Ungglish Writing System

Ungglish has a phonetic writing system but still looks and sounds a lot like English. Generally, pronounciation is preserved better than spelling. It is not easy to balance pronunciation and spelling, mainly because English represents at least 14 vowel sounds (more than that in some dialects), with only 5 vowel letters. To make this easier, I eliminated two “basic” English vowels from Ungglish, leaving 7 basic vowels and 5 diphthongs.

Ungglish is phonetic in one direction: the pronunciation of every word is determined by spelling and is easy to predict if you know all of the rules, although some sounds have more than one spelling, and some letters can make (or participate in) more than one sound.

Ungglish spelling rules cause a few words to become longer (e.g. “oepen” instead of “open”) and I felt it would be best, on balance, to eliminate double letters except in special cases, so that Ungglish writing need not be longer than English writing.

Generally, English speakers can simply “sound out” the words, except that double consonants are avoided. For example, “killer” is spelled “kiler” in Ungglish. So when you see a single letter that might have originally been a double letter in English, try assuming that it was, e.g. ofis = office and comun = common.

There are several sequences of letters with a special pronounciation rule, e.g. OE is a single vowel pronounced as in TOE.

Consonants

• Some letters have a sound that changes when combined with H. These letter combinations are CH, PH, SH, and TH (as in child, phone, ship, that).
• TH is normally voiced as in “this” or “that”. However, it is unvoiced at the end of a word as in “with” or “munth”.
• THH is an unvoiced TH sound (e.g. thhink, thhing)
• G is pronounced as in go or get, except that GJ is pronounced as J. The GJ letter combination replaces GE in the original English word, e.g. large => largj. Howeer, GJ does not appear after N, lest the N sound change to NG, and it does not appear unless the E is deleted from the word; e.g. huge => huej (not “huegj”) because the E is still present.
• NG is pronounced as a single sound [ŋ]
• C makes an S sound if it appears before E, I or Y; otherwise it makes a K sound.
• Y is a sort of I sound, except that it normally acts as a consonant (a forceful, short I sound). However, if it is not followed by a vowel then it acts as I, as in family or system. Also, YI makes a double I sound (as in carrying) when it is preceded by a consonant.
• TS is merged into a single sound, especially when both letters appear at the end of a syllable (a fact which tends to go unnoticed by English speakers).
• Just as in Englsh, the vowel in ANG and ANK (as in bank, hang) has a range of pronounciations, ranging from A to E. Since A-NG and A-NK are correct pronounciations, this rule is just informational and can be ignored in practice.
• Other than that, and an exception for -tion, the letters B, D, F, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, and Z make the usual sound that they make in English.

Vowels

There are seven basic vowels or “monophthongs” (eight, if the schwa is considered distinct from U as some linguists prefer):

• A as in that (spelled AH if it ever appears at the end of a word)
• E as in bed (spelled EH if it ever appears at the end of a word)
• EE as in need, or I as in kid. Although these two sounds seem substantially different to English speakers, they are considered allophones (not distinct) in Ungglish. Thus “wil” and “weel” (will and wheel) are homophones in Ungglish. The two words will be pronounced differently by English speakers, but distinguishing them is not required. There is a third spelling for this vowel: II. The double I indicates that the vowel is unstressed (see below).
• O as in not
• U as in up. Also, apostrophe denotes a short “u” sound (“schwa”) in an unstressed syllable: ‘bout = about, t’dey = today. When U (or apostrophe) appears before R or L, it may not be pronounced at all but simply causes the R or L to be pronounced syllabically. For example, when pronounced like an American does, the word “fur” only contains two sounds, because U is not a separate sound from R. Essentially, R and L can act as vowels in the American pronunciation style (but are consonants in other words).
• OO as in tool, which is not considered distinct from OO as in book. Alternate spelling: UU (used when the English word contains U and not O, or when the English word contains OU pronounced as in should)
• OE as in toe. English speakers pronounce this as a diphthong, but it is not considered distinct (allophone) from the non-diphthong O of other languages such as Spanish. Ungglish considers OE in “toe” to be the same as the O in “or”. In the American English style of speaking, those two vowels sound different, but in the Spanish style they don’t. Both styles are acceptable when speaking Ungglish.

