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The traditional analysis is of limited usefulness. One reason is that it is incomplete.  It does not list all vowel phonemes.

The following listing of phonemes are also arranged in the arbitrary aeiou order rather than some rational one such as their position in the vowel quadrilateral. The basic difference is that this listing is complete. All 19 English vowels are shown.

The e has two sounds, eh and ei - close to the long-A /ei/ but shorter as found in the word *air.

Primarily because of the great vowel shift and the lack of any correction, English vowels symbols do not correspond to continental vowel signs.

The primary issue is should, at this late date, the correction be made? Should we stick with the ideosyncratic and unique English sound-symbol conventions or should, in the name of World English, use conventions closer to world norms? No correction would make the new regularized English writing system easier to learn for those brought up on TO. A modification would make English easier to learn as a second language.

As shown below, in IPA, neither air nor ape should have any association with the A sound.

There is a slight difference between lyre and liar (lyr / ly'r). Do we want to mark this difference?

It is easy to see how if you do not have enough sound signs and no sound signs for key sounds such as /3:/ and schwa, there are going to be a wide variety of digraphs used to suggest the appropriate sound. The schwa, an unstressed /uh/ sound, is represented by every vowel letter. The result is chaos.

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   Links |  Simple Spelling  |  Anglic  |  New Follick   |  Portuguese   |  Alt.Script   | Millenium   |  Interspel   |  Dewey  | 

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The English writing system is more difficult than it needs to be. On the other hand, once learned, it does the job.
Those for simplifying the orthography are united in their dislike of the inconsistency and unecessary complexity of TO but divergent in their goals. Both want to reduce irregularity and inconsistency but some would be satisfied with a 50% reduction. A 50% reduction should make the English writing system twice as easy to master.

The basic fact is that English is only 40% phonemic at the word level. If a long passage were written in TO and a phonemic script based on the most frequent spellings such as New Spelling, only 40% of the spellings would match. (See the Gettysburg Address). To increase the similarity between the univalent and polyvalent scripts, two strategies have been tried: (1) accept 40 common irregularly spelled words and (2) use positional spelling. Either of these compromises reduces phonemicy or the rule of the alphabetic principle. The latter is systematic and fully predictable.

Some reformers simply want an improvement, a 50% improvement would be sufficient. Others want something closer to perfection. There is also disagreement with how much of the traditional system should be retained. The pragmatists among the reformers see no point in introducing new sound - symbol correspondences. The fact that some of these correspondences do not line up with those in most other countries is not a problem.

Latin 1

[a] /a:/ ring-a ålms a:lmz want wander watch *aunt quantity squad *father	// schwa a' '  a' @ a'go sofa fiesta' a'thor'ti syl'nt pens'l unit lem'n torta's sirk's lim'zyn camouflage	[i]  /i:/ epsilon eel i:l  il medium, ego each, clean grief, field seize, either key, money fa'tigue gasoline	[o]  /o:/ o-cap awe o:  o cross long author caught ought law, saw altar, tall	/u:/ ring-u ooze u:z uz truth flew, flu bruise youth move boot	/3:/ yogh urn 3:n 'rn earth burn her, earn sir, irk first pearl occur	6 Long Vowels There are 3 not 5 e-sounds. One of the e shapes is associated with /i:/. The epsilon, a reversed 3, could be the new sound sign or grapheme.     One proposal for an a shape that sounds something like an o is ring-a.
32	42	30	22	29	29	Total No. of Spellings
/au/ owl  out  power  round  saurkraut	/ei/ ape eight  great  way obey	['y] /ai/ eye ayin ice, fine aisle fly, cycle, buy high, guide height, seismic bayou, cayenne	[o'] /ou/ oak, court glow, owe oat, boat open, local though plateau	[iu] /ju/ use unit, you mule, yew fuel, juice feud beauty	/oi/ oil  boy loyal lawyer /loi'r/	6 blends Diphthongs I sA nU bQ gO Vt I se nu boi go' aut I say niu boy go out
						Total No. of Spellings
/a/ ax at, and laugh plaid salve	/e/ etch edge their friend said death	/i/ itch tin verify cynik forfeit guilt	/o/ ox pot optic bother *father	[u'] /^/ up about cup, sun love rough double flood	[u.] /u/ hook foot, put would good wolf woman	6 Short Checked
						Total No. of Spellings
are /ar/ heart carve par, car	air /er/ care their pear	ire /yr/ fire lyre pyre	or /or/ four lore pour	your /iur/ fury sure pure		8 R-blends.
ar2 paragraph parachute character	ear /ir/ near deer fierce	awr order	our /aur/ power paur dour	poor /pu:r/ doer newer nu:r	error /e'r/	2.

