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This is a web version of part of an essay published by the Simplified Spelling Society in 1998. This page has been designed for easy printing. For reading, you may want to format your browser to increase the type size. 1/05/97 PV7-1.html Sound-signs for English
 

Alphabets for English PV #7   A Personal View by Steve Bett Introducing Nu Folik Notation

Does English have an alphabet?

An alphabet is an ordered set of sound-signs. The original idea was to have one and only one sound sign (grapheme) for every significant segment of sound (phoneme). To the extent that writing systems have consistent symbol to sound (grapheme-phoneme) correspondences they are considered alphabetic or phonemic. Ideally there should be one and only one symbol for every significant speech sound in the language. Most European writing systems (other than English) have had several reforms to bring the graphic representation of their language close to the ideal. To reestablish the alphabetic principle, English would have to have a similar reform to remove letters that have gone silent or become superfluous and limit the number of inconsistent orthographic options.

Since the year 1100, the development or English orthography has largely ignored the alphabetic principle and the idea that each letter (or digraph) should be a sound sign. The result has been a chaotic and inconsistent orthography and the dubious distinction of being "the world's worst spelled language." English has a minimum of 40 significant speech sounds. In a phonemic or alphabetic system, these sounds would be spelled about 40 ways. In the traditional English writing system, they are spelled over 400 ways.

English needs an alphabet: A consistent way of spelling that provides a guide to pronunciation. This web page explores a way that such an alphabet could be developed which has grapheme-phoneme correspondences consistent with other European countries and yet deviates little from one of the dozen or so alternative spellings for each sound found in English. This solution is called New Follick [Nu Folik].

New Follick, the proposed notational system for the broad transcription of the sounds in English speech, is based on the Spanish/Portuguese inspired script developed by Mont Follick around 1935. NuFolik is simiar to H. Lingren's Phonetic A (1970) and to such derivitive notations as Chekt Spelling and Unigraf. NF is also similar to the broad romic notations developed by Daniel Jones and Henry Sweet around 1900. The basic difference is that New Follick does not use any special characters (characters that are not found in the ASCII character set or typewriter keyboard). This makes Nu Folik an IPA based pronunciation guide that is relatively easy to read, write, and remember.

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Note: New Follick is an ASCII - IPA notation (also referred to as an "askey-bet" or "phonascii"). ASCII refers to the limited Roman character set available on all computer systems and typewriter keyboards. IPA refers to the notational system endorsed by International Phonetic Association for the narrow transcription of any language. IPA notation is consistent with most European sound values.

Background

In a strict sense, English doesn't have an alphabet. It uses the same inventory of letter shapes as many other languages but, unlike these other writing systems, the graphemes are not associated with the phonemes of the language in any systematic way. The traditional English orthography (TO) does not adhere to an alphabetic principle. As a consequence: spelling is an unreliable guide to pronunciation and the ability to correctly pronounce a word is no guarantee that it can correctly spelt.
 

Unlike most languages, English ignores the alphabetic principle that spelling should show pronunciation. -- C. Upward

The way a particular language community pronounces words and the words themselves change over time. To retain a simple and consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondence, writing systems must be periodically adjusted or reformed. By not making periodic reforms, Noah Webster argued, "Letters, the most useful invention that ever blessed mankind, lose a part of their value by no longer being the representatives of the sounds originally annexed to them." The effect is "to destroy the benefits of the alphabet."

The reason that other European countries have a closer correspondence between pronunciation and spelling is because they have had one or more spelling reforms in the past 300 years. English has had some spelling reforms in the period from the Norman Conquest (1066) to the publication of Samuel Johnson's influential Dictionary in 1754. These included the introduction of etymological, Latin, and French spellings and conventions.

Few of the reforms were designed to make the English writing system simpler and more alphabetical or phonemic. The reforms were primarily "based on the notion that the business of spelling is to represent the origin and history of a word instead of its sound and meaning." The exceptions include assigning fixed phonetic values to u and v (ca 1630) and changing the spelling of bytte to bit. According to Crystal, social tolerance of variant spelling came to an end around 1650 as 18th century notions of correctness began to emerge. By 1780, poor spelling became stigmatized.

Restored English: John Reilly says that restoring the G-P principles of old English would regularize English spelling. One could argue that NuFolik does this to some extent with [dy, luv, u'ndr, er, ak, eri, go.t/gat, spo'k, tho', pikt, shuz, kau, xei, brij, eit, flyt].

