Linguistics
Last updated
Last updated
My forays into 📄 font design eventually led me to looking for new ways to represent English. Never did I focus on æsthetic beauty per se, but rather on exploring unusual representations of form and shape, attempting to push the boundaries of how readers perceive shapes and render them into letters.
One thing led to another and suddenly I'm creating a whole new alphabet for English — not once, not twice, but at least 5 times, until I finally arrived at the (still-evolving) beast that I've dubbed NewEng.
I expect this project to keep evolving, as some elements of it are totally stable while others are still in flux, somewhat unavoidably. I am happy with the stable elements and they fulfill my intentions perfectly.
The unstable elements may take more iterations to reach maturity, or may never settle without some additional layers of evolution in the orthography.
It strikes me that perhaps a fully-linear script is not ideal for representing the complexities of English's phonological mutations in speech combined with its grammatical morphology, but it is hard to deviate when linear script — and without diacritics — looks so clean and gentle on the eyes.
It is a phonemic alphabet with a many-to-one relationship between letters and phonemes, thus it can be used to accurately maintain etymological history whilst not creating any confusions as to how to pronounce a letter.
You can explore NewEng on the dedicated website:
Enjoy it!
You are welcome to use it however you wish.
If you use it in your works, I would appreciate at least an acknowledgement in your release! This is a labour of love, I want it to be out in the world. If you appreciate my efforts and have the means, I would be forever grateful for your contribution to support me. You can support me via buymeacoffee or my paypal or anything else — message me for details.
I am a private tutor and I also teach in language centres and online.
I founded DeltaStep English in 2023 through the expansion of my private tuition work, and writing a series of educational English ebooks.
Links to creative idea notes:
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