we could also spell ch as tsh. there's no reason to do any of this except i think it would look sorta interesting and different. words like:
- dzhudzh (judge)
- tshurtsh (church)
- tshandzhe (change)
one of the historical material realities i aesthetically bemoan the most is english orthography never keeping any diacritics even though we have an embarrassment of riches phonetically regarding vowel sounds in particular.
of course this butts up against the other reality of english having no particular dominant phonetic set for the past two centuries—and especially not before that but in a different way during the middle english period—and even less during the old english period hoo boy—what with its particular means of globalization and use as lingua franca in the context of england's particular ideological brainworms—i wonder if we had more specific letters for specific vowels (say, of the london dialect juuuust on the eve of the great vowel shift), how different the language could sound now.
in the past i've foolishly tried to come up with a full phonetic transcription system for English but it's literally impossible with all the splits and mergers across all the different dialects
the best i ever managed was one that works pretty well for my dialect of california english, which had six unique vowel letters, each with two lengths. "y" is used for schwa, which is inspired by the orthography of Welsh
- a /æ/ [or /a/ in diphthongs]
- ā /ɑ/
- e /ɛ/
- ē /eɪ/
- i /ɪ/
- ī /i/
- o /ɔ/
- ō /oʊ/
- u /ʊ/
- ū /u/
- y /ə/
- ȳ /ʌ/
i love how i just have one extra vowel than the other half of GA-speaking americans. are you sad that [ɔ] was taken from you if you don't have it? i would be.
e: literally in the most fanciful inane way of like, 'ha! my mouth gets to go somewhere yours doesnt. thats so sad for you...'
other than that it doesn't actually ambiguously merge that many words
