Benjamin Franklin’s six new phonetics alphabets

Benjamin Franklin’s six new phonetics alphabets

Benjamin Franklin, it turns out, wasn’t content with playing a key role in the early American printing industry, establishing the first circulating library and writing a bestselling almanac for twenty-five years running: the man also wanted to change the way Americans actually spelled stuff.

In the mid-1760s, when Franklin was living in London, he began to think about the alphabet, and the conclusion he came to was that the 26-letter alphabet as it stood was irrational and unconnected to spoken English. And so, as Jimmy Stamp writes in a recent post on the Smithsonian’s Design Decoded blog, Franklin proposed axing six letters— C, J, Q, W, X, and Y— and assigning only one sound to each letter. Plus—because it’s always fun to make up new letters— he invented six letters that looked like this:

Franklin’s system, as he laid out in “A Reformed Mode of The spelling” was intended to “give the Alphabet a more natural Order” through organizing letters by the way the corresponding sounds were formed in the mouth. Thus, there were “simple Sounds formed by the Breath, with none or very little help of Tongue, Teeth, and Lips,” like “o” and “huh” (“huh” was to be indicated by the new letter that resembles a “y”), and other sounds like “f” and “v”, formed “still more forward by the under Lip applied to the upper Teeth.”

According to the paper “Six New Letters for a Reformed Alphabet” by Nicola Twilley, Franklin first put his alphabet to use in flirty correspondence with his landlady’s daughter Polly Stevenson. Stevenson wasn’t fazed:

Previous exposure to Franklin’s eclectic and experimental intelligence must explain the fact that on receiving a letter was entirely written in a new alphabet, Polly simply transcribed it, and then replied in the new alphabet, listing the obstacles in the way of its widespread adoption.