Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[Mauro]

Or should the letters reflect the exact position of the tongue and the corresponding airflow?  

Hangul, the Korean script, was supposedly based on that idea.

But even without going that far, one could at least use similar shapes for corresponding voiced and unvoiced consonants (P-B, F-V, T-D, K-G, S-Z, Sh-Zh, Tsh-Dj), with a systematic detail (like an extra stroke in a specific position, or a left-right reversal) to indicate the voicing. 

And make lower case be just a smaller version of upper case. (Cyrillic does that for most letters, but then it has "m" as lower case "T"...). 

And use only short (x-height) letters for vowels, even in upper case, to leave space for diacritics (if and when needed).

All the best, --stolfi

I think the development of a script is more a question of its specific history and of backward compatibility rather than the result of rational decisions. This can be seen everywhere, not only in scripts: why is the layout of a standard keyboard so weird and sub-optimal? Why is the machine-level language and registry organization of today's Intel processor so strange (and sub-optimal) (*)? It's a combination of 1) an initial system which could not foresee the future developments and was unfit from the start, 2) in combination with technological limitations which forced sub-optimal choices, but 3) which nonetheless estabilished a (sub-optimal) standard to which the future developments were compelled to adhere for backward compatibility. I think it also works for scripts, so I would not expect a 'grassroot' script to be optimal nor coherent. Scripts (and languages) also drift, apparently randomly, in time.

A freshly designed script, of course, could be much more 'rational', but this surely requires a lot of work and especially a lot of knowledge about phonetics and linguistics, and it would be hard to get people to accept it (even if there are examples where this happened, but starting from no script at all, as for Cree, or in the case of Hangul from a script which was based on a foreign script and was replaced for nationalistic reasons, if I'm not mistaken).



(*) I'm sorry but I can't find now a truly cool reference article on this aspect. Iirc it was on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which I highly recommend if you're into this kind of stuff (also great articles on reverse-engineerig old high-end, for the era, electronic parts, ie. from the Apollio missions, and analog computers, which were, simply, astonishing pieces of machinery).