The Fun Riform

The full specification of the Fun Riform can be found here. It was created by language and math enthusiast jan Misali, and I think it stands out from other Latin-script spelling reforms because of its goals.

See, the Fun Riform does things that just don't make sense for a reform genuinely trying to be a purely phonemic or phonetic orthography for English. It will add a silent <e> to the end of words that end in certain consonant sounds, just for aesthetic reasons. It doesn't bother to distinguish between the sounds <th> makes in "thigh" and "thy" (try and think about why this is). It doesn't even have a dedicated letter for the schwa, which for many would be a non-negotiable in any serious spelling reform.

But jan Misali's goal with the Fun Riform was different. First and foremost was for it to be aesthetically pleasing and fun to use for him personally, in case the name didn't already make that clear. He also wanted to make it intuitive to read even for people unfamiliar with it, as well as easily describable in a single screen of text. Most of all, he wanted it to be flexible. He says the biggest rule of the reform is "If a word looks wrong to you, it is wrong, and you should spell it differently." And sure enough, the rules of the reform enable people to spell the same word in different ways depending on their accent while still being readable. Scroll down to the examples on his page and see how the excerpt from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written to reflect British Received Pronunciation, is spelled differently from the other examples that appear to be written in General American.

jan Misali's encouragement of orthographical anarchy can be easily criticized. Plenty would argue that the more we allow spelling to be fragmented, the larger the burden placed on the reader is. As one commenter on jan Misali's video about the reform put it, "Ever hear an accent you couldn't understand? Now imagine you can't read it, either." I don't think it's actually that big a deal, though. Realistically, if something like the Fun Riform were ever adopted, where people were able to develop alternate spellings for words under a single clearly-defined system, I think we'd see a handful of standards develop based on major families of accents. As things stand now, with conventional orthography, we have two major standards: British English and American English, the latter branching off the former due to some minor spelling reforms proposed by Noah Webster, I think. Under the Fun Riform, we might see a couple other standards spring up, but it would hardly be as inconvenient as some people might fear.

I journaled for a short time in the Fun Riform, though in handwriting only. I've never typed in it before because I have no easy way to type the diacritics on my computer's keyboard. jan Misali appears to do much more writing on his phone than I do on mine, which is why he apparently has a simple enough time typing the diacritics himself. But who knows? Maybe one day I'll find a way and try writing a blog post or two in the Fun Riform.