A Quick Alternative: Digraphs with Acute Accents

Because I've had little time to come back to this blog, I want to first apologize for the errors in grammar and spelling that exist in my first post. Secondly, for that same reason, I am going to quickly outline an alternative to the diacritics that I've rough-drafted. I'll list out some basic explanations, but obviously leave out the lengthy stuff for later. So, without further ado...





One large criticism I've heard about the system that I outlined earlier is that learning diacritics (and the one extra letter) would be far too difficult for most people who natively speak English. If the issue is simply that people feel uncomfortable with using and writing diacritics, then I can understand because most English-speakers tend to oddly have an unreasonable fear of them (even though the "looks" of a language is to me an utterly terrible reason to not want reform). However, even then, there still exists the need of some solution to the problem. 


And so, in my mind, only one other solution is still available: double vowels (as Dutch uses) paired with the standardization of certain digraphs and elimination of other digraphs. Without that or diacritics, one would have to deal with the even-more awkward letters that others have suggested over the decades (such as this one and its table). And, really, if a major obstacle to diacritics is the lack of visual appeal, then double vowels/digraphs would be killing two birds with one stone: there's consistent phonetic spelling, and people could still use their good ol' English alphabet without much revamping of the keyboard. More importantly, though, this alternative also solves the issue I had with the other system in that acute accents could effectively be used. (Of course, it is indeed arbitrary to decide which vowel in a double-vowel combo gets the accent, but that's the nature of the beast.)


Nevertheless, it'd be best to actually show the alternative. Thus, some of the justification aside, below is the alternative with phonetic values:

1. A —— /ɑː/
2. Ae —— /æ/
3. Ai —— /aɪ/
4. B —— /b/
5. C —— /tʃ/ 
6. D —— /d/
7. Р—— /θ/ or /ð/
8. E —— /ɛ/
9. Ee —— /iː/
10. Ei —— /eɪ/
11. F —— /f/
12. G —— /g/
13. H —— /h/
14. I —— /ɪ/
15. J —— /dʒ/
16. K —— /k/
17. L —— /l/
18. M —— /m/
19. N —— /n/
20. O —— /oʊ/
21. Oo —— /uː/
22. P —— /p/
23. R —— /r/ 
24. S —— /s/ or /z/
25. Sh —— /ʃ/
26. T —— /t/
27. U —— /ʌ/
28. Ui —— /ʊ/
29. V —— /v/
30. W —— /w/
31. Y —— /j/
32. Yu —— /juː/
33. Z —— /z/
34. Zh —— /ʒ/

Notes:

1. Much of the decisions for which digraph to use comes from the IPA.
2. I've come to notice that a large majority of English words have stress on the first syllable. Accordingly, acute accents would be used to indicate irregular stress and would be placed on the first vowel of a digraph.
3. Digraphs would be treated as one sound but as two different letters. For example: in German, ch is treated as one phoneme of the whole word but is treated as two separate letters when organizing a dictionary or writing the alphabet; in contrast, ch is in Spanish an not just an independent phoneme but also an actual independent letter in dictionaries and the alphabet.
4. This alternative may admittedly be more cluttered. For example, in the word riot, it would be spelled in this system as raiat or raiit. Perhaps it's just me, but I'd prefer rīat/rīit over raiat/raiit any day.