Don't use this crappy writer: Install it on your Windows computer using Keyman (same syntax as here): altype.kmx
Altype is a special writing system for the English language designed to unify pronounciation and make writing shorter. It uses an accent system and also cuts off extraneous letters such as q, x, and c. Altype's largest flaw is that it is totally attached to English (read the documentation for Accent 1 to see why). The other one is that it is attached to whatever accent I have, so you probably will disagree with some of the spellings. Another flaw is that it is a bit too good at shortening words, to the point that homophones become a problem as they have identical spellings. The solution is the #, also known as the Homophone Differentiator. There can be up to three # (hashes) added to the end of a word, as there are no quintuple homophones in English. Homophones follow a priority order. A high priority means that the spelling has fewer hashes and a lower priority means that the spelling has more hashes, up to three. Priority is first done by type of word. The order here is: Pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, verbs, nouns. If homophones occupy the same type of word, then the most common word (according to an Ngram) has higher priority.
There are four accents, labeled one through four. The first accent is the -, also known as the overline or macron. When you see it over a letter, that is a sign to read the letter as you would in the alphabet song. This is useful for vowels A, E, I, O, U (though for U say "yu" not "oo" as that is something else). It works for all letters. However, for some (such as n and m), there is a duplicate with the 2nd and 3rd accents. In this case, the 3rd accent has priority, then the 2nd, and the first has the lowest priority. As a result, you will almost never see n1 or m1. The 2nd and 3rd accents follow a similar pattern. Accent 2 is the Acute Accent (/) and Accent 3 is the Grave Accent (\). Both represent an added "e" on the "up side" of the accent. For example, r3 (up side on the left) is equal to the sound "er". g2 (up side on the right) is equal to the sound "ge" - actually the sound that j makes. The final special case is l2. It makes the "le" sound as would be found at the end of a word like "little." Other than that it will be an "eh" sound prepended or appended to the letter. As I said before, the 3rd accent has priority over the 2nd. The fourth accent, also known as the circumflex accent or the "hat", is the ALT accent. It allows a letter to take on an alternate pronounciation. In earlier revisions like Rev6 and Rev7, the sound made by a character with a 4th accent was sometimes ridiculous (such as w4 making the sh sound). This was a temporary measure to allow me to write Altype on a standard keyboard. Nowadays (Rev9 as of time of writing), a character with a 4th accent will be very similar, generally "voiced" (I believe the term is). For example, f4 makes the v sound because the v sound is like f, but with the vocal cords engaged. Other combinations are s4 = z and t4 = d. One example is opposite: g4 = k. The reason that this is not inverted is because g2 was already special because it had j, and k2 is "keh" which is completely different.
Generally, accents CANNOT be combined. Consider "air": One may be tempted to do r33 for eh + er, but this is not allowed. In fact, "air" (er3) is one of the few words where there is an unmodified e as a result of there being no other letters to merge the E in to. It is not permitted to combine two identical accents. There is no stipulation against combining a 2/3 accent and a 1 accent, but I do not believe there are any English words that use this. Perhaps when writing loanwords or foreign languages this may be more useful. It is not permitted to combine a 2nd and 3rd accent on the same letter, as that usually causes one letter to have two syllables (not allowed). I can only think of one case where it would not: g23 would make an "ej" sound. However, just one case is not enough to break the rule, so the e must be conjoined somewhere else (usually with the preceeding letter). In fact, the word "edge" (eg2) is another one of the rare cases of a dangling e, because of this rule. The most common combined accents are the 42 and 43 accents, sometimes also called 5th and 6th accents. They prepend or append an E with the alternate pronounciation of the letter. For example t43 makes the sound "ed". The 4 accent must ALWAYS be on the bottom, so that the 2 or 3 is on the top, then the accent 4, then the letter itself. It is not proper to do it the other way around as it makes it look like you are trying to apply an alternate pronounciation to the combined e + letter, which is not possible. In order to throw off the bounds of the letters that have been removed, combining a 1 and 4 accent is not permitted, as the characters with 4 accents do not have a different 1.
The existence of a 2nd and 3rd accent causes ambiguities to appear. Consider the word "revolution". There is an unmodified e that should be combined. Should it be r3f4o1lu4\sh\1 or rf43o1lu4\sh\1? (make re + volution or r + evolution?). The first rule to check is the syllable boundary. An E must not be conjoined across a syllable boundary. When we say the word, r and e are on one syllable and volution is the rest of the word. Therefore, r2 should be used. Now consider the word "bet". Again, there is a dangling e. There is no syllable boundary. Should it be b2t or bt3? This is where a memorized priority rule comes in: When there are two equally short ways to make a sound, the highest accent number goes first. This means that a 3rd accent has priority, so it should be bt3.
