Milestones and current progress
Starlan is a new human language based on and mutually intelligible with American English. Starlan makes it possible for non-native speakers (and for children) to learn English up to 10 times faster and to minimize accent from the start.
In short:
Phonetic spelling means: words are spelled the same way they are pronounced.
On the flip side it means:
A new learner of Starlan can learn the basic pronunciation rules in about 30 minutes and IMMEDIATELY know the correct pronunciation of any word in any text!
Even without knowing that word's meaning.
And without ever having to look up pronunciation.
This means, people speaking Starlan will:
- understand American English speakers perfectly and vice versa
- learn flawless American English pronunciation up to 10 times faster
- benefit from reduced miscommunication in personal interactions
- have more time available to spend on more productive tasks
- free up more mental capacity for developing new skills and ideas
Originally, I conceived Starlan as the language for the citizens of Star City (see Star City Manifesto [1]). And originally, I called it "Star English". But eventually, I realized that having the word "English" within the name would be counter-productive.
Too many idiots would get triggered and try to waste our time if the name would indicate that it's "some new kind of English". So, I changed the name to Starlan, which is short for "star language".
Just this simple change already gives us a lot more freedom. Freedom to change and adjust things the way we see fit. Because we don't even claim that Starlan is English. We just say that Starlan is like English. So, we can freely change things however the hell we want.
And if, over time, Starlan starts deviating more and more from English, so be it! Since it doesn't have the word "English" anywhere in the name, we have the ultimate freedom to do the necessary changes.
We just want it to be very close (in terms of pronunciation) to Standard American English at the beginning. So that new learners (and their teachers) around the world quickly realize how vastly superior Starlan is compared to American English.
At a certain point, most educators and schools around the world will realize that teaching Starlan (instead of American or British English) is better because machines can convert any English text to Starlan in a heartbeat. And Starlan is mutually intelligible with English but up to 10 times easier and faster for people to learn.
There are too many incompetent idiots in charge. Everywhere.
That's the basic premise and the reason for building Star City. But instead of complaining about incompetent idiots being in charge everywhere, we just want to build a new, independent city-state. A new country on the map. With our own laws and rules. And we'll put measures in place to continuously weed out incompetent idiots. Because just like weed, idiots will continuously be popping up everywhere. That's inevitable. But we'll have a system to keep that weed in check. See "the Peter Principle" for more information on this institutional "illness".
TODO:
Develop a system that systematically prevents incompetent people from rising to the top AND systematically weeds out incompetent people who still manage to rise to the top. A system like this will probably never be 100% effective (nothing ever is). But if we could consistently weed out 80% or maybe even 90% incompetent people from top positions in Star City, we'll be way ahead of anyone else.
Communication is super-important when building a new mega-city designed to make the world a better place. And not just that. Star City aims to become the undisputed world leader in science and technology. Using science and technology we aim to turn this 100-million-people-strong mega-city into the greenest, most sustainable and most fun mega-city on the planet.
But to get there, we need to use every advantage we can get.
One crucial aspect of this mega-project will be communication. Communication between people. Communication between people who work for Star City. Communication between people who want to help.
If communication is key to success, then what hinders communication?
When a speaker is difficult to understand due to accent, that hinders communication and understanding.
When a non-native speaker has difficulty learning correct pronunciation, that hinders communication and increases the wasted time that person has to spend on learning the language.
When the correct pronunciation is unclear (because of weird spelling) and the person has to look the correct pronunciation up, that hinders communication and understanding.
The obvious solution is to REMOVE the barriers, remove the obstacles, remove the annoyances, remove the problems that make it harder for people to learn a language, harder to learn the correct pronunciation of a language, harder to learn the correct spelling of a language.
That solution is so obvious that even a blind should be able to see it.
If it wasn't for the horrendous spelling nightmare, English would be one of the easiest languages to learn. So, we'll be fixing this problem and we'll call this fix Starlan AKA Star Language.
Relying on someone else to fix the spelling problem in English is a pipe dream. That's never gonna happen. And even if it somehow miracolously does happen, it will inevitably be watered down to the point of being useless.
