing, what we mean in linguistics is that it represents full human language. There are earlier visual records and representations, from cave paintings to record keeping, but it's not until the visual creation specifically represents how we speak that we consider it true writing. Early writing was pictographic, meaning images represented words that were usually what the images were based on. For example, the word tree could be represented with an image of a tree. But eventually, the images became more abstract or arbitrary, so you didn't have to draw an accurate image of every word. While we still have writing systems like Chinese, where a single character can represent an entire word, called a logogram, which is not necessarily just a picture of the thing, most systems ended up using their symbols to represent specific sounds.

[00:04:47]And from there, we get things like alphabets, where right now you only need a few dozen characters in the right combination to represent the pronunciation of a given word, and therefore represent an entire language.

[00:04:58]But since writing is man-made and intentionally designed, even if it's designed to represent our pronunciations, it can never be perfect.

[00:05:05]This is also what I meant by hating my L's ending. Spoilers for Our Claire Obscure Expedition 33, if you haven't finished it yet. I'm only talking about it for a few seconds, and I'll try to be cryptic, but it's like the point of the entire story, and it's so worth experiencing for yourself. So, I'll wait a few seconds before starting, and you can skip to this part to get past it.

[00:05:23]Writing is a visual representation of what we say or hear, just like a painting is a visual representation of what we see or think. Okay, you've been warned. You had time. Spoilers now. I don't care how real the painting is to My L or anyone else. She should not be trapped with the painting, unable to overcome the reason she got into it.

[00:05:43]Moving on in the real with her loved ones is the right choice.

[00:05:47]Okay.

[00:05:48]Spoilers over. Looking at English, for example, we have about 40 phonemes or primary sounds, but only 26 letters.

[00:05:55]Five vowel letters, but most accents have more like 15 to 20 different vowel phonemes. The gap between English and what our letters were designed for is massive. Besides a few exceptions, the letters in our alphabet were designed for Roman classical Latin, which the Romans modified from the Etruscans, who modified it from the Greeks, then from the Phoenicians, from the Egyptians, who started with hieroglyphs. And I'm not saying that English can't also use writing developed from that family, but most of the letters we use now are pretty much the same as they were when Julius Caesar was using them. Whereas each one of those cultures modified them to fit their needs, we have forced ourselves into using an alphabet that was designed for a language that was spoken 2,000 years ago that English is not descended from. Why didn't we modify it to fit our speech? Well, early English writers did. They used a runic alphabet, which is also derived from the same family, but was developed for the Germanic languages. English specifically used a variation called futhark. There aren't a lot of futhark records though, because the transition to Latin alphabet happened relatively early in English literature. The spread of Christianity across Europe made Latin writing popular, and so many adopted those letters for their own writing. And since England Christianized before most of Scandinavia, that's why we see runes more associated with them, because they held on to the Germanic religion more and runic alphabets longer. So, today we have a lot more runic records from them.

[00:07:18]But, English is not just left with an alphabet that wasn't designed for it.

[00:07:21]We've also made very few modifications to it to fit our needs, especially in the modern English period, basically anything after the year 1500. Many might not realize that standardized writing and spelling is relatively new.

[00:07:34]Increased printing helped standardize things, but a lot of people still wrote basically however it made sense to them.

[00:07:39]It wasn't until literacy and education became more commonplace around 300 years ago that most people actually started learning to spell things all the same way. And unlike many languages that have some sort of academy or even a government branch that defines spelling standards, English doesn't actually have anyone doing that. Our standard spellings only exist because everyone just settled into the same standard. For example, the Korean alphabet was first developed in 1400s and since then various parts of Korean governments have occasionally issued updates to the spellings and standards of writing.

[00:08:10]Certain letters became outdated and dropped. Sometimes designs changed, spellings updated to reflect changing pronunciation. But even then, it's not perfect. There are some letters that represent the same sounds as others, single letters that represent different sounds in different contexts, and if you're not familiar with the phonetics of Korean, just reading it won't give you a perfectly accurate explanation of the pronunciations even in one accent, let alone across the many different accents that exist. And therein lies the problem with all standardized spelling.

[00:08:40]For example, for the King of England, he's got two letter Rs written in this word that just don't get pronounced. I mean, if he only pronounces the vowel there, why not just use a single vowel letter? And for both of us, we have one sound, voiced dental fricative, /ð/, being represented by two letters, t h.

