Unifon
is a phonemic transcription system for the English Language. Unifon
means "one sound" and implies "one sound per symbol." It is a uni-phonic
and uni-graphic alternative to the traditional writing system which has
over 560
ways to spell the 40 or so sounds
in the English language. Unifon and most other phonemic writing systems
have one unique way to spell each sound.
EC letcr iz
csOSEAtcd wiD c singcl sQnd
This
reduction in complexity makes a phonemic writing system at least 10 times
easier to learn. It is easier to learn because there is only 1/10
as much to learn. 40 ways to spell 40 sounds compared to over 400.
Memorize
40 letter sound associations and you are literate in
the sense that you can transliterate [or covert to letters] any phrase
you can speak and vocalize any phrase you see written in Unifon.
One
can, of course, learn to read a language phonetically without understanding
it. Opera stars often learn to read and sing their parts phonetically without
being able, for instance, to speak Italian. Italian has a highly phonetic
writing system so it is relatively easy to "crack" the code.
Italian
and Spanish are over 90% phonemic - they are written as spoken and no one
has to think of sounds as independent of their letter representations.
English is about 40% phonemic - it corresponds to its pronunciation guide
only 40% of the time.
How irregular
is traditional English spelling?
It depends on how you define
"regular" and how you measure it
it dependz on hau
U difIn regUlcr and hau U meZcr it [U2]
The
BCC
recently quoted an unamed source who claimed that 13% of English words
were irregularly spelled. This correponds to Wijk's claim that English
was 87% rule based. Carney [1994] makes a similar claim. What
they are talking about is the sequential application of 100 or more rules.
The kind of thing that a computer is good at doing but human's are not
[Mitton, 1997]. However, no computer has yet been able to spell sounds
with this degree of accuracy. There are programs that will guess
the correct spelling 87% of the time in four tries [Hanna, 1964].
Flesch
[1984] and other advocates of phonics first have argued that English is
95% phonetic. There are statistical regularities in the traditional
English writing system but to claim that spelling or pronunciation is more
than 40% predictable without positional and lexical cues is misleading
if not totally in error.
There
is nothing about the language that prevents it from being as phonemic and
predictable as Italian. With the Unifon writing system spelling and
pronunciation are over 98% predictable.
Except for syllables ending
in R, o is used for the aa sound.
UNIFON
has 1 character for each of the 40 basic sounds of English - 16v 24c
UnicodeRegistry
U+E740 –UE76F standards. [link] |
Letter - Sound correspondences
Unifon means on sound and
implies that the transcription system has one and only sound for each symbol
in the alphabet.
With 40 sound signs, the
Unifon alphabet has a symbol for every significant sound in the English
language and a sound spelling for every word in the dictionary. |
p t
k f th s sh tsh
y ng
are or
air error er-array
ear ia yu
herder air herder
|
The Shaw Alphabet by
Kingsley Read
The top line, called 'talls'
are all unvoiced except for the last character which represents NG.
This clerical error was never switched with the 'deep' loop [h].
A more serious reversal occurred
in the labeling of the combined charaacters on the botton row. The r-combinations
air and error are reversed.
The rounded r shape
in the middle of the 3rd row represents schwa. Herder can be transcribed
as h@@rd@r /@@r/ is
clearly the shape labeled air. herder would be transcribed as hXdD
[hXdD]
The shape for [e] is the
4th shape on the 3rd row.e
/eir/ would incorporate this shape.[x]
|
The
words phonetic and phonemic mean based on sound. All languages are
100% phonemic. They are all sound codes. Writing systems are phonemic
to the extent that they visualize the sound code. A writing system
does not have to sound based -- there are other ways to convey meaning.
The number system, for instance, can have a meaning independent of its
vocalization. Icons found on the signs in airport terminals and used to
identify the controls on consumer electronics also have meaning independent
of their vocalization in a particular language.
Egyptian
hieroglyphic writing was a mixture of phonograms, pictograms, semagrams,
and logograms. The great breakthrough in simplification came with
the full realization that phonograms alone were sufficient to record speech.
According to McLuhan, the phoenician alphabet made writing a skill that
could be acquired in a couple of weeks instead of one that took half a
lifetime to master.
The
idea of the alphabet spread like wildfire and within few hundred years,
all of the cities where the Phoenician's exchanged trade goods adapted
the semitic letters to their own language. The Greek's added phonograms
for vowels to make system that was usable for non-semitic languages. Under
Greek influence, the Copts started writing Egyptian using a Greek-Phoenician
inspired system. The Roman's adapted the Phoenician inspired etruscan script.
