Here's my proposal for a phonetic spelling system for English.

1) The only time letters might be doubled is when a vowel sound is held out long, for example, the end of "Utah".

2) Many schwas are not represented by a letter--if there's really a vowel sound in there, we don't punt and call it a schwa, we figure out what it is and spell it with that letter.

3) Glides are spelled by combining the vowels that make them up.

4) Letters that duplicate the sounds of other letters are used for some other sound.

5) Accents are added to letters to make the sounds we don't have letters available for.

6) Unaccented vowel pronunciations are chosen to match their Spanish and romanized Japanese pronunciations.

7) No silent letters.

Here's a list of the letters and glides and how they're pronounced. A few will be a little weird, because an available letter is getting reassigned:

  • "a" as in "father"
  • "â" as "a" in "at"
  • "ai" as "i" in "hi"
  • "b" as in "book"
  • "c" as "ch" in "child"
  • "d" as in "do"
  • "e" as in "get"
  • "ei" a "a" in "pe"
  • "f" as in "for"
  • "g" as in "get"
  • "h" as in "hi"
  • "i" as the "e" in "be"
  • "î" as "i" in "it"
  • "iu" as "u" in "Utah"
  • "j" as in "jump"
  • "k" as in "ark"
  • "l" as in "let"
  • "m" as in "me"
  • "n" as in "no"
  • "ñ" as "ng" in "sing"--note that in words with a "g" sound, as in the name "Inga", "ñ" must be followed by a "g"
  • "o" as in "no", but not necessarily with the slight "w" that we tend to append to it
  • "ô" as "u" in "put"
  • "p" as in "pig"
  • "q" as the "g" in "massage" (a.k.a. "zh")
  • "r" as in "run"
  • "s" as in "sit"
  • "t" as in "to"
  • "u" as "oo" in "goose"
  • "û" as "u" in "up"
  • "v" as in "vase"
  • "w" as in "we"
  • "x" as "sh" in "shut"
  • "y" as "th" in "bath"
  • "ÿ" as "th" in "this"
  • "z" as in "zip"

Keyboards would need an "accent" key, similar to the "shift" key, for easier typing. Until then, on Macintosh, the accents are added to the vowel by typing option+i and then the vowel, to the "n" by typing option+n and then "n", and to the "y" by typing option+i and then "y". All of the accented characters are part of the ISO-8859-1 character set (which is a subset of UTF-8), ensuring widespread availability.

Reader Comment:
Nu Propozl Foor Fonetik Speliq (New Proposal For Phonetic Spelling) » Alpha Gecko said:
[...] posted an idea for an English phonetic spelling system before. It’s an idea I’d still like to see implemented. But I’ve changed some of [...]
(join the conversation below)

Meibi Ai'l hâv tu start raitiñ yîs wei tu si îf ît wîl kâc an.

...or in other letters...

Maybe I'll have to start writing this way to see if it will catch on.