in plain english

for assistance in how to read ZUMEL/zacanese, check out the first post here

ok, this is to help out anyone wondering what the hell is going to be going on on this site. i get bored. when i get bored, i think about weird things. several years back, i worked in turkmenistan and kazakhstan, russian speaking countries, and in my spare time i tried reading the language from signs, etc. with the locals to learn how to read cyrrilic. i was told even if i didn't know the word, i had excellent pronunciation. i must credit my lonely planet™ russian phrasebook and the russian language for being extremely phonetic.

if i do recall, phonics was being kinda phased out as i was growing up. unless i'm hallucinating madly, i remember my parents complaining about the new way children were taught to read without phonics. either way, it led me to re-evaluate the english language.

my being raised with english as my mother tongue gives me advantages and disadvantages. one advantage is that, apparently, english is one of the tougher languages to learn. it's a bastardization of numerous other languages thrown together. since these root languages differed, as the language solidified, rules were made, but with those rules came numerous exceptions; thus, an impure language had to deal with it's growing pains. how it became the language of global commerce, i'll never know. the disadvantage is since it is almost THE global language, i've been afforded the luxury of not needing to learn another language to travel the world to do my job.

still, this is my effort to help simplify the english language with phonics, removing redundant letters, and incorporating a few more efficient letters from other languages. from now on, all posts are going to be written in ZUMEL (title), or zacanese, for those of you who do not like acronyms. there is no capitalization in ZUMEL/zacanese, i prefer bold. the ZUMEL/zacanese alphabet consists of 32 letters, broken down into 19 consonants, 10 vowels, and 3 digraphs (or 'blends').

the consonants:

1. b
2. d
3. f
4. g
5. h
6. j
7. ж (soft j like the 's' in closure)
8. k
9. l
10. m
11. n
12. p
13. r
14. s
15. t
16. v
17. w
18. y
19. z

the vowels (5 vowels, long and short types are explicit):

1. ā, a
2. ē, e
3. ī, i
4. ō, o
5. ū, u

and the digraphs:

1. ş = sh
2. ç = ch
3. ţ = th

this is a living language as i made it up only a few years ago and there's been very little beta testing besides working out some trivial flaws on a car trip with ChumpAssFool over at BTB **come to think of it, i think the roots of this go back to grade school when CAF and i wrote notes for PolGer**. if you can handle taking the time to forget what you know the word should look like, and just hear it, i'd appreciate any comments or words that can't be expressed very succintly. this isn't a language for comprehension, per se, as there will be many homographs. this language would be more based towards correct pronunciation.

i'm sure the updates won't be every day, but they should be one or two times a week since i have two other blogs i write for. i'll tweak the layout a little bit when i have the time. this is just a crazy side project. i made a language pack for windows so you TOO can type in zacanese, if you want it, i'll figure out a way to link it. i think there is a small glitch in it, but we'll have to see. this is the last post i'll be able to use the blogger spell check. let's see how this goes...