A more rational arrangment of graphemes.

In NuFolik, a type of IPA notation, 5 letters are used to distinguish 19 vowel sounds. Each letter is assigned to three related sounds and these sounds are distinguished by a trailing mark. Long and short sounds are distinguished by adding an extender mark to the letter. Diphthongs are distinguished by a letter or a symbol that represents a sound such as the apostrophe for a U sound. Since the sounds are related, the marker can often be dropped without loss in intelligibility.

Without the marker, there is a 3 way ambiguity. To what extent can we live with 3 way ambiguity? "I thin,k wi kan liv with a limitd a'maunt ov ambigiuiti." I think we probably can as long as there are no letter combinations with two interpretations in the same context. When the marker is dropped, however, there is usually a much wider range of associated pronunciations.

The short e with 19 spellings is often taken as the initial target for reform. Almost eveyrone would find ther, frend, sed easier to use than their TO counterparts (*there, *friend, *said).

In an ideal alphabetic or phonemic system, there would be only one way to spell each significant sound in a language. English has about 41 phonemes. This could be represented with 41 graphemes. In English, with an average of 14 spelling patterns per sound, the number is much higher: over 460.

The average vowel can spelled a phenomenal 20.7 different ways, according to Dewey's research. This suggests that vowels in TO (the traditional English writing system or orthography) are little more than place holders. In phonemic notation, the same 41 sounds would be spelled 41 ways -- in other words, with one, and only one, spelling per sound.

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 9. [o, oo, u, ue, u-e, ew, oe, o-e, ou].   CS makes a few substitutions [y for igh] but not many. 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. 

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M. Bell writes:  The problem with TO is not that it has tu few ways of representing the 44 foneems, but tu menny
- at leest 256 distinct wuns.

 The following 25 giv forreners (like I wos 40 yeers ago) and yung children lerning tu spel a reel heddake with British English.
 Apart from the 'u', thay hav perfectly recognisabl, eesy-tu-lern ways  (grafeems) of representing them.

 If children had tu lern just the 25 (and the uther regulars of the alfabet),  lerning tu spell English wood be a peece of cake. The spelling code wood be so  much eesyer tu crack.

 I hav been askd a few times reecently whot my overall plan is.

Esentially it is GETTING RID OF THE ALTERNATIVS.
Representing the following 25 foneems in riting involvs constantly havving tu make decissions.
They can be written one and only one way, as indicated below:

 1. Ay  as in play, they, ate, raid, great?

 2. Ar   as in car, calm, heart?

 3. Ah  as in banana, verandah?

 4. Air as in fair, dare, bear, there or their?

 5. Aw as in law, taut, caught, talk or all?

 6. Short 'e'  as in bed, head and many?

 7. Er as in her, fir, fur or worm?  /3:/  RR

 8. Ee  as in feet, meat, believe, receive, recede and he?

 9. F  as in fun, photo or cough?

 10. Short 'i' as in bit, pretty or women?

 11. 'I' as in die,  mile or fly?

 12. J as in jet, gem or edge

 13. Ks as in accept or ax?

 14. Oo as in food, move, group, blue or do?

 15. Oe as in toe, slow, shoulder, boat or bold?

 16. Ow as in  cow, bough or house?

 17. Or as in  for, door, board, more or your?

 18. Oi as in oil, noise or boy?

 19. Our as in flour or flower?

 20. S as in sad, cent or science?

 21. Sk as in skip, school or scalp?

 22. U as in mud, young, blood or some?

 23. Uh as in good, push or could?

 24. Ue as in due, duty, new, ewe, view or you?

 25. Z as in zip or in advertise?

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Bibliography      Return to the Simplified Spelling Page      Dewey      Problems with Spelling      Interspel

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