Alphabet

Alphabet is a set of letters that represents phonemes of a spoken language in writing. The other writing systems are syllabaries (in which each character represents a syllable) and logographic (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit).

## Orish Alphabet

The development of the Orish alphabet started when Or Hoshmand was 8 years old approximantly (2008), when he started dreaming about a language that is simple, easy and clean after he discovered how difficult Hebrew and English are, as well as other languages. In this period Or Hoshmand already wanted a phonetic orthography, with no letters that can represent more than one sound, no sounds that can be written in more than one letter, no silent letters, no unwritten sounds, no letters that represent combinations of sounds, no sounds that are written in a single letter and no words spelled abnormally for their pronunciation; but had no idea which orthography he actually wanted, so he tried to draw on a paper letter-like symbols that don't belong to any alphabet and are not registered in Unicode, and the worst, they were difficult to detect because they had complicated shapes and were changed from page to page constantly. To represent the sound of each one of these symbols, Or Hoshmand attached letters from Hebrew and English that represent the same sound to each one of them. Or Hoshmand also had difficulties to determine how vowels will be written in Orish, because in Hebrew and English they are written in very different ways, in Hebrew they are written in diacritics if at all and they are not used regularly but mainly to help inexperienced readers to read or to prevent misreadings where that's likely or to reflect pronunciation of words that are uncommon in speech, while in English they are written in normal letters that don't necessary look very different from letters that represent consonants, a gap that causes such dilemma. Also, Or Hoshmand didn't have the phonological perception he has today, the possibility that different sounds are not necessary different phonemes was foreign to him, he didn't know that both Hebrew and English together don't use all sounds humans can pronounce as phonemes, he didn't know that sometimes sounds that are almost identical are separate phonemes in some language (for example, /i/ and /ɪ/, that he didn't even hear the difference between them), and when he tried to build a phonetic system for Orish he introduced all sounds he knew to pronounce as different phonemes without thinking how easy or hard to pronounce they are, which unfortunately could lead to difficulties in pronunciation in this language, something the he wanted to prevent even in this period. This method was abandoned early because it was difficult to use and was created with a poor linguistic knowledge, and then Or Hoshmand thought he should actually stop trying to develop Orish, and the development of Orish was discontinued.

In 2018, after many years Or Hoshmand didn't even think about Orish, after gaining some linguistic knowledge, he started trying to develop Orish again, still with the principles that make a language easy to learn and use including phoneticness, he finally knew that different sounds are not necessary different phonemes, but they are sometimes allophones of the same phonemes, and that languages don't have to use all sounds humans can pronounce as phonemes; he also discovered that humans can even pronounce many sounds that don't exist in any language in the world. When he chose the phonemes for Orish in this period his considerations were more targeted, he chose phonemes that are common in many languages in the world and those that are likely to be easy to learn to pronounce even if they don't exist in one's native language. For example, rhotic consonants are usually in complementary distribution in the different languages in the world so in Orish there is only one phoneme that every one of them can be used as its pronunciation. After Or Hoshmand finished choosing phonemes for Orish he borrowed their letters from the International Phonetic Alphabet, except for Y that in a direct borrowing it would be J (probably to make it look more natural for English speakers). Because the letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent the phonemes Or Hoshmand chose for Orish are Latin, Orish uses Latin alphabet in its writing system.

Another way to tell how the alphabet in Orish was created is from the point of view of the English alphabet. In English there are many letters with good phonetic values so they were added to Orish: B, (normal) D, F, (hard) G, (independent) H, K, L, M, (alveolar) N, P, (unvoiced) S, (normal) T, V, (consonantal) W, (consonantal) Y and (non-foreign) Z. The letter R has a similar phonetic value too, but its pronunciation depends mainly on the speaker's accent (for example Or Hoshmand pronounced it as a uvular trill in English until 2018 when he learned to pronounce it as a retroflex trill like in English), but the difference in the pronunciation of this letter doesn't interfere with using it for a phoneme in Orish. The vowel letters A, E, I, O and U represent many sounds in English but before Or Hoshmand learned which sounds they actually they represent he learned to transcribe /a/ to A and /o/ to O and so on and that affected the sounds he associates these letters with, and they are enough to represent all 5 vowels in Orish that he naturally knows to pronounce so they got their phonetic values. The letter X in English is unnecessary for Orish with its phonetic value because it represents consonants clusters, but Or Hoshmand saw that this letter is used for the phoneme /x/ in some languages, so he added it to Orish with a completely different new phonetic value. Two letters for postalveolar fricatives that don't exist in English (Ʃ and Ʒ) were added to Orish by borrowing from the International Phonetic Alphabet, beside one letter that represents the sound /ə/ and comes only to deal with pronunciation difficulties (Ə). For affricates Or Hoshmand didn't devote letters but combinations of letters that the first one represents a plosive consonant and the second one represents a fricative consonant with the same place of articulation and phonation because that's how they are pronounced and that's also how they are written in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and that is also likely to make them easier for speakers who don't have them in their native language to learn to pronounce. The letter J was considered to be used for /j/ inspired by the International Phonetic Alphabet but was replaced with Y soon to make it look more natural for English speakers, and then it was removed completely from the alphabet. The letters C and Q don't carry any unique phonetic value that makes them practical to add to Orish, so they were removed.

There are more good reasons Orish uses Latin alphabet in its writing system:

* First, this is an alphabet, it uses a limited number of characters, while syllabries require to invent a new character for each syllable, and logographics require to invent a new character for each word or morpheme, which is a problem today, because today there is a technology that can show only a limited number of characters that are already registered in Unicode.
* One of the most important principles of Orish is phoneticness, coordination between the pronunciation and the written form of each word, so that it will be easy to know how to pronounce each word by its spelling or vice versa. Syllabries can represent only a limited number of syllables (while in Orish there is no clear limit to the number of possible syllables), and in logographics knowing how to pronounce each word by its written form or vice versa is never possible.
* A writing form that is already registered in Unicode and includes many letters is preferable to a writing forms that is not registered in Unicode or if so includes few characters, just choose phonemes for the language and letters for each one of them, and when new phonemes are introduced in the language it's already possible to pick characters that belong to the same or a similar script from Unicode and use them for the new phonemes.
* Latin alphabet is relatively easy to read and write because each letter has only two forms that both of them are geometrically simple (although one form is enough too), and each letter appears individually, and is not connected to the letter before or after it. This is a big advantage in comparison to the Arabic script, in which most letters have four forms depending on their position, more complicated shapes, are connected to each other, and there are many groups of letters that differ only in diacritics, that make the Arabic script difficult to use.
* The main source of each one of the letters in Orish is actually the International Phonetic Alphabet, which doesn't belong to any language but has a role of representing pronunciation of any word in writing regardless of the standard writing system of the language, and mainly uses Latin letters; but there are some exceptions.
* After all, the Latin script is common in many languages, including English which is learned as a second language more than any other language in the world, so most people in the world are familiar with the latin script.

Although Orish is officially written in Latin script, it can also be alternatively written in a featural script, and even in ideograms.

 **Digraphs**
 **Diacritics**
 **Suggested Letters**
 **Others**