Boswell credited Johnson's 1775 dictionary with conferring stability on the language. While this may be true, Johnson primarily endorsed what had already been accepted by the influential writers of his day. He did make a number of choices favoring one spelling over another but these judgments were not colored by any attempt to move spelling in the direction of phonemic regularity. While he favored morphemic regularity, he saw no reason to align spelling with pronunciation. He usually represented the plural as [s] although the sound was often a /z/. He consistenly represted the past tense as [ed] although the sound was often /t/. He replaced the medial [y] with [i].

Johnson reasoned that maintaining phonemic alignment was next to impossible because language continually changed. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as Swift, Johnson felt it was folly to imagine that a dictionary could embalm language and preserve its words and phrases from mutability. (See The Story of English)

In the 14th Century, Chaucer commented on the

"…grete dyversite in English and in the writyng of our tung."

By 1800 one type of diversity had been effectively abolished but the diversity of ways to spell a particular sound has remained. We can no longer use a [y] for the /ai/ in "diversity" but we can still use this letter to represent the "long I" or /ai/ in other words such as "fly". English spelling was standardized (at the word level) but it was never regularized.

The dissatisfaction with English orthography has a long history. The earliest proposal for a more phonemic writing system was probably advanced by Orm in 1180. Orm developed an orthography that doubled consonants after a short vowel. Orm's writing is a principle source of information on the pronunciation of early middle English. John Hart proposed a radical phonetic reform of English in 1569. In 1580, William Bullokar proposed an alphabet of 37 letters. In 1793, William Thornton wrote,

Ingli.5 ot tu kontein a' singl di.stinkt mark or kera'tr a.z th repra'senta'tiv 'v iich si.mple saund wich iz po.si.bl for th huma'n vois 'n breth tu u'tr. No' mark shu.d repra'sent tu or thri distinkt saunds nor shu.d eni si.mpl saund bi repra'sentd b'y tu or thri difr'nt kera'ktrz (Thornton used his own notation not CKS)

Since 1100, more than 70 phonemic notational systems have been proposed for English. Had any one of them been adopted, they would have provided a more consistent writing system and simplified the spelling of English words. Phonemic transcriptions substitute sound spellings for the archaic and etymological spellings found in the English writing system. e.g.,

GYM/jim   DEBT/det   MOVE/mu:v   SIGHT/syt   ROUGH/ruf   ALTHOUGH/o:ltho'

800 years ago, the [e] in *move and the [gh] in *sight and *rough were pronounced. The language changed, but the archaic spellings have remained. The traditional writing system is now clogged with with unpronounced or silent letters. Removing the silent letters might not speed reading but it would certainly save space, facilitate learning, and simplify spelling.
 

The Goals of Spelling Reform Remove archaic spellings that do not reflect current pronunciation. Remove the confusion and inconsistency engendered by a petrified chaotic unpredictable orthography Re-establish the alphabetic principle so spelling is predictable and shows pronunciation. Re-establish simple and consistent grapheme - phoneme correspondences. Enable more to read & write by using a simpler system which would be easier to teach and learn. Make it easy to read, pronounce, and spell new or unfamiliar words correctly Enable all to have reading and writing vocabularies as great as their speaking vocabularies Enable students to be taught to a higher standard with significantly less resources. Represent sounds of English with a notation that is more space efficient than TO.

This essay explores the kinds of changes that would be required to make English as consistent and regular as the writing systems used in other European countries. The primary concerns are (1) to find a way to bridge the gap between IPA notation, European letter pronunciations, and traditional English spelling and (2) to find systematic ways to generate compact word spellings similar to Cut Spelling.

A Non Phonemic Path to Greater Phonemic Regularity: Cut Spelling

One of the simplest and least disruptive ways to achieve greater consistency is to insist that letters must represent sounds. By insisting that a letter must signify a sound, the confusing superfluity of silent letters could be eliminated. Removing the silent letters (non sound signs) could solve about 75% of the problems with English spelling. This strategy, known as Cut Spelling, removes some of the archaic spellings and some of the unpredictability of TO (mentioned in goals 1 & 2 ). Clipping the surplus letters also makes written English easier to pronounce and more space efficient (goals 2, 6 & 9 ).

Eliminating silent letters does not mean that every letter that remains signifies a particular sound. It reduces but does not eliminate ambiguity. Cut spelling (CS) is not "sound spelling". As a consequence, CS does not provide a sound strategy for spelling all the words a person can pronounce. This is not say that CS does not simplify spelling. It does. The speller no longer has to guess what silent letters to add in order to duplicate dictionary spelling.