[00:08:58]Okay, so we use a digraph for that sound because Latin letters weren't designed for it. But that digraph isn't always the same sound. Here, it's a voiceless dental fricative, and sometimes these letters are next to each other, but aren't even a digraph.

[00:09:12]For example, this isn't the name but rather it's the insult And you just got to know if it's acting as a digraph or not. There's no rule that can be applied to always predict when it is. Even when we do have a single letter that represents a certain sound, that letter alone can change, too. For example, in my accent, the letter O is pronounced differently in all of these words. Do, job, Job, woman, women, come, found, record, record, and observe. There might be even more that I just didn't think of. I mean, how many pronunciations are all spelled with the same letter o for you?

[00:09:44]Let us know. And then on the flip side, we can have a single phoneme that is represented in a ton of different ways.

[00:09:49]Every vowel can be a schwa in some context. Even stressed tense vowels can have a bunch of spellings. B, beat, beet, field, ceiling, these, keys, city, all spelling the same sound differently.

[00:10:03]And this takes me back to my question in the beginning.

[00:10:06]What is this word?

[00:10:08]It's fish, using the gh in words like laugh, the o in women, and the t in the suffix shun.

[00:10:15]Why do we have a writing system that allows such wild variation for that to make sense? This is not the best we can do. And which sounds are spelled differently or the same vary by every person's accent. For example, to me, farther and father are different. If your accent is more like the King of England, they're probably the same. This happens all over English. But still, why are minute and minute spelled the same if there probably aren't any English speakers that pronounce them the same?

[00:10:45]The writing is simply doing a bad job of actually representing how we speak.

[00:10:50]That's not to say standardized writing is useless. There are many ways in which it's great. It's useful because it helps us communicate with essentially a lingua franca in written form, uh scriptum franca, if you will.

[00:11:02]Uh I'm not sure if that line checks out, but you get the point. Even if we speak very differently, even to the point of not understanding each other, we can communicate through writing. That's essentially how Chinese works.

[00:11:11]Linguistically, Chinese is a language family with some languages that are quite different from each other and not mutually intelligible.

[00:11:19]And while there are local informal variations in writing, standard Chinese is written the same for everyone.

[00:11:25]Basically, if you have some formal writing in Chinese, it's written in a way that most closely reflects Mandarin.

[00:11:32]Even if the person writing it does not speak or understand Mandarin, which can also be said to be its own problem because now you don't have a writing system to represent the way people actually speak if they're not speaking Mandarin or something like that, but you get the point, right? There are uses for writing that can bring people together across linguistic barriers. And standardized writing isn't just useful for native speakers, but also a second language learner. Lots of people learning a language get good at reading and writing before speaking and listening and again, can use that to overcome the differences in dialect or accent. That's useful when communicating globally or moving to a new place. At least you should be able to read some signs and documents then. And in some ways we can each see our accent accurately represented in the standard.

[00:12:15]For example, if I look back at this word, to me it represents the pronunciation farther, but to the King of England it might represent father.

[00:12:23]So, these combinations of AR and ER represent different sounds to him than they do to me. But to each of us, both those combinations are still different from each other, accurately representing that we are both pronouncing those two syllables differently. So, standardized writing has its benefits, but it also has its problems. It makes it some things harder. For example, recognizing a new language. I've made many videos about Scots and now it's an official language, but it still exists on a dialect continuum with English. People in Scotland speak something a long a spectrum. There's no distinct point where it stops being English and starts being Scots. And when discussing this, I've gotten some comments saying things like if the written form is still close enough, then it should be considered a dialect and not a language, but if everyone's writing to the same written standard, then isn't everything a dialect? I mean, when can something ever be its own language if they're still using the same writing standard? I think back to Chinese. Someone who speaks Cantonese might write the same as someone who speaks Mandarin, but should they really be considered the same if they can't even understand each other?

[00:13:32]And with an example like Scots, which hasn't yet settled on one standardized writing, many people who speak it still write standard English writing. Does that mean they don't speak Scots? You can see the problem, right? Since the writing is not the same as the actual natural language, we can't rely on that.

[00:13:48]And since so many people who don't know about linguistics still say stuff like that, some languages don't get the resources and respect they deserve, and their speakers are often ridiculed or punished for not speaking a standard that matches the spelling.

