" NuEnglish Spelling Rule"

NuEnglish spelling rules

NuEnglish will not change how you speak English, only how you spell it. Every syllable of every word is to be spelled as you pronounce it, unless you feel that your readers will not understand what you write, in which case you should spell according to "Standard Broadcast English" pronunciation (the way radio and TV announcers and newspeople pronounce).

1	Each letter or combination of letters has only one sound, as follows:
	5 short vowels: use A, E, I, O, and U for the more-often-used sounds, as in “That pet did not run.” 5 long vowels: use macrons (lines over vowels) for the less-often-used sounds, as in “Thā ēt frīd tōfū" (They eat fried tofu), or add an E to the vowels (AE, EE, IE, OE, or UE) if macrons are not available, as in “Mae Green tried roe glue”. (Note: "short" and "long" as used here are traditional and popular, but not phonetic, terms.) 4 other vowel sounds: use AU, OO, OI, and OU for the sounds in “Haul good oil out.” 18 consonant sounds represented by a single letter: use the letters that are used most often as in “Yes, Val 'Zip' Kim hid our big fan-jet win.” 6 consonant sounds represented by digraphs (two letters): (1) use TH and TT for the sounds as in "then" and "thin", respectively; (2) use C ONLY in CH as in "chip"; (3) use SH and NG for the sounds in "wishing"; (4) use ZH in "muzhik", for the sound of Z in "azure", of S in "treasure", and of G in "massage". use Q ONLY as follows: use Q (not QU) for the KW sound as "qit" ("quit"). use X ONLY as follows: use X for the KS sound of "exit", as in "suxes" ("success") and for CS, which has a KS sound, as in academic subjects: "fizix", "mattematix", and "ekunomix" ("physics", "mathematics", and "economics"). Use KS instead of X for plurals and possessives ending in K, as in "duks" and "duk's" ("ducks" and "duck's"). There are two "long U" sounds in English, as in few and sue. To distinguish them, NuEnglish spelling of the English word "fuel" (or the vowel of any word with this "long U" sound) is fyuel or fyūl. This is equivalent to adding the sound of the letter F before the English word yule. Although some combinations of a vowel and a following "R" are actually phonemes, beginning students can learn these as combinations in the same way as they learn all other combinations of phonemes. The WH combination is actually a combination of the "H" and the "W" phonemes (in that order) but is spelled as WH to agree with traditional spelling and to be consistent with the spelling of the "CH, SH, TH," and "ZH" phonemes.

2	There are no silent letters and no double letters that make a single sound, except OO and TT—and EE if macrons aren't used.

3	All sounds must be shown, except for the NG sound in NK and NX, as in "bank" and "jinx".

4	For consistency, the "-able" and "-ible" suffixes are always written "-ubul" in NuEnglish, as in "kāpubul" and "terubul" ("capable" and "terrible").

5	The spelling of proper names and trademarks ("John" and "Drano") are unchanged, except the names of the months and days ("Janyūarē", "Mundā", etc.), and proper nouns used as common nouns, as in "Mok" ("Mach [number]").

6	An asterisk (), pronounced "star," immediately precedes a primary stressed vowel(s) or semivowel, as in "qōtāshun," "suround," "dābyū" ("quotation," "surround," "debut"), unless the primary stress is on the first syllable, as in "hapē" ("happy").

7	Compound words (words composed of 2 or more words) are hyphenated, as in "hot-rod" and "finggur-print".

8	If pronunciation of proper nouns and trademarks needs to be shown, add the NuEnglish spelling between square brackets after the proper noun or trademark, as in "Matthew [Mattyū]" and "Tylenol [Tīlunaul]".

9	Use an apostrophe to show contractions, as in "kan't" for "kan not"), or possession, as in "Tom'z" ("Tom's").

10	The only deviation from phonemic spelling is for numbers of less than a million. Thus: "U 3-fōld inkrēs", "1 and 1 iz 2", "Sum-1 iz at thu dōr", and "Ī'l bē uwā fōr 4 dāz". 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).