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to Applied Grapho-Phonology
Initial Teaching Alphabets
Systematic Spelling Schemes
Orthographic Reform Proposals
Restored English Spelling
Steve Bett, Ph.D.

 
English is only 40% phonemic (i.e., only 40% alphabetic and consistent).  This is an affront to logic and makes learning unnecessarily difficult and frustrating. 
The consistency of English spelling can be easily improved.  There are three popular approaches to the problem of the restoring the alphabet.  We say restore because Old English was 90% alphabetic. 
  1. Eliminate redundant letters - almost every letter is redundant and silent in some word
  2. Eliminate code overlaps - no letter or digraph should have more than one pronunciation.
  3. Eliminate all inconsistencies - 1-to-1 correspondence between graphemes & phonemes.
The initial teaching alphabet (ITA) eliminated redundant letters and most code overlaps.  ITA was a medium not a method and although it worked with any approach to the teaching of reading and writing, it would have worked better (and been easier to study) if it had been associated with a method.  ITA was 200 times easier than the traditional orthography but when used with a mix of teaching methods it proved to be only 25% better over a four year period.  The transition to TO was never specifically taught until the end of the ITA era (early 1970's).  Some who were taught using ITA blame the medium on their continuing problems in matching dictionary spellings.  Such claims have never been proved.  What was proved was that young children could learn to express themselves in ITA four times as fast as a control group could in TO.

Educational fads, particularly those that add cost and administrative inconvenience, are usually short lived.  Such was the case with ITA.  No major publisher currently supports this approach to the teaching of reading, writing, and spelling.

POETAETOE (ITA spelling) (NS - new spelling)

ITA was based on New Spelling (Ellis, 1932), a notational scheme that always represented "long" vowels as ae, ee, ie, oe, ue.  "Ie sae nue boi goe tel mee whaat yue see."  This is consistent and readable but doesn't look much like TO. 

POATAYTO (RES spelling)

The newest scheme called restored spelling (RES) is more complicated than ITA but closer to TO.  In fact it is more traditional (pre 1100) than traditional orthography which dates from 1755.  The difference is that RES spells current pronunciation the way it would have been spelled in Old English.  TO contains many silent letters because the spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation.  TO often spells an ancient pronunciation: some words are spelled the same as they were in 1100 but we no longer pronounce them that way. [e.g., knight/nyt, enough/enuf]

"TIME" used to be pronounced tim-uh.  "GIVE" used to be pronounced giv-uh (Cf: given). In RES, these words would be spelled TYM and GIV. In ITA, TIEM and GIV.

The "long" or free vowels in RES would be represented as ai, ee, y, oa, ue in situations where they need to be distinguished from checked vowels, i.e., when followed by a consonant.  Otherwise they would be represented as ay, e, I/y, o, u as in say, me, I/my, silo, guru.  Hence:  "I say nu boy go tel me wot u se."  RES looks mor lyk English becaus it employs positiona'l speling, just lyk TO.

RES is not phonemic since there is more than one way to spell a sound.  It is systematic and predictable:  There is only one way to spell a sound in a particular position in a word.  The absence of confusing code overlaps make it a viable candidate for a new ITM (initial teaching medium) in the schools.  It is a great place to start learning to read and write.  No new rules are needed to transition to TO since RES identifies all of the consistent rules in traditional English spelling.  The transition is one of adding exceptions to the rules. (see heterographs).

Teachers interested in using RES as a new initial teaching medium in the classroom or for a research study may contact Dr. Steve Bett for details.
 
A dictionary for RES has yet to be completed but there is one for several variants of new spelling (NS, ALC Fonetik).  An automated converter is available to convert any passage to ALC Fonetik.
 Alphabetical Listing of Spelling Related Documents
To return to the INDEX, click the browser's BACK button

 
ac-dictionary     ( Aurally coded dictionary idea )
alphabet.html    (Alphabetic characters shapes - ancient origins)
autbtrspel.html  (Automated spelling converter for ALC fonetic -BTRSPL)

CKS-nut.html        (English Phoneme Inventory - Chekt spelng)
CKS chktspl.html  (Chekt Spelling Table - large file) 
cut spelling           (cutting out redundant letters while retaining pattern)
dewey dew-add     (G. Dewey's frequency tables: 451 ways to spell 41 sounds) 

ebonics.html  (Ebonics - Black English, Pidjins, and Creoles)
evalalfa          (Evaluation & ranking of alternative notations and writing systems)
getizbrg.html  (Gettysburg Address in Reformed Spelling) 
globish.html   (Globish-Global English, by M. Gogate)
glossdb.html  (Glossary of Spelling Terms used in SSS forum)
greek.html     (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences for Greek) -defective

henu.html      (The Strucutre of Egyptian Hieroglyphics) missing graphics
imptabl.html  (A Typology of Notational Systems for English)
interspl.html  (International Spelling for English by Valerie Yule) large file 
latin-1.html    (An augmented romic character set for web documents) 
letrmatrix.html  (Letter Matrix illustrating alternative notations for English)

map-IPA         (Mapping orthographies onto IPA)
pidjin.html        (Pidjins and Creoles by Valerie Yule)
publish-it.html  (How to publish on the Web - intro. to HTML) 
PV-7               (An Alphabet for English - Nu Folik & Chekt Spelng) 2, 3, 4
RES                (Restored English Spelling - vowel table)

saundz-eng     (Graphical representation of English sounds)
schwa.html     (Discussion of the schwa and number of vowels)
shaw-pref        (Preface to book by George Bernard Shaw)
simpspel.html  (Simplified Spelling Page, Link to Bibliography)
spel-fun          (Spelling Humor - TwainSpel - Reform in Stages)
spel-links.html (Home page - links to other spelling related pages)
spel-link.html   (short version - loads quickly) 
spelling-day.html (Sept. 9, 1999 is Spelling Day & Hangul Day) 
spel-inv          (Spelling as a Social Invention by Valerie Yule)
spelng.html    (The Trouble with Spelling) - History of English Writing
syllabics        (Vowels for Bosnia -  Humerous misunderstanding of syllabics)

twian-spl.html          (Mark Twain on simplified spelling) 
train-cadmus.html    (Mark Twain on reform of Egyptian - Cadmus) 

vowels.html       (English Vowels - click for vowel sound) no sound files
webster.html     (Noah Webster - short biography)
wrld-ortho.html  (world orthography - broad romic notation) 
 
http://pages.whowhere.com/cgi-bin/bedit      email-sss
http://www.delphi.com/spelreform go to bottom of page, select forum
 
To return to this page, click on the browser's back button

Most of pages listed above are under construction. The main problem is getting the time to upload  all of the graphics  into the images file.  On this kind of server, all the links must be absolute - i.e., the full URL.  Relataive links do not work.

A new 20 Mb website is being developed at http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangoh/555
The advantage here is that files can be uploaded via ftp - making it much faster.  Code name for new site: rapidrytr.

A list of sites sites dealing with spelling reform can be found at  http://www.delphi.com/spelreform . 
To join a discussion group on simplified spelling, contact anyone on the list at http://www.nik.dircon.co.uk/spelling/email_d.html

Your comments and critiques are welcomed.