I’ve been dabbling in English Gregg (or rather simply trying to read texts) and now that I identify letters more quickly than before and without confusing them as much as in the past, I find English DJS to be quite legible, apart for the occasional short forms or unusual diphtongs that are not used in French DJS which I have to just try and guess.
I’m also increasingly aware of how le, la, les, de la, takes up space (and probably writing time), and since French DJS was never supposed to be used as a standalone system, but rather as a complement to English DJS, I was wondering if it would be acceptable AND viable to just re-use English DJS “the” in French as an ideogram, i.e. taking it to stand for “le, la” / “, de la” instead of actually transcribing those words phonetically.
Since “the” would be read as and isolated “ye” in French, it could not possibly mean anything other than “the” (le, la) so it would not be confused with anything else. The only possible ambiguity I can think of at the moment would be when using this symbol along with a word ending in -ain/aine or -in/-ine, whereby there would be no way to tell the gender of the corresponding word since the endings are transcribed identically. That said, this ambiguity already exists with “un, une” which are both transcribed as a dot.
And maybe the plural could be indicated by adding a small circle. I know this really looks like makeshift arrangements but it’s really been bothering me lately and I can’t think of a more appropriate system to get rid of those huge French articles.
What do you think?
Thanks.