u/LeadingSuspect5855

Status quo

Pitman is a positional system, that means as soon as you put a letter on your lined paper you write a syllable. You can put your consonant on the line and it will represent consonant + either e|eɪ|ʌ|ō. To make clear which one of the choices you really mean, pitman uses diacritica placed before or after the literal, thus also indicating reverse syllable or simple syllable.

Imagine you ignore diacritica for a moment, then pitman has 3 levels representing:

[æ ɒ ɑː ɔː aɪ ɔɪ
ɛ ʌ eɪ əʊ/oʊ
ɪ ʊ iː uː ju aʊ]

or a bit simplified and ordered

a ī o oy
e eɪ ʌ ō
i u ū aʊ

So interestingly Pitman would put "bet" and "bate" on the same level! Something that I believed only us german speaking people would put together. But Pitman was aware of the phonographic familiarity in that regard.

You may not be aware consciously, but the english vowels are those which i call strong [a o], weak [e ʌ] (including all kinds of colored schwa sounds not only ʌ) and the lifting [i u]. And if you combine the strong and weak with the lifting vowels you get practically all diphthongs used in english including those you anglophone call long vowels.

Interestingly Pitman was aware of that it seems, at least he chose to match the levels:

strong
weak
lifting

Now Pitman has chosen to put diphthongs on the levels too per default, so

strong + [i]
weak + [i] | [o] + [u]
lifting + [u] | [a] + [u]

As you see the diphthongs use either i or u. So I could make Pitmans systems a bit easier by introducing just two diacritica, so I can make up all the diphtongs? Let's do this:

Introducing diacritica for lifting vowels

DOT • shall be the [i] dot. and DASH - represents [u]

That way my positional vowel system looks like this

strong + [i, u]
weak + [i, u]
lifting + [i, u]

Now we still have to decide whether the vowel comes before or after the consonant. Well for the diphthongs we just do what pitmaniacs always did, put the dot or dash in front of the literal. What about the others? We could use another diacriticum! rotate the dash, thick dot, or a tiny hook?

Introducing diacritica for the remaining vowels to represent preceding vowels

tiny hooks could be the first and second vowel in the respective level, but since you can rotate hooks we can also all of them ⊂⊃∩∪! Lets do this:

[a, o] -- ∩ ⊃
[e, ʌ] -- ⊂ ∪

Well that looks like a svastika, which is the sign for prosperity and luck in all countries with culture!

Testing on all 3 levels:

"bat": bt, "about": ∩b-t, "boat": b⊃t, " I'm ": •m, "our": -r
"bet, but, butt": bt, "bate": b•t
"bit": bt, "beat":b•t, "boot": b-t,"you'r": -r

What do you think? I think it's pretty neat! Let me know...