Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly.<p>(And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.)<p>Thinking about it-- you increase your bandwidth immediately. You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Use the extra bits to add in the more confusing vowels sounds, and appropriate current digraphs where they aren't confusing.<p>Chording becomes your standard input device; just press every sound that's in the word at once and move on. Anyone would be able to type as fast as they could talk, at least, and read far faster. Text to speech and vice versa would be much easier. Machine translation would make you perfectly legible to the non-phonetically-literate, and the vastly improved typing speed would more than make up for any minor hiccups. It would be much, much easier to teach English to children and non-natives, so much so that we'd stop using letters for everyday writing. Alphabetic English would be bizarrely unintelligible within a couple generations, but again, thanks to machine translation, perfectly readable.<p>Of course you get all of this just from having a phonetic alphabet; a concise binary representation is just icing on the cake. If your goal is to get people to read different, why not go for the grand prize?