Chapter grammar — every paper follows the same skeleton
- The Match
- The Drift
- The Reform
- The Depth
- The Learner
Each case starts from the moment spelling matched speech, tracks the sound changes that pulled them apart, asks whether reform closed the gap, and weighs the ‘depth’ of the orthography against the learner's burden.
01 gh The Chaos of EnglishEnglish — the Great Vowel Shift, printers' whims and frozen French spellings: why ‘ghoti’ could spell ‘fish’. Forthcoming
02 བོད The Frozen WordTibetan — spelling fixed in the 9th century while speech moved on, leaving stacks of silent letters. Room → 03 한 Shallow by DesignKorean — an orthography engineered to match speech, and the literacy dividend of a shallow system. Room → 04 Q Silent WitnessesFrench — the silent letters that record an older pronunciation, and the Académie that guards them. Forthcoming
05 IPA Deep and ShallowThe spectrum — Finnish and Spanish near one-to-one, English and Tibetan far from it, and what each buys and costs. Forthcoming
06 ß When Reform WinsSuccessful reforms — Dutch, German 1996, Portuguese: the politics of changing how a nation spells. Forthcoming
07 ◦ The Learner's BillClosing paper — orthographic depth measured against reading-acquisition time: what a hard spelling really costs a child. Forthcoming
Toward the book
This series is declared complete at seven papers. On completion it moves to Naisu Press as a volume in the institute's imprint — same chapter grammar, same specimens, print-first typesetting via the Paged.js pipeline. Papers published here remain open access; the book is the collected, revised edition.