The letterforms of the Roman alphabet were all originally pictograms representing entire words (A is for Ox etc). These were adapted to phonetic use and in many cases these symbols do a great job of representing all the possible sounds in a language. This is most notable in modern day Italian or German, where the twenty-six characters of the alphabet are almost perfect in their ability to represent the spoken language.

Phonetically speaking, English is unsuccessful due to the way spelling has evolved. The twenty-six symbols do not consistently represent a unique sound, instead they can represent several sounds. Due to its lack of precision and indeed confusion, learning the English system can be difficult.

There have been many attempts to develop a new system of characters to adequately represent sounds. Attempts have also been made to modify the Roman alphabet in order to represent the many sound units upon which all words in English are built. However ‘the forms of our letters are so well established that any attempt to modify them results in deterioration, not enhancement, of comprehension.’ (Jerry Kelly, Texts on Type: p92)

With the English system seemingly so woefully inadequate in terms of Phonetics, it may be more fruitful to abandon that avenue of reform in favor of another. So in order to find a way that would make writing, reading - and by extension, learning easier - we can look at frequency to determine the rules.
A cliché is a saying, expression or idea, which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning; rendering it a stereotype. The term is generally used in a negative context.

The word originally comes from the French clicher, ‘to stereotype’, originally ‘to copy’. Historically used in the days of moveable type when letters were set with metal printing plates. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a commonly used phrase as one single piece of metal. These single slugs of metal were known as a cliché or a stereotype.

Based on the evidence of the Oxford English Corpus, the 25 most commonly used words account for about one third of all written material in the English language. The first 100 make up about one-half, and the first 300 make up about sixty-five percent. The frequency of these written words can be considered clichés, in its original context. In terms of frequency, it is most useful to count base words or lemmas rather than individual inflectional word-forms; for example, climbs, climbing, and climbed are counted as examples of the lemma climb. Just ten different lemmas (the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I) account for a remarkable 25% of all the one billion words used in the Oxford English Corpus.

These cliché logograms have been created to compliment the existing alphabet. When notating written language, as a time and space saving exercise these clichés can be replaced by a written or pictorial symbol intended to represent the whole word. These symbols can be used in conjunction with our existing Latin alphabet.

The cliché symbols are effectively an abbreviation or a shortened form of the word. Using the ampersand (&) as an example: The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for ‘and’. The ampersand comes in many different forms and because of its ubiquity; it is generally no longer considered a ligature, but a logogram.

This approach of course is imperfect. A language built on a combination of phonetics and Pictograms is already confusing, but by being flexible with the rules we can make it faster and perhaps easier. The main flaw in a modern fully pictographic alphabet (e.g. Chinese) is that it requires well over two thousand characters to be learned (as opposed to twenty-six). By utilizing pictograms for only our commonly used words we essentially take a short cut, which gives us the building blocks to learn the language quicker.
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