No matter what arguments you bring to incompetent idiots who are in charge, those idiots will prevail. So, we won't even discuss anything with those idiots. They can keep their English the way it is and we'll be using Starlan in Star City. End of story! Easy peasy.
Because the name Starlan doesn't mention the word "English" anywhere in its name, incompetent idiots don't have any business telling us what we can and can't do with Starlan. For all they know, it's a NEW LANGUAGE. So, we can do anything we want.
The intelligent question now is:
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Create a phonetic spelling version of American English.
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Call that Starlan.
That's it! Done.
Of course, it's easier said than done.
And of course, we might have a few exceptions here and there. At least in Starlan version 1.
And once we get at least 100 million people to speak and write Starlan, we can discuss the possibility of developing Starlan version 2. But we gotta start somewhere.
Even if people have to learn a few exceptions in Starlan version 1, there shouldn't be more than 1-2 hours needed to learn those exceptions. 3 hours tops. And that means: even Starlan version 1 will be light years ahead of American English in terms of ease of use and ease of learning!
And that in turn means:
New learners of Starlan will save HUNDREDS or possibly THOUSANDS of hours learning the new language. And they'll be able to know the correct pronunciation of every word from DAY ONE! Just by reading!
Just by reading a book or a newspaper, people will instantly know the correct pronunciation of EVERY word. From DAY ONE. Without looking anything up!
Of course, the mouth and the tongue of a new learner will need some time (a few days or a few weeks) to actually learn to pronounce the sounds correctly. But regardless of that, new speakers of Starlan will know, from DAY ONE and with 100% certainty (without looking it up) how any given word written in Starlan is supposed to be pronounced, how it's supposed to sound.
THAT's the big difference here!
A new learner of Starlan will also be able to immediately look up the meaning of a word they hear from someone. Because just by hearing the correct pronunciation of a word, a new learner will immediately know the correct or likely spelling of that word!
And since looking up the meaning of an unknown word will become so much easier, people — once again — will learn this new language FASTER!
At this point, nobody really knows how much faster people will be able to learn Starlan. Plus, that will depend on the learner's mother tongue. But it's quite possible that new learners whose native language is something like German or Swedish or Dutch might be able to learn Starlan 10 times faster than American English. Or, potentially, even faster than that!
Oh, and children who are being tortured — for years — with the English spelling at school, won't be subjected to this torture anymore because they'll immediately know how to spell everything they say.
And that means:
These children... the new generation will have much more of their mental power freed up to learn SCIENCE!!!
And of course, learning science cannot be just another torture for children! Learning science for children must be made so fun and exciting that they'd rather do that than playing video games. But this is a completely separate topic. In Star City, world's best education for children (for every child) will be priority number one! It has to be if Star City is to become the undisputed world leader in science and technology.
It should be obvious that with phonetic spelling, you have to pick ONE accent, ONE version of pronunciation. But why should Starlan use Standard North-American English pronunciation for its phonetic spelling? Why not use British pronunciation instead?
Or how about Australian accent? South Africa? What??... You haven't even considered the accent of the people who live in Liverpool or... Manchester? How can you not like the accent of the great science presenter and physics professor Brian Cox? That's just "racist". And "anti-science".
If you aren't "racist" or "anti-science", we should all agree that Brian Cox's Mancunian accent should be the standard for the phonetic spelling in Starlan. I mean, we certainly can't use Dara Ó Briain's accent because that guy can't really speak English to begin with.
Right?
Well, if you have a brain, you should be able to answer the question from the subtitle faster than I do.
But if you prefer an extra-long answer, here you go:
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North-American English accent (spoken in Canada and the US) has by far the largest number of native English speakers worldwide. That's it. End of story. You want more reasons? Alright.
