Miscellany № 96: EPA
Esteemed Norwegian typefoundry Monokrom (who, of course, designed the fonts used here at Shady Characters), tweeted a while back about a Unicode character called the “Wiggly Exclamation Mark”. Here’s the relevant snippet of text:
I’d never come across this mark before, and some digging revealed that it came not from the Unicode standard itself but rather a proposal to add characters relating to the so-called “English Phonotypic Alphabet”, or EPA.1 The EPA, in turn, is an English spelling reform that was promoted during the 1840s by Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis. Needless to say, Ellis and Pitman failed to make much of a dent in English’s famously obtuse orthography.2 One need only compare the proposed spellings of words like “hwen” (when), “acsent” (accent) and “menʃun” (mention) with their current forms to see how well it all panned out.