Digital-Friendly New Ēnglish

KDE’s accent placement is special, unfortunately

Stephanie Dare

The previous Revision 1 of New Ēnglish was perfectly usable. Of course, as long as you either used the right keyboard layout on KDE Plasma, or were hand-writing New Ēnglish words. Most people are most likely doing neither of these, so I’ve decided to make a new revision that will be more easily usable on more standard keyboard layouts – at least, assuming you have (an equivalent of) a compose key. You don’t need one, but it will make using New Ēnglish much easier.

New updates to New Ēnglish were made in-between this and the previous revision, which will be addressed at the end of the document. This document will then be based off of the previous revision, which will be how it works in the future.

All words stated in New Ēnglish, other than it’s own title, will be denoted with italicization for its first usage if not used in a comparison in this document. For example, “the New Ēnglish “trebuchet” is trebūðæ”.

Let’s start off with diacritical marks. Previously, we declared the mācron (ā) as a blanket replacing for the “Silent E”. However, most characters (specifically, most consonants) do not support the mācron. The mācron’s function of making a letter state itself will only be for vowels only. The silent E also differentiated between the sounds of /θ/ and /ð/. Unfortunately, our character set and my patience does not allow for such distinction to be made here. Both sounds will still have to be represented by the þorn (þ), so that we can still use the eþ (ð) for generating /tʃ/, as ‘C’ will still no longer be included in the official alphabet. While the ash­ (æ and Æ) will be classified as a vowel, and­ has macron versions (Ǣ and ǣ), they will not be allowed to use mācrons, unless writing a word from another language, like Ænglisċ. For consonants that must say their names, placing an E with dīerēsis (ë and Ë) in front or behind the letter based on which consonant it is (guide at end).

The dīerēsis/umlout (ä) is a bit trickier to implement. Its original configuration was meant to replace any character that was to be treated as silent. However, like the mācron, it too is unable to be freely placed on any consonant you please. Also as such, the dīerēsis will only be applied to vowels. This does not under any circumstances apply to the letter Y, despite dīerēsis versions of it existing in Unicode (ÿ and Ÿ).

Now, to address the undocumented updates, starting with where the language standards will actually be applied. Any foreign words, like stated above, will not be subject to New Ēnglish’s rules, as is to be expected, as well as names and whatever slang that may be made or has been made. Therefore, strings like “reina”, “spræc”, “Dahlia”, “Satya”, etc. are all valid New Ēnglish words.

More permanent names must also be created for the various versions of English. What we know as Old English is in New Ēnglish “Ānglō-Saxonik Ēnglish”, or simply “Ænglisċ”, the latter being the actual word in Old English. For oral purposes, the first one would be used, but the two names are interchangeable for written work. Middle English can stay as-is phonetically, respelled as “Midlë Ēnglish”. For what is now Current English, could perhaps be Nēō-Shakespearean Ēnglish, named after Shakespeare, who created a majority of modern English words, along with many other contributors to the language since then. New English can be more permanently renamed to “Dīacritical Ēnglish”, due to, among other things, the addition of diacritical marks.

Earlier, I mentioned how most consonants can not use the legacy method of using a mācron in order to make a letter state itself, and looking back, it’s for the best. This new system of placing letters before or after the consonant (or replacing it entirely) will look much better written out anyways.

Refer to this chart for the placement:

Nēō-Shakespearean Ēnglish	Nēu Ēnglish
b	bē
c	Unused
d	dē
f	ef
g	jē
h	æð
j	jæ
k	kæ
l	el
m	em
n	en
p	pē
q	kēu
r	ar
s	es
t	tē
v	vē
w	Undetermined
x	eks
y	wī
z	zē