The alphabet should be expanded

MY GOD, has it been a while since I did an opinion page on this website? I'm pretty sure the last page I did on my opinions on something was from 2024. I'll get to my thoughts on Celeste whenever I have the time and motivation to speak about the game, but I wanted to talk about something I didn't think I would put out here: the English alphabet feels a bit outdated nowadays.

Yeah, I know. We've been using the 26 letters of the English alphabet for the past... several hundred years? There's not really been an update to the alphabet for quite some time, and I've definitely seen people try to add more or at least bring old letters back in.

So... I'm now just thinking that the English alphabet deserves an upgrade in the 21st century, but there's a problem. There are multiple proposals; some are just trolls, and others are more serious, and it's hard to choose just one. So I will just present my proposal for the sake of this page, from research on videos and opinions from other people.

Just a quick side note: I am not going to bring up the fictional alphabet that'll be used in the Codex: Red Eclipse series. I am remodeling it, but it is still themed around a semi-alien-sounding language for number names, so there will be no mention of those letters from that series. Understood? Let's begin!

Let's start with getting letters for the most frequent sounds we use. "Th" is used a lot, but why not have a single letter for that? Let's bring back the letter Thorn into the alphabet! The capital letter is Þ, and the lowercase letter is þ, sitting between T and U.

For other sounds, specifically "Zh," "Sh," and "Ch," why not bring a few accented letters? Coming from the Czech alphabet, we have Ž / ž for "zh," Š / š for "sh," and Č / č for "ch." I'll call Č "cheh," Š "sheh," and Ž "zheh." Č is between C and D, Š is between S and T, and Ž is after Z.

There are a bunch of words that contain a double s, but couldn't that be more efficient with a single letter? Let's bring in the eszett, which is ß / ẞ. Words like "possible," "possess," etc. could use a bit of efficiency, which ß could do a better job at. This sits between S and Š.

I'm going to be talking about the next letter we could bring back. The "ng" sound is essential for the ending of every gerund, like swimming, running, guessing, etc. Welcome, eng, which is the letter Ŋ / ŋ.

Would it be better to write "swimming" as "swimmiŋ"? I think so.

Now, while every letter in the alphabet has a simple sound to it, there's one that is overdue for simplicity. Yes, I'm talking about W. Why is W pronounced "Double U" when it doesn't even resemble two Us? Nope, I want that W simplified, and I think "wren" works better for this letter.

There obviously could be more to add here, but as it is? 32 letters for an alphabet (64 when you take into account uppercase and lowercase versions) works for me. More would, of course, start to complicate things unless it's for a specific purpose, especially for me, who had a hard time learning the English we know of today when I was young, so I'll just leave it there.

... There is also an alternative alphabet for "English," which is called the "Shavian" alphabet. You can read more about Shavian here.

This is my first text written in Shavian. As you can see, there are no silent letters in this writing; we have a single letter for frequent words and vowels. We also save space writing in Shavian compared to English. This is not perfect writing, but I have to start somewhere...

There is also conlanging and neography, just to mention those.