Talk:Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet

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A fact from Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 28 December 2005. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet was Franklin's proposal for a spelling reform of the English language?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2005/December.

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Untitled

Franklin's proposal was not the earliest English spelling reform; there were proposals in the late 16th century and 17th century from William Bullokar and others. AnonMoos 02:34, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

thank you for pointing that out. I wasn't sure. --Revolución (talk) 03:50, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

New letters invented?

The current write-up seems to imply that Ben Franklin invented the letters he added to the alphabet. A contributor to Talk:Eng (letter) reports differently, at least for "ŋ" I cannot corroborate the claim found there, but it sounds reasonable. --Rschmertz 08:20, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Reference needed

This page appears to be copied verbatim from the Omniglot Page without attribution. Jedwards05 20:54, 6 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This page includes a sentence which appears to be copied verbatim from Omniglot: "Only one accented letter appears in the alphabet: ê, which represents the a in mane and lane." There is no mention of the letter ê in the original reference (Franklin, Benjamin. A Reformed Mode of Spelling. In Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces, pages 467-478. London, 1779.). As such, I'm deleting this sentence. If anyone has a reference for such a letter, please include it. -- dowobeha (talk) 15:02, 7 Aug 2013 (UTC)

Expansion

An example paragraph would be nice, and a table of glyphs. -- Beland (talk) 07:02, 7 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have added a table of glyphs. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are no Unicode symbols for Franklin's letters oa, ish, eth, and edth. -- dowobeha (talk) 14:59, 7 Aug 2013 (UTC)

Probably would be better to have an image table -- cf. Initial Teaching Alphabet... AnonMoos (talk) 06:33, 9 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There wouldn’t be much point to Unicode characters for those as they were never adopted. --Moyogo/ (talk) 20:23, 9 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Moyogo, I disagree. There is historical and scholarly work on Franklin's alphabet. Having the additional characters would be useful for encoding existing scholarly work and for encyclopedic and future scholarly discussion. Dowobeha (talk) 20:11, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

However, until such time as this is added to Unicode, and fonts become available, it would be nice to have a suitable image on this article... AnonMoos (talk) 19:28, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

AnonMoos - agreed. Can you point me to another page that has a table of the format that you envision? Dowobeha (talk) 20:16, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Already linked Initial Teaching Alphabet above; you could also look at UNIFON, Shavian alphabet, etc... AnonMoos (talk) 20:44, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. Also File:Star-Wars-aurek-besh-alphabet-chart.svg... -- AnonMoos (talk) 16:32, 22 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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Letter names

The page provides a "Letter name" from each letter. Any idea where these are coming from? (For example, the distinction between "ah" and "a" seems suspect to me, based on my understanding of phonology from the time.) Wolfdog (talk) 14:23, 8 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

name of b

The article currently says the name of "b" is "b"; all the other consonantal letters involve an added vowel in the name. I'm guessing but can't prove (yet) that "b" was "bi". --Haruo (talk) 22:50, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Spelling Reform Review and New Franklin Alphabet

The Franklin Alphabet has been reviewed in this video, and as a response, a new revision that aims to eliminate non-Unicode characters and make vowel spellings more explicitly derived has been published on Omniglot. I suspect that this may not fulfil notability standards, but since the article for the Shavian alphabet mentions the "revised Shaw abjad" which is also only published on Omniglot and has pretty much zero notability, I think we should either mention the review video and include New Franklin Alphabet, or delete the mention to the revised Shaw abjad. 122.213.236.124 (talk) 12:12, 16 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If it's just one person's proposal, then I would doubt it. I'm not defending the Shavian alphabet article (which possibly should be pruned), but that's from the 20th century, is encoded in Unicode, and has a history of attempts to to tinker with it and improve it, so it's not quite the same as one person trying to revive something from the 18th century. AnonMoos (talk) 16:06, 16 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]