Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "I updated the alphabet. What do you think?" video.

  1. Naturally, as is so very common with these things, no attempt to address the vowels (we write them using five-ish characters. Depending on dialect and how you count, English has anywhere from 10 to 20 vowels. The problem should be obvious), and no concern for the ability to actually write the blasted thing quickly (a large part of the reason why the lower case letters are the way they are, though not the entirity of it). And little concern for why words are spelled the way they are (and thus what changes would need to be made to support the substitutions), though it's possible I just mised those if they were present, as I was somewhat distracted at some points. There's a reason why Conlang communities generally have Very mixed opinions on English spelling reforms (basically: it's where a lot of people start out, so no one wants to discourage it, really, but they're also almost universally awful when you start actually considering the practicalities, because they tend to ignore an awful lot of factors that are very relevant to creating a usable orthography, nevermind one you can actually get people to adopt.)
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  2. Oddly, English 'q' is just what you get when, as an English speaker, you try to say 'kw'. It gets its own character entirely because the result is a different sound formed in a different part of the mouth that does actually appear as its own thing in other langauges (and, naturally, printers). No idea why that resulted in qu being normalised rather than qw though.
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