WLM2s - An Alternate Form of WLM

This page presents an alternate form of the WLM spelling system, which I am for the moment calling WLM2s, the 2s standing for "two schwa".  I am in the process of deciding whether to declare WLM2s to be the official form of WLM, or possibly, to present it as an acceptable alternate form.  Perhaps the end result could be a hybrid of the two, accepting some but not all of the differences.  If you believe WLM to be interesting, and have an opinion on whether WLM2s is an improvement, I urge you to E-mail me (see the bottom of the page for the address) and tell me so.  I can't ignore your opinion if you don't give it to me!

The major differences between WLM and WLM2s are as follows:

1. WLM uses the letter i for the schwa except at word beginning and word end.  WLM2s uses both i and o.  i is used when the sound is the "indistinct i", a short i resembling a schwa, or when it is conventionally spelled with the letter e or i.  The letter o is used in other cases.  The purpose of this change is to make the spelling of certain words more natural.  For example, the WLM spellings surkis, sabitahjh and kitastrify would become surkos, sabotahjh and kotastrofy in WLM2s.  I note that difference 3 below causes some schwas to be spelled out before liquids in WLM2s where they are omitted in WLM.  These schwas are always spelled with o.

2. WLM uses the letter o for the long o sound, as in smok and motivayt.  Since WLM2s uses the o as a schwa, it spells the long o with the digraph oa: smoak, moativayt.  At the end of a word, such as zeero or medo, a plain o is still used, since the schwa is always spelled with a at word end.  The ending o is not changed when a plural or past tense ending is added, even if ambiguity results, as in foatoz and fahlod.  (To prevent ambiguity, perhaps an apostrophe, or even an e, could be inserted after the o.  But if we're going to do that, why not just use the oa digraph to start with?)
   

3. The handling of syllabic liquids in WLM2s is different, and tends to use the apostrophe rather than the letter h as a marker.  This will be further explained later, but for now, here are some examples.

In addition to these major differences, there are the following minor changes to WLM2s:

1. WLM2s uses -ebl and -ebility, not -ibl and -ibility, for the TS suffixes -able/ible and -ability/ibility: wurkebl, lejebl, feezebility.

2. WLM2s uses -ment rather than -mhnt for the TS suffix -ment, as in payvment, argyment, eistablixment.

3. In addition to its major changes in the handling of syllabic liquids, WLM2s allows the liquids m and n to be juxtaposed without an intervening h.  Thus, WLM2s spells the WLM woomhn and venhm as woomn and venm.
   

4. Unlike WLM, WLM2s distinguishes the cases of ending rl where the l is not syllabic (kurl) from ones where it is syllabic (skwurol).
   

Explaining  how either WLM or WLM2s handles syllabic liquids is a big job, because the situation with these sounds is so complicated.  Spelling system developers like myself could save themselves a lot of trouble if we weren't so attracted to the idea of leaving out those unnecessary vowels.  Unfortunately, leaving them all out leads to horrible ambiguities, and we have to figure out which words we can omit the vowels from, and what to do about the ones where we can't.

When I speak of syllabic liquids, I'm talking about cases where a liquid sound (l, m, n or r) comprises the only vowel in a syllable, or cases where the vowel is a schwa followed by a liquid.  Phoneticists distinguish these two cases, but I am unable to tell the difference between them, and so I use the term "syllabic liquid" to refer to both.  I'll probably go to hell for it, I guess.  What I'd like for either form of WLM is to just leave the schwa out from these sounds, writing letr for <letter>, and kmplayn for <complain>.  Would they were all that easy!  The archtypical problem word is <forum>.  We can't leave out the vowel here: form is a different word.  A long process of analysis leads to the following conclusions:

1. It is safe to leave out the vowel before a liquid if the preceding sound is a non-liquid consonant, and the liquid is either word-final, or followed by a non-liquid consonant.  Thus, we can write: katl, knsidr, prseev.
   

2. It is safe to leave out the vowel when the liquid is either word-final or followed by a non-liquid, even in the case where the preceding sound is a liquid consonant, provided the first liquid is not l or r, or the second liquid is not m or n.  Thus, we can write: kulr, winr, kaml.  In WLM2s, we can also write hyuemn, denm.  However, in WLM2s, we consider the case of r followed by syllabic l unsafe.  In WLM, we write korl, while in WLM2s this spelling is not permitted.  Basically, the WLM rules imagine that the words <swirl> and <squirrel> rhyme (swurl and skwurl), while the WLM2s rules assume they do not (swurl and skwurol).  It would be unambiguous for a liquid to follow itself without an intervening letter, as in mmoriyl, kann or teirriez, but in both versions of WLM, we insist on separating them, due to the very different use of double letters by traditional spelling.  WLM2s has momoriyl, kanon and teireriez for the words above.
   

The cases we have left are words where a syllabic liquid is followed by a vowel, like <colony> or <ferocious>, or where an unacceptable liquid sequence occurs, like <solemn> or <coronation>.  Some unpleasant words have several troublesome liquids in a row, like <aluminum> or <foreigner> or <phenomenally>.  WLM spells words like these by using a silent letter h as a marker.  The words in the previous sentences are spelled kahlhny, frhoxus, korhnayxn, sahlhm, eluemhnhm, forhnr and fnhahmhnlhy in WLM.  The exact rule is hard to describe, because sometimes the h follows the syllabic liquid (frhoxus) and sometimes it precedes it (korhnayxn).  The WLM2s rules are slightly easier to understand.  When a syllabic liquid is followed by a vowel or another syllabic liquid, WLM2s uses an apostrophe to separate the two, as in fr'oaxus, aluemn'm and fn'ahmn'ly.  In any other situation involving a syllabic liquid, a vowel is written, o before l, m or n, or e before r.  Thus, for the other troublesome words above we have kahlony, sahlom, koronayxn and foron'r.  One of the benefits of this particular scheme is that the spelling of words is not usually changed when we add suffixes to them, as in the case of fn'ahmn'n, fn'ahmn'l and fn'ahmn'ly, or profexn, profexn'l and profexn'lizm.

When spelling a troublesome word, we start at the right-hand side and process the word right-to-left, adding a vowel or apostrophe at the rightmost troublespot.  For instance, in <foreigner>, the -nr sequence is all right, and it is only when we hit the -rn that we get into trouble.  Note that once we add a vowel, the spelling of all or part of the word preceding may be resolved.  In <zeppelin>, once we realize that the ending must be spelled -'n, we have no trouble deciding what to do with the -el-: zepl'n.  (The word <aluminum> is trickier than the others; you might think that the spelling aluemnm would be acceptable, but it is ambiguous because you can't tell whether the n is intended to be syllabic or not.  In this case, an apostrophe must be inserted between the n and m to mark them as syllabic:  eluemn'm.)  I consider this to be a strong advantage for this part of WLM2s: I have not yet found an informal way to describe exactly how to insert the h's into troublesome words such as these with WLM.  (A balancing disadvantage is that WLM2 uses the apostrophe in a number of different ways, and it is more complicated to figure out whether it needs to be pronounced or not.)

To illustrate the effect of these changes on an extended text, the table below gives the text of the song "Desolation Row" (words and music by Bob Dylan) in both systems.  The changes are not so many as to make the appearance radically different, but as you may notice, most verses have changes in a fair number of lines.

To comment on this page, e-mail Alan at wyrdplay.org