Article

English, Unish, and an Ideal International Language: From a Perspective of Speech Sound and Writing System

Young-Hee Jung 1
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1Sejong University

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

In recent years, as international communication has become more frequent and significant, the obstacle that foreign language pose is more keenly felt and so the linguistic variety of the present world has become a heavy burden on international communication. In order to facilitate an international communication, various artificial languages have been constructed. In this paper, I examine Unish, one of the recently constructed artificial languages, and English, a dominant language of the present world, from the perspective of phonetics, phonology, and writing system. I argue that an ideal international language should not contain speech sounds that are not easy to produce, and its writing system should be phonemic. Unish, I show, contains consonant sounds that are not easy to produce. Writing system of Unish is in part not phonemic. English is found to contain too many vowel sounds, the aspect that makes acquisition of English difficult. Spelling system of English is the most problematic about English as an international language. An ideal international that is proposed contains the most frequent and easy-to-produce seventeen consonant sounds. It has a basic five-vowel system and its writing system is perfectly phonemic.

Keywords: international communication; artificial language; Unish; phonetics; phonology; writing system; sound; phonemic; easy-to- produce consonant; five vowel system

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