Diphthongs and vowel combinations:

There are five diphthongs here plus a two-syllable sound (IA) and some alternate spellings.

• AE or EI as in laet (late), eit (eight)
• IE as in die
• UE as in value (not as in true)
• OU as in out (not as in you, would or through), or
• OW as in now (not as in know or stow)
• OY or OI as in boy, point
• IA as in media, median (unlike the others, this is two separate syllables)
• AW and AU are the same as the vowel O, except that the interpretation of O changes at the end of a word, whereas AW/AU always makes the same sound.

Special pronunciation rules:

At end of word (or before a dash):

• A_ (at the end of a word, or before a dash) is pronounced as U
• E_ is not allowed, except in the word “the”
• I_ is pronounced as I
• O_ is pronounced as OE
• U_ is pronounced as UU
• TH_ is pronounced as unvoiced TH.,
• THE_ is pronounced as voiced TH (except the word “the” which is pronounced as “tha”, and the suffix -ture mentioned below)

Vowels before r:

• OR = OER
• AR = O.R (i.e. O as in “not”)
• ER = UR, except ERR which has the more logical pronunciation of E-R as in error
• IR and UR have the expected pronunciation.

Other:

• AI = IE
• QU means KW, so QUE in “queschun” is pronounced KWE, not KYOO.
• TION and SION are pronounced SHUN
• TURE is pronounced CHUR
• OLOGY is pronounced OLUJY, with stress on the O
• OLOGIC is pronounced OLOJIC, with stress on the second O

Note:

• The vowel in ANK and ANG can have a range of acceptable pronounciations in English. One of them is like A in cat, which is not the typical pronounciation, but we allow it to avoid defining another rule.

The overall pronunciation of a word is determined by scanning the word from left-to-right, repeatedly matching the longest known letter combination. For example, the letter sequence UEE is pronounced UE-E (UE as in value, E as in bed). It is incorrect to treat this as UH-EE.

Word stress

Typically, in a multi-syllable (multi-vowel) word, the first syllable is stressed. However, another vowel takes the stress instead in these situations:

1. There is a dot (period) inside the word. The dot marks the beginning of the syllable to be stressed. Examples: ie.dia (idea), be.leeva (believe) The dot does not affect pronounciation, except that “TH.”, with a dot, is pronounced as TH in “thin” rather than TH in “then”.
2. The word ends in -ia, -tion, -cial (and does not contain a dot). In these cases, the syllable before that suffix is stressed.
3. The word contans -ology or -ologic. The first O is stressed in -ology and the second O is stressed in -ologic.

Correspondence between Ungglish and English words

Most of the time, Ungglish word stems are pronounced the same as in English (if one ignores allophonic differences).

However, there are some words that have a nonstandard pronunciation so that the spelling can stay the same or similar to the English word. This is done only for

• Words that end in ‘tion’ or ‘cial’ or that are well-known internationally
• Words that a minority of English speakers already pronounce in the modified way. Examples: isue
• Words that have an unstressed letter E which a native english speaker would pronounce as U. Examples: guverment, problem, prezident
• Country and region names, whose spellings are only modified so that the name ends in “ia”, so that consonants sound the same, and so that the number of vowels (before ia) stays the same. Examples: America => Amerrikia, Canada => Canadia, Vietnam => Vi-etnamia

Other notes

A dash (-) can be used to break up a sequence of letters in a way that changes pronounciation; it affects pronounciation the same way as as a space character, except that the sequence is treated as a single word for the purpose of choosing stress. Dashes may be used or needed to separate word roots in compound words, or to indicate how a name is pronunced without introducing new letters (e.g. Mon.go-lia).