Why don't you spell to aid pronunciation?

We get this question a lot about the kasahorow spelling style from people who have spent decades mastering the intricacies of a given language:
- where are the diacritics?
- where are the tone markings?
- how can a learner pronounce this word correctly if you don't spell it exactly the way I think it should be spelt?
- prosody, where is it?
- why do you have spaces between words that I combined as a student?

The short answer is that writing and speaking are different. We write for easy reading by people who already speak the language.

We suggest our dictionary users to build a relationship with a person who already speaks the language. We believe in the power of relationships and so what better way to learn the pronunciation of Kumasi Twi than from your best friend in Kumasi?

Another answer is that a kasahorow language is a written format that can be used to represent the speech of many residents from different cities and towns around the world. So the correct pronunciation of a word is whatever the hearer will understand.

More important to us is to avoid ambiguity in the written form. This means that we cannot write jokes that rely on ambiguity to be funny. We can write all other humourous forms though. Most of all, we have gained the ability to write African languages quicker. If you don't have to use accents, and special tone marks, you can write more with fewer keystrokes. With the speed you gain in composition, you can even write more words to explain something in more than one way. We think that speed of composition is a great advantage!

We are still very interested in adding many different pronunciations (male, female, child, location variants) of each word to our online dictionaries as audio aids. If you can help speed us along, please email us at help@kasahorow.org.