To illustrate in some detail how NuSpel can remove all ambiguity and doubt regarding pronunciation, a few paragraphs and a short creative exercise from Update to AlphaPower are excerpted below. To read the remainder of the discussion, click here .
If a shaped-up alphabet succeeds in shaping up our enunciation, it will greatly extend the limits of our language's potential lexicon, which is the largest in the world and growing at a very rapid rate, with neologisms from technology and science predominating plus many others from sources as diverse as marketing and slang. Speakers of German have a beautiful way of refering to their lexicon as their Wortschatz (their "word treasure"). A language's sounds should be thought of as a treasure too. We speakers of English are the inglorious possessors of an alphabet that devalues our "Lautschatz" (stock or treasure of speech sounds) one of the greatest treasures a people can have--of inestimable value! For speech, oratory, poetry, theater, song--for utterance and expression of all kinds.
What a treasure, the voiced palato-alveolar grooved fricative consonant of pleasure, azurite, illusion! You'd think we'd love it enough to give it a letter of its own! Zsa Zsa... Luge... Azure... Leisure... How lovely! If lack of a letter hasn't totally prevented us from using it word-initially and word-finally, it has come very close. Let's experiment with just this one new expanded alphabet letter to see how it can dramatically increase our inventory of syllabic word-building blocks while enhancing our lexicon esthetically. This sample, of necessity, will be very brief. Additional demonstrations could be made with the other phonemes* of our language similarly bereft of symbols of their own.
Adding (which could also be written as <zh>) to the consonant-vowel sequences of English creates innumerable dazzling new strings of pearls for our treasure--hypothetical ones that can become real. Like extras waiting largely unappreciated in the wings, syllables incorporating
and other left-out letters will come on stage and perform brilliantly if given a semblance of recognition and long overdue invitations inscribed with their very own letters.
The use of bold type or an accent mark to indicate primary stress (accent) would be an invaluable aid to children, to foreigners trying to learn our langage, and all the rest of us who typically stumble over the pronunciation of unfamiliar words (opercular or opercular, for example). If your browser permits display of bold type, you will notice a bold e in the first example and a bold u in the second. This device would be employed only to mark departures from the rather regular stress patterns of our language. You might identify the most prominent vowel in the words below according to your infallible feel for this and argue it out with someone. In lieu of listing many thousands of possible meanings for the new stocks of lexical treasures waiting to be added to our language, this will be presented as a small matching exercise.
*Phonetically differentiated speech sounds heard by natives as being the same; in English, unaspirated p of spin, for example, contrasted with the aspirated p of pin, which can blow out a flame as demonstated in a hazardous way by Eliza Doolittle in the movie My Fair Lady. Instead of hazardously pronouncing these words into the flame of a match or a candle, say them safely against the back of your hand and you should notice a clear if less dramatic distinction.