End Illiteracy in English

NuEnglish Spelling Rules

The 14 vowels and 24 consonants (in underlined, italic capitals, for highlighting) have only ONE pronunciation. (No emphasis—capital, bold, italic, underline, or color—affects pronunciation in NuEnglish.)

1. The A, E, I, O, and U are pronounced as in “That pet did not run.”

2. The AE, EE, IE, OE, and UE are pronounced as in “Mae Green tried roe glue.” These vowels may, instead, be spelled with a macron (a straight line above a, e, i, o, or u).

3. The AU, OI, OO, and OU are pronounced as in “Haul good oil out.”

4. The 18 single consonants are pronounced as in “YeS, VaL ‘ZiP ‘ KiM HiD ouR BiG FaN-JeT Win.

5. Six consonant sounds are spelled with two letters: (1) CH is pronounced as in “chip.” This is the only way the letter C is used in NuEnglish. (2 ) SH and (3) NG are pronounced as in “wishing,” (4) ZH is pronounced as in muzhik. (Muzhik is an English word referring to a Russian peasant in which the zh is pronounced the same as the s in treasure.) (5) TH is pronounced as in “then,” and (6) TT is pronounced the same as the th in “thin.” This is because English spells the sounds in “thin” and “then” the same.

6. The above letters represent the basic sounds used to distinguish between syllables or words. Two letters represent more than one basic sound. The X is used only for the KS blend. The Q (not QU) is used only for the KW blend. All the other sounds of X and Q are spelled out.

7. Traditional English spelling does not distinguish between the vowel sounds in “sue” and “fuel.” NuEnglish spells the vowel sound in “sue” as ue and the sound in “fuel” as yue. (This is equivalent to placing an F sound before the word “Yule”).

8. The initial sound in words like “which” are actually pronounced as HW. Air is expelled before the W sound, so it is spelled that way: hwich.

9. There are no silent letters and no double letters having a single sound except OO and TT. (If macrons are not used, the EE is also used for a single sound.) The two Gs in the NuEnglish spelling “finggur” are in two syllables, therefore two sounds.

10. All sounds are shown except the NG sound in NK and NX as in “bank” and “jinx.”

11. To show the accent, an asterisk is placed before the vowel in a primary accented syllable. An asterisk (say star when spelling aloud) is not used if primary accent is on the first syllable.

12. Numbers are used instead of spelling out the number unless numbers are required. Numbers must be spelled out on some legal documents, such as on a check. Numbers should be spelled when numbers could be confused with letters such as L or O.

Being able to read NuEnglish requires only knowledge of these 12 simple rules. In order to standardize spelling enough to enable programming of a traditional English spelling to NuEnglish converter and to ensure that everyone can read what you write requires knowledge of the following NuEnglish spelling rules.

13. For consistency, the “-able” and “-ible” suffixes are always written “-ubul” in NuEnglish.

14. All words, including names, trademarks, etc., are spelled as they sound. When proper names and trademarks are first used, for clarity and legality, the traditional spelling will appear between square brackets after the NuEnglish spelling, as in “Mattyue [Matthew] or Tilunaul [Tylenol]. The only exceptions are the names of the months and days and proper nouns used as common nouns, as in “Mok” (“Mach” number).

15. Compound words (words composed of 2 or more words) are hyphenated, as in “hot-daug” and “finggur-print” (“hotdog” and “fingerprint”). A prefix is considered a separate word when its meaning is clear and the meaning of the rest of the compound word is clear also, such as “a-”, “anti-”, “dis-”, “non-”, “re-” and “un-” in “ae-moerul”, “antee-statik”, “dis-u-pir”, “non-profit”, “ree-due” and “un-butun” (“amoral”, “antistatic”, “disappear”, “nonprofit”, “redo” and “unbutton”). This special consideration for prefixes will improve sight understanding, and may not burden a word with more punctuation, as the hyphen may substitute for a star. Care must be taken with “re-”: meaning “again”, it is written with a long E and hyphen, as in “ree-due” (“redo”), whereas with the meaning “back”, it is written with a short E and hyphen, as in “re-miend” (“remind”). Chemical names hyphenate all prefixes, such as “polee-tetru-floeroe-ettileen” (“polytetrafluoroethylene”).

16. Use an apostrophe to show contractions, as in “kan’t” for “kan not”, or possession, as in “Tom’z” (“Tom’s”).

17. Clarification of spelling with numbers: The only deviation from phonemic spelling is for numbers of less than a million. Thus: “U 3-foeld inkrees”, “1 and 1 iz 2″, “Sum-1 iz at thu doer”, and “Ie’l bee u-wae foer 4 daez”. The reasons are because numerals are universally understood, are very compact, and are easily distinguished from “won”, “to”, “too”, “for”, “fore”, and “ate”. Ordinal numbers are written as a numeral plus “tt” or “ett”: “4tt”, “10tt”, “100tt”, “20ett”, “30ett”, excepting “1st”, “2nd”, and “3rd”, and the pronunciation of “5tt” (fiftt). The use of numerals instead of spelling the numbers is optional and should not be used when filling out forms such as bank checks which specify spelling out the numbers, or whenever the number 1 could possibly be confused with the letters capital I or lower case L, or when the letter O could possibly be confused with zero.

The spelling rules to be taught first, of course, are spelling rules 1 through 12. Spelling rules 13 through 17 were added to make NuEnglish consistent enough to prepare a computer program for converting traditional English into NuEnglish and can be taught last. Begin by teaching only one student at a time. If you are an accomplished teacher you might be able to effectively teach five or six at a time.