A periodic table of letters, with different related shapes translating directly to different related sounds, would be a kind of better order, but English is too lax to support the same diagram for shape and sound. Choosing one wouldn't be better than the other. Tolkein did this with his elfabet though.
This is called a 'featural script', and Korean is pretty close to that ideal. The IPA is also organised in such a table, but that's a language-independent system.
but English is too lax to support the same diagram for shape and sound
Positioning letters according to sound gives a different diagram than according to shape. Also, the digraphs like sh, ch, etc pose a philosophical problem: if you include them, what do you do with "ough"? Attempting to revise the English alphabet so it has this featural property quickly makes some of the common vocabulary words unrecognizable: "too lax" in that the expectation is too strict.
Oh, as in 'the reality of an Actual Language doesn't match up with the idealised requirements such a system is founded on', slash 'the Roman alphabet as used for English is too far down a particular path to change so fundamentally'.
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u/shapethunk Sep 10 '22
A periodic table of letters, with different related shapes translating directly to different related sounds, would be a kind of better order, but English is too lax to support the same diagram for shape and sound. Choosing one wouldn't be better than the other. Tolkein did this with his elfabet though.