[00:14:02]Which is especially ironic in English because nobody's accent completely matches the spelling. And to prove that the writing is not the same as the actual language, we can see what happens when people change writing systems.

[00:14:13]A century ago, Kazakh was written in Arabic script, then in 1929 switched to Latin. Then in 1940 switched to Cyrillic. And then in 2017 started switching back to Latin, but they didn't like that Latin standard, so they came up with a new one and they're transitioning to that. That's five different writing standards, and not just small little tweaks on some words or letters. Between three different base scripts, all in the past century.

[00:14:37]But it's still the same language. It didn't become genetically related to Arabic or Latin or Russian just by using their scripts. People didn't suddenly stop speaking the way they used to speak. They just started writing differently. The actual language remained the actual language. Heck, I mentioned English was originally written with Futhorc runes, but we switched to Latin. And while spellings did regularly change in the past, now we're stuck with things that often better reflect pronunciations from centuries ago than the way anyone actually speaks today.

[00:15:07]Some spellings we use now were never based on our English pronunciation, but were changed just to look more like Latin or Italian or French. For example, colonel never had an L pronounced in the middle in English. It used to be spelled with an R, but some geniuses in the Renaissance wanted it to look more like its Italian and Latin origin, so they started using an L and now we've all been sticking to it. English writing has become so unnecessarily complicated and not phonemic that there are studies suggesting that dyslexia is more common and more severe in English than other languages like Spanish that have very consistent spelling, which is also called transparent or shallow orthography.

[00:15:47]Spanish isn't 100% phonemic where one sound is always and only represented by one letter, but it's consistent enough that if you read a new word in Spanish for the first time without hearing it, you should know exactly how it's pronounced in a given accent with few exceptions. Try that with English. Not only that, but while English teachers and scholars are always debating and looking for better methods of teaching reading and writing that work better, children learning Welsh perform a lot better at the same age because it has a shallow orthography and the English learning children fall behind with the least proficient of them being even further behind even after years of learning. Not only that, but lower literacy leads to economic losses and lower development across a society and worse health, income, and opportunities for individuals that can also affect the children of adults with low literacy.

[00:16:37]So, why are we leaving ourselves with this writing system that is proven to be harder to learn and causes more problems than others? Why are we debating how to teach it better instead of just fixing the writing itself? It's not the natural language, which we don't have to use it.

[00:16:51]It's barely even tied to anyone's actual current accent and it will only become less representative of our language as our speech continues to evolve and our writing doesn't get updated to reflect that. So, instead of just complaining and waiting for someone else to do it, I created three new alphabets for English.

[00:17:07]One that's basically just spelling reform using Latin letters with digraphs, one that's a little more different using Latin letters with diacritics, and one that's a completely new orthography made for English by an English-speaking linguist with symbols that are not only designed to be easily distinguished from each other, with symbols that are not only designed to be easily distinguished from each other for easy reading, but also featural, which means certain shapes represent certain aspects of pronunciation. And not only that, but the letters are also designed to look like the shape of your mouth as you pronounce the sound that that letter represents. As shown with the problems I mentioned earlier, spelling reform or even a complete writing overhaul can't fix everything. As long as there is some kind of standardized writing, it will inevitably be more similar to some accents than others. But we can fix all the stupid stuff that never reflected our real speech and design English writing so that it's easier for second language learners and native speaker children to learn to read, which can have knock-on benefits for everyone in almost any aspect of life. Knowledge is health, wealth, and success. And so much of our knowledge in the modern world relies on literacy. So why not just make literacy easier? Over the next few weeks, I will make videos giving detailed explanations of each of my alphabets, their pros and cons, how to use them, and how I envision implementing them. So subscribe and turn on notifications to see those as soon as they come out. And if you want to see the first of my alphabet videos already available and ad-free, consider checking out my Patreon. But if you can't or don't want to do that, then just liking, commenting, and sharing this video with someone else who would like to watch it can be just as helpful. I do all the work for these videos all by myself.

[00:18:47]These alphabets will be open to suggestions and improvements. I might do occasional update videos as well to show you the improvements that I've made to them. And hopefully together, we can fix English's ridiculous writing challenges and make literacy easier and better for everyone who wants to read and write English. I hope I'll see you there. So until then, thank you for watching. And remember, every accent, every dialect, every language, the way everybody speaks around the world, no matter what they look or sound like, are all equally valid and beautiful. Goodbye.