Linguists have long noted that one of the most frequent [27%] sounds in English, an unstressed central vowel called the schwa, is not associated with any particular vowel letter. In IPA this obscure vowel is indicated with a turned e - [e ]. In TO it is represented by every vowel letter [about, , important, benefit, sensitive, confuse, onion]. In 1969 Harry Lingren made a forceful argument for the incorporation of the schwa into the writing system. He went so far as to call for the rejection of any writing system for English that did not have a separate symbol for schwa. Lindgren proposed substituting an apostrophe for the unstressed /^/ or 'up' sound [*little à lit'l ]. When the terminal letter is a syllabic L M N or R, the apostrophe becomes redundant. Thus [lit'l à litl]. This shortened form becomes the model for [rule 3] in Cut Spelling.

Spelling is much harder than reading. If one comes across the word *REED, it has only one interpretation and in this case one pronunciation. If one has to spell the sound /ri:d/, however, there are over 14 options or ways to do this in TO. Researchers contend that reading and spelling are quite different skills. Being good at one does not imply that one is good at the other.

If one has never seen the word spelled before, Cut Spelling doesn't necessarily enable one to spell it. Except for its substitutions, such as y for /ai/, and the use of syllabic consonants [ m, n, l, r ], CS provides few clues. Cut spelling does not disrupt old reading habits because it retains most of the visual patterns of TO. It also retains some of the ambiguity and polyvalence of TO (e.g., /ei/ = a, a-e, ay, ai, ey, …[a] = at, ale, all, are, alms, ago)

Since CS is not systematic, it is of limited help when it comes to spelling. The same sound can be spelled several different ways but only one matches the dictionary. In CS, most vowel sounds can still be spelled about four different ways (Compared to about 20 ways in TO). To make spelling predictable, there must be a system that has a one to one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes at least at each position in a word.

If there is but one way to spell each sound and no ambiguity, the system is referred to as phonemic or alphabetic. No system that uses digraphs to represent sounds can be completely phonemic or completely alphabetic (i.e., without ambiguity). If there are three ways to spell depending on whether the sound comes at the beginning, middle, or end of a word, then the system is less phonemic but still regular and systematic. In such a system it would be possible to predict how a particular pronunciation is spelled.

A spelling system can be systematic or predictable without being completely alphabetical or phonemic. An orthography that allows two or three different spellings depending on the position of the sound in the word permits a closer approximation of TO. A writing system that uses positional spelling is a little more complicated than one with just one spelling per sound but it has a much better chance of capturing the appearance of written English.

All phonemic writing systems look odd to those brought up on a steady diet of TO

It would seem simple enough to match up letters and sounds. The problem is that no matter what spelling pattern one chooses, at least half of the spellings are going to seem strange to TO readers. This is because at the word level, TO is irregular 60% of the time. There is no way for a univalent system to look like a polyvalent one. No matter what spelling is made universal, it will conflict with the 14 other ways that the sound is spelled in English. In other words, no set of univalent spelling patterns is going to match up with TO more than about 40% of the time. [e.g., <u: =oo > works for food and cool but not for rool, jool, noo, nooz, fyoo, etc.]

As shown in the table below, Cut Spelling manages to retain the visual patterns of TO by retaining some of the ambiguity or polyvalence of TO. The same sound /u:/ can be spelled several different ways in Cut Spelling: u, u-e, ew, o, oo, oo-e, o-e. However, reducing the orthographic options from 18+ to 8 is a major improvement. For WES (World English Spelling), a type of New Spelling, the universal spelling pattern for /u:/ is oo. For New Follick the pattern is [u:] where the colon (or semi-colon if one prefers a non-shifted character) is an extender mark. The Yurabet uses [w] as the extender for the back vowels and [y] as the extender for the front vowels. /u:/ is therefore represented as [uw] and *rule would be spelled *ruwl and *root would be spelled *ruwt. This is logical but a bit disruptive. Chekt Speling uses [u] (below) since the checked vowels are not marked. Instead, chekt speling marks the checked vowel. The word "hook" is spelled [hu.k].

The chart above illustrates 18 of the 29 different ways that the /u:/ sound is spelled in TO. Cut Spelling reduces the number from 18+ to 4. Phonemic systems such as WES, NS, and NF reduce the number of different ways to spell a sound to 1. See Dewey, 1971, for a complete list of the different possible TO spellings for every sound.

The Problem English can't be spelt. --G.B. Shaw

Traditional English Orthography (TO) is unnecessarily difficult, confusing, and inconsistent. In TO, there is usually only one lexically correct way to spell a word but dozens of ways spell most sounds (End-Part I) (next)

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