Altype began as a way to cut excess letters that English does not need (redundant). Altype Rev9 cuts the following letters for these reasons:
This leaves us with 17 letters. However, English also has some sounds that are represented with two letters (as in th ch sh ng). These were implemented as:
Additionally, some less logical sounds made by combining vowels were turned into their own accents. These include:
This webpage effectively makes your keyboard into a special Keyboard for writing Altype. Certain letters are overwritten when you type them. Let's first begin by talking about the two checkboxes available. The first checkbox toggles on and off Standard Mode. In Standard Mode, there will be no modifications made to your keyboard, so you should use the accent and special character buttons to write. This is best for Mobile users. Strict Mode, if enabled, prevents you from writing any non-Altype letters. It does not delete any existing letters. Off of standard mode, your keyboard behaves in the following manner: Three keys are overwritten into custom letters. Z becomes the Thorn key (\th\), X becomes the Shun key (\sh\), and C becomes the Chun key (\ch\). Use shift to write uppercase like you would any other letter. Four other keys are overwritten to form the four accents. The - key is for 1st accent, the / key is for 2nd accent, the ' key is for 3rd accent, and the [ key is for 4th accent (much like on the Canadian French Keyboard). Writing is done in French Canadian Style, so that means you press the accent keys first, then the letter. If you wanted to write i1, you would press -, then press i to write the character. Pressing backspace cancels the accent buffer. For a trickier example, if you wanted to write t43, press [, then ', then t to write the letter.
This latest revision coincided with the release of the Altype Writer. It made a new character for the ch sound (bringing the total back to 20). This was so a new sound could be added: \sh\4 or the zh sound. For instance, bourgeoisie (a valid word) would be written Br3\sh\4wa4s4e1. (It looks very ugly writing here on a standard keyboard in Pinyin-style, but it is better on the proper writer). \ch\ does not have a 4th accent. Its first accent is "chun" to satisfy words like Question (g4ws3\ch\1)
It was at this time that I had the idea to make my own Altype writer website where I could put in any character I wanted, rather than being bound to Lexilogos. Inspired by Icelandic, I came full-circle and began to make special sounds have special characters again. th was assigned good old Thorn. sh was assigned to Sigma. The Sigma would have a 1st accent of shun (tion), thereby satisfying it. The 4th accent was assigned to ch, in another inversion of the 4th accent "suggestion." Ng remained the same, as it is somewhat logical (though it too does not follow the "suggestion").
This revision is an "LTS" revision in that it is still used if an Altype writer is not available. It is fully compatible with Lexilogos as it uses only standard letter-accent combinations. Tion was moved to i4, th to h4, ch to y4, and sh to w4. As a result of the illogical movements, this is the most "unreadable" revision of Altype to somebody who has no knowledge of it. This revision also added some of the combined-vowel sounds known today, such as oy (y4), ah (a4), and ao (o4). ch was moved to m4. [Note that all of these changes happened over a few days, but they are included in one revision]
This revision added the last 4th accent variant for pure letters: g-k. It also added the concept of 5th and 6th (42 and 43) accents. It was also the first version that began to use the Lexilogos Diacritics Keyboard. The custom ng character was renamed to n4. This revision also nailed down some of the vowel sounds: u1 would say "yu", and u4 would be oo. E4 would be ou. THis revision also introduced the concept of using the Homophone Differentiator.
This revision converted another fourth accent character: t-d. It was also at this time that sh, ch, and tion were merged into one custom character. ch was given the default, sh was given 1st accent, and tion was given 4th accent. Back then, the rules were much looser.
This revision began to compress letters into their 4th accent variants. At this time, the fourth accent was the down-up variety rather than the up-down variety. The original ones were s-z and f-v
This revision added special characters for ng and tion, as well as the accent l2 (for ol).
This revision introduced the concept of r3 and g2, (2nd and 3rd accents), but it was not globally applied. It also added special characters for th, ch, and sh, though these were custom characters meaning that Altype could only be written by hand.
Altype was first an experiement to remove unnecessary letters. The first version simply removed c, x, and q. It also added the first accent, in an identical form to this day.
| English | Pinyin-Form | True Form |
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