The Anglish Moot:Orthographic guidelines

The following orthographic guidelines are of course all up for debate, but they are intended at least to lay the groundwork for a standardized spelling system for the Anglish project.

Overview
When composing Anglish articles and otherwise writing in Anglish on this wiki, it is general practice for editors to spell all included Modern English words in their usual form, and to spell any neologisms according to the typical patterns of English orthography either on a common-sense basis or in accordance with philological theory. To put it a different way, Anglish spelling is essentially the same as Modern English spelling, as newly created or revived words are adapted to fit in with the general "look" of English text.

There are, however, cases where some editors argue that the spelling of a particular Modern English word of pure stock should be altered for Anglish use. For instance, the words "tongue" and "island" are both of pure Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin, but both have "corrupted" spellings in the sense that they strayed under foreign influence to "unnatural" forms. Alternatives such as "tung" and "iland," among some others, have been proposed, but clear consensus on these issues has yet to be reached.

The letters
When written according to the guidelines outlined above, Anglish only really uses the letters of the ordinary English alphabet:

A B C D E F G H I J* K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z*


 * Note: In the matter of J and Z, these letters appear only very seldom in pure English words, examples being "jowl" and "freeze." An argument can be made that these two letters need not be used in Anglish, since, in the case of the examples, "jowl" can be re-formed as "chowl" (perhaps a more legitimate form based on its etymology), and "freeze" can be respelled as "freese." However, such changes, as well as the aforementioned special cases of words like "tongue" and "island" must be discussed and consensus reached.