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North-American English (NAE) accent is the easiest for non-native speakers to understand. Plus, every native English speaker around the world can easily understand American English whereas Americans sometimes struggle to understand British English speakers. I've been living in London for years and to this day I sometimes have to ask a British English speaker to repeat the same word 2, 3 and sometimes 4 times because I just don't understand what the person is saying. That NEVER happens with American English. American English is always crystal clear to me as a non-native English speaker. Just the fact that in words ending in "r" (like car, air etc.) the "r" sound is always clearly audible in NAE but gets "swallowed" in British English... just that fact alone makes the British English accent a non-starter. Remember, CLARITY and EASE OF LEARNING is our goal here.
Your preference for a particular TV presenter is irrelevant. Your cultural or national background is irrelevant. Any of your or my personal preferences are irrelevant.
If I cared about my personal preferences, I wouldn't need any changes in English spelling. According to Grammarly (a little tool I use), in a week where Grammarly had checked 35,246 words I had written I was "more accurate than 79% of Grammarly users". That's despite the fact that Grammarly users tend to be people who are already good at spelling. And: I used "more unique words than 82% of Grammarly users" i.e. not just easy to spell words in that 35,246-word sample.
Oh, and whenever I do one of those spelling tests (riddled with supposedly hard-to-spell words), I typically end up in the top 2% of all test takers. So, if anything, the atrocious spelling in English is advantageous to me because it allows me to claim a bragging right.
Starlan is not and cannot be about preferences of some individuals (or groups) with a particular skill set or background.
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Freeing up MASSIVE amounts of wasted time by eliminating the atrocities of English spelling (precious time that both, kids and adults are forced to waste)
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Freeing up people's brain power to do and develop things that are productive and help make the world a better place
This is why Starlan will be the main language in Star City. Starlan is gonna give us such an enormous advantage!
And if we succeed with Star City, everyone is probably gonna say in hindsight: "Oh, yeah, of course it was easy for them to become the undisputed world leader in science and technology. Just look at the massive advantage they got from using Starlan."
Yeah. No shit, Sherlock!
Even to someone with a pea-sized brain it should be immediately obvious that the horrendous spelling system in modern-day English results in a colossal waste of time and talent for the youngsters at school as well as for adults learning English as a second language.
It should also be obvious that this burden and wasted time put the entire society at a disadvantage. There's a price that you have to pay for that long-term.
Why then does this atrocity in the English spelling continue to exist?
It continues to exist for the same reason why the "QUERTY" keyboard layout continues to be the standard keyboard layout for computers today. Even though this legacy layout was originally designed for mechanical typewriters and was designed specifically to SLOW TYPISTS DOWN!
Stupidity and incompetence are wide-spread deceases. Also, reforms aren't free. There's always a short-term initial cost that comes with it. An initial investment is required to improve things. An initial investment that pays dividends. Roasted chickens don't just magically fly into your mouth.
Go ahead and free yourself from the slavery of the QUERTY layout by switching to my Dvorak-Booster Keyboard Layout right now!
Will you do it? No, you probably won't. Because the shackles of the QUERTY layout have become so familiar to you that you find them comfy. So, rather than spending 3 hours on learning a better keyboard layout, you prefer to be shackled by the legacy chains of a keyboard layout that was designed to slow you down.
How does the above paragraph make you feel? There are only a few possible options...
People don't and won't just randomly switch their main language to a different one. Even if the only difference is spelling.
For people to change their main language to Starlan, something has to happen on such a LARGE scale... it would be akin to the movement of the tectonic plates on the planet. At least as far as the lives of the individuals in question are concerned. A MAJOR change in the lives of those people has to happen.
And that is exactly what WILL happen in the case of Starlan.
This will happen when we start building Star City (at the latest). And it will be initiated long before we physically start building this city. It will be initiated when we start building the community of people. People who want Star City to become reality.
The Star City project will change people's lives to such a magnitude that changing their main language to Starlan will actually be a minor issue.
Not only will Starlan be the official language of Star City (and thus required for citizens to know), we will make double and triple sure that these people will WANT to switch to this new language.
We'll make sure that people will be thrilled to learn and adopt this new language LONG before the first stone of Star City's physical foundations is laid.
A radical calendar reform with a new calendar system will be yet another thing that will be different in Star City. Nearly everything will be radically different in Star City. That's why switching to Starlan will feel like a "normal" thing to do.