Although
England was occupied by the Romans in the 4th century. When the Romans
left in 430 AD, the Engles and
Saxons moved in. They spoke a low German tongue. In the 8th
Century, the Saxons adopted the Roman letters and adapted it to Old English.
As was the custom, when the Anglo-Saxon's adopted the Roman alphabet, they
also adopted the Latin sound values. The Latin sound-symbol correspondence
system was augmented with the additon of ae or ash and the thorn and ash
or crossed D: These were sounds that were not found among the Latin
phonemes.
By
1200, the Anglo Saxons had perfected a highly phonemic system of spelling
for Old English.
For
information on what happend next, read the history
of English
Today,
nearly half of the words in the English dictionary contain shifted sound
values and are in need of respelling. However, after years of neglect,
there is no alphabetic standard -- no real way to anglacize spelling. We
know the 40 significant sound categories of speech, but we don't know for
sure how to assign these sounds to the 26 x 2 available letters.
Starting
with the 20 letters where there is agreement, Unifon arbitrarly assigns
sounds to 20 additional letters including some upper case letters.
With 40 unequivocal sound signs, it is now possible to respell all of the
words in the English language. With a restored alphabet, reading
and writing can once again become as simple as it was in ancient times
and as easy as it is in languages with highly phonemic writing systems.
Children
can learn a highly phonemic system in a couple of weeks, an adult can learn
it in 40 minutes. Italian children are said to master the Italian
writing system in 6 months. After this brief introduction, 92% can
read at a level that it takes the average English speaking children two
more years to reach [Paulson, 01]. Once mastered, a child will be able
to write any of the 3000+ words they can pronounce and pronounce or "sound
out" any word they see spelled.
After
two weeks of practice, students can learn to spell better in a phonemic
system than they can in the traditional English writing system. The
level of mastery attained in two weeks a phonemic writing system can be
equivalent to ten years with the traditional system.
For
an adult, sound writing seems more difficult than traditional writing but
for a child it is ten times easier than memorizing the configuration of
whole words.
lurn tU spel fast!
[2 weeks vs. 10 years] After two weeks of practice, students can spell
better in a phonemic system than they can in the traditional writing system
after ten years of practice. Findings consistent with this claim have been
published in the Journal of Reading Research. For example, students
of German can spell words in the German writing system with greater accuracy
than they can spell words in the writing system associated with their native
tongue [Upward, 1990].
The reason for this is that
German is more phonemic and consistent than English. English has
too many orthographic options. On the average, there are over 14
different ways to spell a sound in the English writing system. In
Unifon, the average is less than 1.4 different ways. This makes Unifon
about ten times easier to spell.
Learn
40
phonograms and you can spell any word as you pronounce it. When
it comes to learning speed, it is like comparing the speed of a tortoise
[the traditional system] to the speed of a hare [phonemic Unifon].
Wouldn't you prefer to spell
tortoise
the way it is pronounced? You can with Unifon: tOrtcs.
The
c In Unifon is interpreted as a "lazy U" rather
than a redundant symbol for s or k. The lazy U represents the obscure mid
lax vowel in English also known as schwa. Schwa is an unstressed mid lax
vowel that has no unique representation in the English writing system.
There is nothing obscure about the sound: it is the most common sound in
English speech.
The dictionary will tell
you that the word is pronounced
/'t
r-t's/,
which is fine if you can read IPA. Traditional spelling gets the
first syllable correct. The spelling of the second syllable might
seems to rhyme with TOYS. Whatever the pronunciation of [TOISE],
few would guess /t's/.
If
you had to spell TUSK, it is unlikely that you would pick TOISEK among
your first 100 guesses. In Unifon, TUSK would be spelled tusk
if stressed and tcsk if unstressed.
The
traditional writing system [TO] is ambiguous. Almost any particular
spelling in the TO can be pronounced a half dozen different ways. The word,
Unifon,
for instance, might be pronounced "oo-nee-fawn". With Unifon there is no
ambiguity. "YnifOn"
has to be pronounced [yoo-nih-foan]. According to the look-up table:
Y=you, i=the vowel in in,
and O=the vowel in Old.
The
virtue of a phonemic alphabet is its simplicity. An alphabet is a
code, it is a correspondence table such as the one above
that maps the sounds of the language onto a set of letter shapes.
HISTORY:
When England first adopted the Roman letters in the 7th century, they also
adopted the Latin sound conventions. The Saxon scribes had to add
an additional vowel, the ash, and associate the five vowel letters
with ten different vowel sounds, as was the practice in Italy. To indicate
the short vowels, they usually doubled the consonants. The Saxon
writing system based on the this alphabet was as consistent as any in Europe
in the 10th century.
PREDICTABLE
SPELLING: The consistency and predictability of an orthography can be calculated
by comparing the dictionary spelling with pronunciation guide spelling.
