So, remember awhile back how I showed off a writing system I created for a conlang I'm working on? Well, I made an interesting discovery recently. As it turns out, someone else had a very similar idea to mine... in 1867. Visible Speech was invented by Alexander Melville Bell (father of the telephone inventor Graham) as a tool for speech therapy. There are a number of striking similarities between the two.

Both of us chose to represent place of articulation as parabolas, and add extra markings to those parabolas to represent the type of sound being made. We both made the plain/default parabola be an unvoiced fricative, added a line in the center to indicate voicing, and added a ~ to represent nasals, though we put it in different places on the parabola. The directions of our parabolas also lined up, as they are a visual representation of the placement of the tongue and/or lips in the mouth at each place of articulation.

There are a few differences as well. Bell's system was designed for English as a direct replacement of the Latin alphabet, so it is a full left-to-right alphabet with a full complementary system for vowel sounds, whereas mine is a right-to-left abjad designed for a fictional language. Each of our systems also have consonant sounds which do not appear in each other's systems due to our language's differing phonologies. Bell's, for instance, has a distinction between "th" and "s" requiring an extra marking to distinguish them, and mine has velar fricatives which do not exist in English.

So it is not a perfect match, but it is very close. Despite our different purposes for creating these systems, our design goals were actually quite similar - we both wanted to create a system which visually represented each sound in our language in a simple, streamlined, and easy-to-learn manner.