SaypYu (originally SaypU) ( ; acronym for "Spell As You Pronounce Universal alphabet project") is an approximative

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

of 24 alphabet letters to spell languages, including

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

. The spelling system was adopted by Jaber George Jabbour to write English more phonetically. The 24-letter alphabet includes 23 Roman alphabet letters (after excluding "c", "q", and "x") and the addition of a 24th letter, the

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...

letter " ɘ" (close-mid central unrounded vowel) to play the role of schwa. The letter represents the initial sound of "ago" or "about". The SaypYu project promotes "the simple universal phonetic alphabet" which is intended to facilitate a quick and convenient

writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable fo ...

for verbally penetrating foreign situations and pronouncing unusual place-names reasonably quickly and accurately. The official website of the project has published thousands of words in amended phonetic system inviting others to make suggestions, additions, and corrections as a collaborative project. SaypYu is not intended to replace, but to complement the highly sophisticated and elegant

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

(IPA) which is used in professional dictionaries. It currently borrows the " ɘ" directly from the IPA, but possibly this may be replaced by a * or @ for less sophisticated systems. The system while based on phonetic alphabet, represents phonemics instead. Enough similar sounds, are written identically, as the th-sounds found in english are both spelt with th while IPA uses /θ/ in "this" and /ð/ in thin.

Origin

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...

'' Education Editor (Greg Hurst) reported in the article "Learning a new language? It's as easy as ABK!": The project was launched on 10 December 2012 by Jaber George Jabbour, Director of the Logos Capital Ltd. (UK), who is of Syrian origin, widely travelled and has encountered difficulty pronouncing words spelt in conventional Roman text such as ''Leicester Square'' which becomes, in SaypYu: ''Lestɘr skwer''. Its declared purpose is to make pronunciation easier and foster international understanding. According to

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project report by Karen Zarindast "Spell as you Pronounce" in the section ''Words in the News'':

SaypYu Alphabet letters

IPA to SaypYu Map

is spelled as simply tsh.

Criticism

The project was aired on Canadian national radio. The presenter Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed: *Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

, noted that a common linguistic understanding existed between the American colonists and the British authorities in 1773, and there have been numerous civil wars, such as that of 1861–1865, which have tended to be resolved not by talking, but by military force. He acknowledged the failure of Esperanto to gain adherents, but speculated that may be because of a cultural deficiency—while SaypYu sought to preserve existing linguistic cultures, much of English culture is bound up with its quirky spelling—in short, it needs to be expanded to be useful. He noted that a German president has suggested English should be an EU utility language. *Henry Hitchings, a British journalist and the author of ''The Language Wars: A History of Proper English'', observed that there were numerous similar proposals, and that the IPA had identified 107 distinct sounds plus diacritics. Accordingly, he doubted that SaypYu could currently cope with tonal languages, but accepted that this may be addressed if the system develops. The limitations were too great for many languages. Many inventors of language and spelling systems were culturally detached from the reality of the incredible complexity and subtlety of human linguistic interaction.

References

External links