Numerous letters in the alphabet are so often used together that I believe it would be wise to quit mucking about and simply merge them.
Adding letters may seem the opposite of efficiency but I think you will agree that the letters proposed would actually save time and space. I’m all for efficiency: life is short, why spend it doing things the long way?
One of the most obvious candidates for this merging is the familiar trio ‘ing’. ‘ing’ is constantly in use and takes up an awful lot of space for such a small and common sound. I would propose the following to represent it:
Think of the ease and speed with which you will be able to write out such words as fingerling, Ringling and ding-a-ling if you had only one character to pen instead of three every time you used ‘ing’.
The second most obvious candidate for a character of this type is ‘qu’ as the letter ‘q’ is almost never seen without it’s corresponding ‘u’. Since there are instances of the lone ‘q’ and we’ll never talk you out of simply abolishing the ‘u’ as given, merging the two letters into one is the next best solution:
Other proposed mergings would include ‘’sh’, ‘th’, ‘wh’, ‘ch’, ‘tch’, ‘ly’, and ‘ph’, though the latter should simply be abolished and ‘f’ used in its place. Let’s face it, ‘ph’ is but window dressing for otherwise dull and unimportant looking words. Still, seeing ‘fone’ in print does make one want to gag, so I’ve included an alternate for ‘ph’:
Other candidates were dropped after some simple consideration. ‘ough’, for example, seems quite a shoe-in until one realizes what a huge mess this particular set of letters is. Consider:
“While walking through Scarborough, the rough, dough-faced, ploughman fell with a hiccoughing cough into a slough, thoughtless.”
Condensing ‘ough’ into one symbol would only further the crime of its rampant inconsistency. I’m for banning it altogether.