I want to add a third point that list under the heading "Why American English pronunciation". I didn't want to write that down initially but the feelings associated with it keep coming up. So, I need to write it down in order to let it go. I need to "release" those haunting feelings into the wild. And I also think that sharing this might help others.
So, my third reason as to why North-American English (NAE) must be the basis for Starlan is because the clarity that's built-in into NAE pronunciation (see point 2) also eliminates embarrassment for people communicating in the language. In that point 2 I said:
I've been living in London for years and to this day I sometimes have to ask a British English speaker to repeat the same word 2, 3 and sometimes 4 times because I just don't understand what the person is saying.
And let me tell you a secret...
In all those cases where that happened, the typical situation was this:
The speakers in all those cases were people who must have grown up in England and they didn't appear to have any major accent. For all I could tell they were all speaking "standard" British English.
And every time I couldn't understand a word they were saying I felt like the dumbest MF in the world!
The level of embarrassment I experienced there is hard to put into words!
Imagine this:
You don't understand a word and you ask the speaker to repeat it. OK, so far so good. Nothing out of the ordinary. That happens to everyone.
But then... the speaker repeats it and you STILL don't have even the slightest clue what he or she is saying. Not even a clue of what they might mean!
You ask them to repeat it again. And AGAIN... you don't even have the slightest clue of what they might be saying! They seem to be speaking normally but you have absolutely no clue what word they are uttering!
After asking the speaker to repeat the same word 3 or 4 times, I usually just give up. Because I can't bear the feeling of embarrassment. In my mind, I think that the speaker must think that I'm brain-dead retarded because I can't understand a simple word they are saying.
So, what I usually end up doing is: I pretend to have understood whereas in reality I haven't! I just give up because I'm feeling so embarrassed. Maybe this is because I have unusually high standards, who knows.
My point is: the level of embarrassment I experience in such moments is unfathomable. But this has only ever happened to me with British English. With native speakers who didn't appear to have any noticeable accent.
On the flip side though: This sort of thing has NEVER happened to me with American English.
The only issue with American English pronunciation is the occasional difficulty distinguishing between "can" and "can't". But this is something native speakers of American English struggle just as much with. I believe this is the only deficiency of American English pronunciation. When pronouncing "can't" quickly and when the context could mean both "can" and "can't" the "t" in "can't" can be difficult to hear.
Aside from that, the clarity of pronunciation in American English is so much greater than in British English, there's no contest. They aren't even on the same level when it comes to clarity in pronunciation.
British news anchors speak very clearly. But that's because they are specifically trained to do so. Try watching a "regular" British TV show where the speakers aren't news anchors and you'll quickly find that you need subtitles. This sort of thing is not there with American English. All Americans and Canadians can be easily understood without subtitles.
I'm sharing this here because I can't be the only one who experiences things this way. There must be countless other people who feel the same.
And that means:
When deciding "which pronunciation or accent" to use for phonetic spelling, there's NOTHING for consideration that comes even close to North-American English! Not even close.
And if you try to come up with some BS like "oh, in America, the Texans speak differently than Pennsylvanians" etc., my reply to you is gonna be:
STOP the bullshit!
Regardless of what regional accent one might speak, there's a thing called "Standard American English". And EVERY English speaker in the WORLD understands that perfectly. So, we'll use that as a basis for phonetic spelling in Starlan.
Last time I checked no Hollywood movie has ever been re-dubbed into "Pennsylvanian English" or "Texan English" or British English etc. Standard American English seems to work for every Hollywood movie ever produced and all English speakers in the world understand it. It's a "miracle"!
And if there are 2 different standard pronunciations for a word like in "either", we'll just pick one and that's it. Things are less complicated if you don't deliberately try to complicate things.
As for that little problem with "can't" in American English, there is a simple fix for that:
In British English, there can never be a mix-up between "can" and "can't". So, we'll just borrow the British pronunciation of "can't" for our phonetic spelling in Starlan. Easy! In British "can't" the "a" is a long a sound like in "father".
On this resources page here I'll be adding potentially useful resources and links to potential allies.