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THE MOOP WRITING SYSTEM "a kind of alphabet"

By Richard Lewis Roth

I don't expect anyone to closely study this personal writing system, but I describe it to clearly show that it is a writing system.

Just as it is handy to learn and remember the letters of our alphabet in their standard ABC order, I have arranged the Moop system of "sound categories" into a standard order, but not related to the ABC order.

I arbitrarily defined and placed vowel categories first followed by consonants ordered as they appeared in a standard phonetic table. This order was based on natural groupings according to how each sound's vibrations were made and in what particular part of the voice apparatus.

Some MOOP sound categories arbitrarily consist of just one sound, e.g.: sound categories #2 (schwa) and #16 (see below), but most have 2 or more sounds, e.g.: #1 (the "generalized short vowel": a, e, i, o, u--except schwa), #5 (the "y" diphthong: ay, oi, ie, ee) and # 12 (s, z) .

I have developed far more shapes than the 21 that would represent the "sound categories" so I allow each sound category to be represented by a slowly growing number of "alternate shapes."

English has a cursive writing system as well as a printed one. Likewise, I have three MOOP "modes": "hovering," "linearly connected" and "solid shape." In practice I freely mix them up and moreover have recently added to them, in a subordinate way, a kind of personal "shorthand" and a personal variation on ordinary cursive writing.

There are symbols that correspond more or less to periods and commas, and other more special symbols such as "mistake, don't count as a sound" and "interrupted, unfinished thought". The most important special symbol, having numerous alternate forms, is "word separator." Since I want to freely place shapes and spaces, I can't use spaces as word separators; a symbol is necessary.

I represent numbers using the base 4 system which only uses 4 digits: 0, 1, 2, and 3.

I seldom use numbers, therefore I didn't want to restrict the use of a lot of good shapes to this purpose. For my recent MOOPS I usually write the MOOP number somewhere on the canvas. for example in MOOP 210 I write the characters 3102 which in base 4 equals the base 10 number 210.
3102 (base 4) = (3 x 4 3) +(1 x 4 2) + (0 x 4) + (2 x 1) = 3x64 + 1x16 + 0 + 2 = 210

Since most sound categories embrace more than one sound and each sound category has several alternate shapes, a given "spelling" could represent a number of different sounding words and a given word could be "spelled" a number of different ways, for example:

Reading across horizontally, all these sequences "spell" the same range of possible words. These would include: "cat," "god," "kid," "get," "cud," etc. It's hard to read such writing. Even I can have great difficulty unless I recall the general subject matter.

I list the 21 sound categories:

1. The "generalized short vowel" including a,e,i,o, and au; as in cat, get, in, hot, caught.

2. "shwa," the lazy, most middle vowel, usually written "upside down e": as in the o of collide, the a of asleep, the e of the.

3. Short vowels plus "r" as in fir, car, soar, where.

4."w" diphthong: ow, oo, oa as in cow, food, and boat.

5. "y" diphthong: ay, ie, ee, oi as in say, pie, meet and oil.

STOPS: VOICED / UNVOICED

6. b /p

7. d /t

8. g /k

9. /t as in button (when pronounced "but'n")

FRICATIVES: VOICED / UNVOICED

10. v /f

11. th (then)/ th thin)

12. z /s

13. sh as in shoe/ si as in Asia

14. -/h

AFFRICATES:

15. ch as in choose/ j as in Joshua

NASALS:

16. m

17. n

18. ng as in sing

LIQUIDS:

19. L and r (the "r" without preceding short vowel)

GLIDES:

20. w as in win

21. y as in young

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END

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