The spelling of Old English or Anglo Saxon was over 85% consistent with
its pronunciation. This is the estimated average for most European languages
today. The spelling of Modern English is less than 40% consistent with
its pronunciation. Dictionary spelling matches dictionary pronunciation
guide spelling less than 40% of the time.
tortoise
does not match its pronunciation spelling: tOrtcs
hare
does not match its pronunciation spelling her.
her does not match its pronunciation spellings
hur
or
hcr
as in hurdcr.
tortoise hare her here = TORT'S
HER H'R HIR
Most
people will concede that Unifon is indeed a simpler way to code the sounds
of the English language. The real question is whether or not the learning
of Unifon will speed up the learning of the traditional code.
Learning
Unifon or any phonemic system will certainly improve language skills and
provide important insights. Phonemic awareness is supposed to be one of
the best predictors of reading success. Unifon provides insight into
how the alphabet is supposed to work.
Unifon
can be mastered quickly by children. Learn 40 phonograms or sound
signs, and you can write any word you can pronounce. As with Pitman's
i.t.a. in the 1970's, children will master the code quickly and without
the usual frustration and difficulty of having to memorize whole words.
40%
of Unifon will transfer since it corresponds to the consistent part of
the English code. 60% will not transfer any better than explicit
phonics training. Irregular words will have irregular spellings and
will still have to be memorized as logograms. Unifon provides little
help in this area.
An
i.t.a. builds phonic awareness, provides the satisfaction of early success
with reading and writing, builds good word attack strategies, and postpones
the frustration of having to deal with the inconsistencies of the traditional
code. Unifon provides a "metalanguage" a way to talk about the sounds
of speech. All we can say for sure is that starting with Unifon does
not slow down the learning of the traditional code. .
Pitman's
i.t.a. was shown to speed up the learning of the traditional writing system.
In England, those learning to read i.t.a. progressed through the basal
readers much faster. After 2.5 years, 78% of the i.t.a. learners
had passed beyond Book 5 but only 39% of the control group children had
done so [Downing, 13]. In other words, the children matched the progress
of children learning consistent writing systems such as Italian and Spanish
who typically progress twice as fast as those trying to learn the English
code.
The
i.t.a. experiment was based on the transfer of skill hypothesis:
That skills learned in one medium, i.t.a., could be readily transferred
to the more complex task of learning the traditional code. The transfer
of skill has been well documented in a variety of areas. You master the
simpler component tasks before tackling a complex task. It is not
that well documented in language.
By
the time they reach school, children have already mastered the phonemic
speech code. The phonemic alphabetic code is an exact model or replica
of the speech code. The speakers of any language have mastered the
code but cannot articulate or explain it. It was not until around 1900
that linguists became adept at explaining the specifics of the phonemic
code.
All
languages change over time. They may change faster when not anchored by
an archaic writing system and an educational system. Some words start
to be pronounced in a different way, some words cease to be used and others
are coined. English was changing rapidly in the late 15th century
around the time that its spelling was being fixed by the printing industry
. What was fixed was a set of conventions that properly applied to the
earlier way of speaking. In Chaucer's time [pre-1400] "law" was pronounced
lq
or lqc
[lae-oo-wuh]
the spelling law or lawe reflects the pronunciation of a long A [ah] followed
by a rounding short u. Today law is pronounced lx
[lah-aw]. When such variations are multiplied by 1000 words, a certain
disparity between spelling and pronunciation is engendered.
Links
The
current English alfubet, however, is not as easy as ABC. Our 26
letters are at once too few and too many to handle the roughly 40 pieces
of sound (phonemes) that constitute today's spoken English, the variety
of speech used by tom brOkx and pEtcr jeniNz. [more]
We
have a total of more than 560 spellings for the 40 basic sounds of spoken
English. This is many times the number required; it produces an efficiency
rating on average of just 20 percent for our written code. [more]
Ask
any child or foreigner about the vagaries of written English. They will
chronicle the agonies of "one" and "eight" and "tough" and "through"
and "though." English is a verbal melting pot, and we have never had an
Academy, as do the French, to establish linguistic standards. As a result,
we have 15 spellings for the long o sound (owe, beau, though, doe, etc.)
and another 15 for the long A sound (may, maid, gauge, great, weight, etc.).
Imagine the efficiency of our Arabic number system if any digit could randomly
take on several other values: "7 (frequently) times 6 (occasionally) equals
42 (more or less)." [more]
Mark
Twain, who wanted a new one for one alfabet, had a few words on the
subject:
"The English alfubet
is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any word in the language with
any large degree of certainty. ... The silliness of the English alfubet
are quite beyond enumeration.
