Onyx

Onyx is a phonetic steno theory that I was working on around early 2025.

It was an attempt to make an extremely simple, accent-independent phonetic theory with the goal of maximum consistency, with minimal mandatories, while still being very short and open to heavy user briefing.

I found myself frustrated with how much the theories we tend to use today embed about the specific accent and brief preferences of their author. I have since moved on to making a fully orthographic system called Pinchord, which solves this problem in a different way (see Theory Development).

No public dictionary was ever made for Onyx, so it's here now to hopefully serve as inspiration for anyone making their own theory. It's been over a year since I made it though, so I don't remember a whole lot D:

Most of Onyx's secret sauce was its syllabic splitting with a regular outline grammar, and that's mostly all I remember about the theory.

It developed from Lapwing, and eventually used a custom layout. In using Lapwing, I noticed a lot of entire families of conflicts that seemed completely unnecessary, and that's even after Lapwing removed some Plover inconsistencies. Onyx, as far as I'm aware, got down to only having homophonic conflicts (when two words sound the same but are spelled differently).

Namely:

Managing homophones is somewhat of a dark art (which is why I eventually went ortho :p), but Onyx used a few ortho vowels (oo/oa, ea/a_e), ortho c, kn, wh, and wr starters, and of course avoided some homophones that cross word boundaries.

I probably had more to say about phonetic theory complexity a year ago, but now I just think chorded typing is the way to go (see Pinchord :p)

The content on this page is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0