Frequently Asked Questions

We're well aware of how insanely challenging this feat will undoubtedly be, but that hasn't stopped us from putting our sweat and tears into it since we feel the payoff will far outweigh the challenge. We hope that we may accomplish what was previously deemed impossible in due time, with the support and efforts of the open source community. It's on.

A lot more than you might realize, but it's easy for us to miss them if we're used to seeing them all the time. For full coverage of this topic, see our breakdown page.

This website is designed to introduce and teach Postmodern English writing to those who are unfamiliar with it. Naturally, we couldn't just write the entire thing in Postmodern from the get go, or else visitors would have some difficulty with it. Better to start with what we know.

Yes, absolutely! Anyone who wants to contribute can do so. We are always in need of people from around the world who can share some insights about their words and accents. You'll find everything you need to know on the get involved page.

Our goal is to rework the current English writing system into something that is easier to learn, functionally consistent, more compact, and phonetically accurate in representing speech. Simultaneously, we are being careful to design a system of writing that feels familiar, and is easier to transition to. It's no secret that the standard English writing system in use has its fair share of problems and criticisms, which is what we aim to address. We believe this can be accomplished through the efforts of the community from around the world.

Of course! We encourage anyone who wants to start a community elsewhere online to do so. Creating a community is an excellent way to gather people together who are passionate about linguistics.

We currently have a Youtube account, a Reddit account, and a Twitter account (although our Reddit and Twitter accounts are currently not in use). Any other Postmodern English social media pages are not official, and shouldn’t be treated as such. This doesn’t mean we discourage making social media accounts and groups though- in fact we encourage it. Please just do not label them as official.

You may have noticed that a few of the letters that exist in both standard English and Postmodern English have had their letter names changed. The reason behind this is simple: we wanted each letter name to include the sound that the letter makes. So for example, “double U” got changed to “wīn”, since “double U” has no “w” sound in its name. We feel that this makes remembering the sound of each letter a little easier.

The accents you choose to use largely depend on two factors: where you grew up, and where you live today. Listen to yourself when you speak out loud. Do you sound like everyone around you, or do others point out that you have a different accent? Are there some words that you pronounce differently than other people? Long story short, if your accent matches how others around you speak, you will most likely want to write in the accent assigned to your geographic area. Otherwise, you probably want to use the accent that was used where you grew up. For maps of what accents are used where, see our accents page. If you happen to live near one or more accent boundaries, it's possible that your speech will use a mixture of different accents depending on the words. In such cases, it may be useful to likewise write in the same mixture of accents.

Yes- Postmodern English writing reflects the spoken accent of the person writing. For specifics on this, see our spelling guide.

Much like how foreign English accents can be understood with a little effort and a little time, we believe that the same idea will apply to written words that will vary slightly from accent to accent. So while some words in some foreign accents may not be immediately understandable to the reader, they easily can be with some effort, or with a Postmodern dictionary.

If you don't see your accent listed on our list of supported accents, please follow the instructions on the accents page.

Having separate letters in Postmodern English versus having diagraphs for the same sounds in Standard English follows the Postmodern English philosophy point of “condensing writing”, which saves the writer time and effort. Why write more when you can accomplish the same thing with less? This also prevents confusion between certain diagraphs that are spelled the same in standard English, but which make different sounds. If someone isn't familiar with a word spelled with a “th”, how can they know if that “th” is a hard “th” or a soft “th” by only looking at the word? It is much easier in Postmodern English, where a hard “th” is written as “Ћ”, and a soft “th” is written as “Þ”.

While possible, we're against this idea due to the fact that it could cause massive confusion during a transition between two writing systems. For example, the removed letter C could be used to represent the “ch” sound instead, but this means that the current system's C and the new system's C would be completely unrelated. It makes more sense just to use new, but familiar looking letters for sounds that were not previously defined by a single letter (or weren't defined at all). Likewise, existing letters won't make any new sounds in the new system that they previously didn't make in the old system. Avoiding a shuffle helps significantly.

We decided against using separate letters in place of the accented letters for the sake of having fewer unique characters to remember, and for familiarity. What seems more inviting for a new user of Postmodern English: the letter A and the accented variants Á, Ā, and Å, or the letter A and 3 new letters that feel unfamiliar and all make a sound similar to A? We thought the answer seemed clear: use accents for vowel variants, and new but simple characters for digraphs or consonants not previously indicated by a single character. This sets the balance, so that there isn't way too many accents, and isn't a ton of unfamiliar characters either.

No- Postmodern English is only aimed at reforming how English is written. Grammar is unaffected.

It’s true that some standard English words that sound the same, but are spelled differently, will be spelled exactly the same in Postmodern English. For example, both “whole” and “hole” are spelled “hol” in Postmodern English, so context alone needs to clarify what is being discussed. The twist to this situation is that Postmodern English actually distinguishes words from standard English that were originally not distinguished from each other in some cases. As an example, take the standard English word “house”. Does that mean “a house” (noun), or “to house” (verb)? Postmodern English distinguishes between these two meanings, with “hāūs” (noun), and “hāūz” (verb). So in the end, it’s a trade-off. Some standard English words combine into a single Postmodern word, and some single standard English words split out into multiple Postmodern words. Not too bad of a trade, huh?

The Postmodern English alphabet as it is now is complete and fully capable of producing any English sound to the best of our knowledge. If for any reason a new sound enters the English language, and does not pair well with any existing letter, a new letter could be considered. Likewise, if there is significant pushback from the community on an aspect of the Postmodern alphabet, changes could be considered. However we anticipate that changes to the alphabet itself will be extremely rare, if they ever need to occur at all. While spelling can change over time, we're committed to keeping the alphabet as stable as possible.

X is used when this sound occurs in singular words, while “ks” is used when the word is plural or a verb. For more information on this, see the letter X on the alphabet page.

U should be used. In most cases, the shortest way to make a sound is the correct way to spell. See the spelling guide for a complete overview.

Ī was chosen because it is less easily mistaken for the regular dotted i. Some people will dot their i's very similarly to how í appears, so using ī instead avoids that mixup.

In many applications, Ctrl or Alt are used as shortcut keys to do other things. If these keys were used as dead keys, your apps would start going crazy any time you wanted to type in them! We avoided using them for this reason.

The keyboard development app we use for our mobile keyboards, Keyman, currently doesn't support an emoji search. Instead, a fixed number of emojis have to be set up. We did the best we could to include the most popular emojis until Keyman adds the ability to search for them.

Nothing- this is just a naming coincidence. Postmodern English was chosen as the name simply because it is supposed to be the successor to Modern English. Hence the post- prefix.

S looks like 5.

Thorn is back, baby.

Feel free to email us at PostmodernEnglish@gmail.com with any questions you have that aren't explained here. Please note that our team may take a few days to get back with you, due to the volume of emails.