Fonora is an experimental open-source writing system that represents spoken sounds using a small set of intuitive symbols.
Instead of memorizing hundreds of letters and spelling rules, readers learn a handful of symbols that describe how sounds are physically produced in the mouth.
Designed to be phonetic, minimal, and language independent, Fonora explores whether human speech can be written in a simpler, more universal way.
What Is Fonora?
Fonora is an open-source research project that explores a simple question:
What if writing was based on how speech is produced rather than how words are traditionally spelled?
Most writing systems evolved over centuries and often contain complex spelling rules, silent letters, and historical inconsistencies.
Fonora takes a different approach. Every symbol is derived from a physical action inside the human vocal system. Written text becomes a visual representation of speech itself.
The long-term goal is to create a highly learnable phonetic script that can be used to represent spoken language across linguistic boundaries.
How It Works
Fonora is built from only nine core symbols.
Five symbols represent where sounds are produced in the mouth and vocal tract.
Four symbols modify those locations to create different sound types.
Together they form a compact system capable of representing a wide range of human speech sounds.
Places of Articulation
The primary symbols describe where a sound is produced:
Sound Modifiers
Additional symbols modify those positions:
By combining locations and modifiers, Fonora generates its complete sound inventory.
Why Fonora?
Learnable
A small number of visual building blocks can generate an entire writing system.
Phonetic
Words are written according to pronunciation rather than historical spelling.
Universal
The system is designed around speech sounds rather than any specific language.
Visual
Symbols reflect how sounds are physically produced, making pronunciation easier to infer.
Minimal
Every symbol serves a specific purpose. The system aims to remain compact and efficient.
Open
Fonora is an open-source experiment that can evolve through testing, research, and community contribution.
Project Goals
Create a highly learnable writing system
Reduce memorization and spelling complexity
Represent pronunciation directly
Support multiple spoken languages
Remain visually simple and compact
Stay open, accessible, and community-driven
Experimental Research Project
Fonora is an active research project.
The symbol inventory, phonetic mappings, encoding rules, and tooling continue to evolve through experimentation and real-world testing.
This website serves as both documentation for the system and a laboratory for exploring new approaches to written language.
The goal of Fonora is to create a universal phonetic writing system where the symbols themselves describe how sounds are produced, allowing readers and speakers to infer pronunciation directly from the written form.
Translator
Type a word or phrase to get a Fonora spelling via the IPA pipeline. Each word is translated separately. Edit the result with the symbol keyboard.
Keyboard
Type symbols in the area below. Number keys and letter shortcuts insert symbols when focused.
Keyboard mapping
Number and letter shortcuts loaded from language rules.
Number
Letter
Symbol
Label
Kind
Sound Grid
Five places of articulation × four manners. The vowel indicator ⚬ (keyboard 0) is documented under Modifiers and used in the vowel table, not in this grid.
Derived / Reserved Sounds
Reversed-order and modifier-pair sounds defined outside the main grid. Status: defined, experimental, or reserved.
Symbols
Sound
IPA
Status
Explanation
Vowels
Vowels use v3 grammar: simple vowels are ⚬X (2 symbols); diphthongs are ⚬XᵔY (4 symbols). Recipes combine the vowel indicator ⚬, place or manner glyphs, and glide ᵔ.
Vowel mapping
Symbols
Key
Lexical set
Recipe
IPA
Example
Reverse Lookup
Type a sound (e.g. p, sh, ng) to find its symbol combination.
Pronunciation Testing
Evaluate IPA → Fonora encoding across languages. Review outputs, tag failures, and export results.
Multilingual test set for validating one IPA pipeline across languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Arabic). Use the dialect comparison set to compare en-us, en-gb, en-uk-rp, en-au, en-nz, and en-sc on tomato, water, car, dance, and route.
Pick one or more categories, then generate 20–50 test cards.
Generate fake but readable sound strings to test encoder/decoder consistency.
Paste words, one per line.
Pronunciation Validation Mode
Validate whether Fonora preserves pronunciation through the full pipeline:
English → IPA → Fonora phonemes → symbols → recovered phonemes → recovered IPA.
Single word
Batch testing
V3 vowel architecture validation
Validates the dedicated vowel word set through the full pipeline. Every output must use
⚬X or ⚬XᵔY — no legacy
⚬⚬ marker.
Alphabet
Experiment with primary symbols (5 places, vowel indicator ⚬, 4 manner modifiers).
Apply to update the whole app for this browser session, or edit docs/language-rules.md and reload.
Primary symbols
Phoneme inventory
Language-agnostic sound → symbol reference, recomposed from primary symbols above.
Keyboard typing shortcuts are on the Keyboard tab.
Consonants
Phoneme key
Symbol
IPA
Notes
Derived
Phoneme key
Symbol
IPA
Notes
Vowels
Phoneme key
Symbol
IPA
Notes
Fonora Reader
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Fonora Samples
Speech-based writing across languages
Fonora is designed to represent speech, not spelling. These samples show how paragraph-length text from different languages may appear when rendered through the Fonora phonetic system.
The goal is to visually demonstrate how Fonora can represent speech across languages and dialects — using the same symbol inventory regardless of the source writing system.
Fonora is experimental. Samples may change as the phonetic mapping system improves.
These samples are for visual and phonetic testing only. Fonora mappings may evolve over time. Excerpts are from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1 (public domain).