Does Script Design Affect How Machines Hear?

*N'Ko was built for phonetic precision. This experiment asks whether that precision shows up in speech recognition.* When Solomana Kante designed N'Ko in 1949, he made a rule that no other major writing system fully follows: every sound gets exactly one character. Every character represents exactly one sound. No exceptions, no digraphs, no context-dependent pronunciations. If you hear it, you can write it. If you see it, you can say it. This was a design choice for human readers. Kante wanted a script that West African children could learn without memorizing exceptions. A script where literacy was achievable in weeks, not years. But there's a second beneficiary of that design decision that Kante couldn't have anticipated: automatic speech recognition systems. Modern ASR works by solving an alignment problem. You have a stream of audio. You have a sequence of characters. You need to learn which sounds map to which characters. The less ambiguous that mapping, the easier the alignment problem. The easier the alignment problem, the fewer errors the decoder makes.