![]() ENgliS is a simple 40 letter phonemic alphabet ENgliS iz a simpl 40 letr fOnEmik qlfabet
ENgliS uses 36 keys for the 36 uncombined
phonemes in spoken English. A few phoneme combinations are represented
with a single letters bringing the total number of symbols to 40. ENgliS can be used as a dictionary key and is quite close to the one used by Webster ( www.m-w.com ). The difference is that ENgliS is does not use digraphs and accents to augment the alphabet. Webster does.
Webster has a schwa-& instead of the schwa-a of
ENgliS. Since the traditional writing system uses digraphs (or 2 letter symbols), some ENgliS sound signs can be hard to recognize: e.g., C=ch, S=sh, N=ng, D=dh/th, T=th. The traditional English writing system uses over 100 symbols and on the average each of these symbols represents two distinct sounds. (see pictography.htm) Each of the five English vowel letters represent 4 different sounds or phonemes. A= (age, as, alms, ago,
all) = (Aj, qz, cmz, agO, ol ) This suggests that for children ENgliS would be 5 times as easy to learn as the traditional writing system. 40 symbols for 40 sounds instead of over 400 (Dewey, 1971; Hanna et al. 1965). 85% of the spellings of a particular phoneme
in English Not only is ENgliS five times easier than the traditional writing system, when you learn ENgliS you usually learn one of the five traditional ways to spell a sound. You are 20% of the way to your goal of literacy in the traditional system. The i/t/a research documented that just using the phonemic alphabet to transcribe a controlled vocabulary reader resulted in a two fold improvement. Just reducing the ambiguity of the sound spelling allowed the i/t/a readers to complete the 5 books in their basal reading series twice as fast as the control group. Being able to read 300 words is not the same as being code literate. The i/t/a program never determined how many students could spell words that were not in their readers. Only the children that were code literate would be able to do this. When 50% of the class failed to over-learn the i/t/a code, they failed to meet the conditions of Downings transfer of training hypothesis. When children are challenged to write in the sound-code, then they quickly over-learn it. Most teachers don't see how this could work. Preschoolers, they say, are not ready for writing and many are not reading ready either. The University of Chicago lab school experiments (ca. 1950) challenge this point of view. There, preschool children mastered Unifon (a code very similar to ENgliS) in a writing to read program. Not only did they master the phonemic code in 3 months, they transitioned to reading comic books and by the end of the year were reading third grade readers. Unlike the slow i/t/a basal reading program which lasted 2 years, the quick Unifon writing to read program actually accelerated traditional literacy and saved two years of schooling. ( www.unifon.org ) The purpose of ENgliS is to accelerate literacy by teaching the easy_code_first. The easy code is the dictionary pronunciation guide. There is 5 times less to learn so the dictionary key can be learned 5 times as fast. Once the basic code is learned, children can begin to deal with the ambiguities of the more complex traditional writing system. They now have a way of talking about speech sounds and this is a great advantage. We can now say that the letter A represents these five sounds (age, as, alms, ago, all), and that the first of these sounds (a as in age) can be spelled a dozen different ways (a, ae, a..e, ai, ay, ei, ey, ei..e, ...). ENgliS represents shifted vowels rather than Latin vowels. In Latin and the IPA, similar sounds have similar letter shapes. Age-edge = ej Ej. Eel-ill = il Il. Seat-sit = sit sIt. In a nomic notation there is a shape-sound divergence: Aj-ej, El-il, sEt-sit. The recommendation is to teach the easy code first and then introduce the alternatives and code overlaps. It only takes 3 months for children to learn ENgliS. To augment the alphabet from 26 to 40
symbols, ENgliS uses the redundant upper case letters to represent
additional sounds. To replace the grammatical marker, ENgliS uses ^ to mark
proper nouns. ^tw ogment Da qlfabet, ^ENgliS
Uzaz (^).
ENgliS is another mixed cap
notation similar to Unifon which uses a schwa-a instead of a schwa-c. oi
is spelled oi with o assigned to /O/ as in awe rather than to /A/ as in
General American <odd>. See
www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/englis-short.htm
There are at least three vowel letters in Unifon that combine sounds: I =
oi, Q = xi, q = aC. They could be represented as combinations in a
unigraphic notation. The IPA is unigraphic and does not have symbols for
these combined sounds.
J = dZ, CH = tS, the sound in out = aU, and so on.
Malone thought that a transitional alphabet (or initial teaching medium)
should use AEIO yU for the
long vowels rather than the IPA e i aI o ju or as they
are generally pronounced in English, eI i aI oU ju
The hardest part about ENgliS is learning to sound spell. English readers and writers do not build sound spelling skills because the traditional orthography is so unreliable. [more] Traditional spelling [tradspel] is usually learned by memorizing visual patterns and eye rhymes. There is a basic sound code as proponents of phonics are quick to point out, but it only works about 50% of the time. You can, however, memorize the four most likely spellings for a given sound and be right 85% of the time, provided you get four tries. Most people go thru the options and pick the spelling that looks right. Visual memory is a key component of good spelling. [more] Here is a quick test: Spell
sapEna in
tradspel: ____________________ HINT: It sounds like sapEna but it contains two silent letters. In ENgliS the vowels y and schwa-a are always unstressed. wiD a litL prqktis, you can sound spell any word in your vocabulary correctly the first time. After less than three weeks of practice, you will be able to spell words in ENgliS with twice the accuracy of your conventional spellings. First year students of German are able to spell German words with greater accuracy than they can English words. English speaking students of German make less than half the spelling errors in German than they do in English [Upward, 1994]. German often has two ways to spell a particular sound but English has an average of nearly 14 ways. While 4 of these ways account for about 85% of the spellings in the dictionary, the ambiguity is still too much for predictable spelling. Most forms of regularized English are much easier to spell because they remove silent letters and extra letters such as double consonants when they do not mark a stressed short vowel. Advocates of phonics will say that the sound in AXE
is spelled only one way ignoring such spellings as
plaid, have, half, laugh,
dahlia, guarantee. AXE is spelled
one way in ENgliS <ax> but this means that many words
are respelled: plad, hav, laf, dalia,
garantE. To achieve a highly predictable spelling, the unstressed vowels must also be spelled. ENgliS adds two new letters for this purpose the schwa a as in ago and the schwi y as in very. The schwi y is an allophone of E except for being unstressed. For native speakers VerE is sufficient. For ESL students, stress should be indicated / Very / or / 'VerE / Stress is phonemic in English and 40% of the multi-syllable words have irregular stress. Regular stress in English is on the first syllable. dEzYnd for fqst fOnEmik tYpiN ENgliS is designed for fast phonemic typing on a standard QWERTY keyboard. It contains no diacritics or special characters in its ASCII form, but can be converted when an extended character set is available. The most important conversion is probably q to a and c to ä. ENgliS purports to be the best unigraphic
ASCII restricted notation for the English
language. ENgliS could be used as an i.t.a. altho it is not very close to tradspel. Spanglish might be a little better since it is digraphic and tries to mimic the marking practices found in English spelling. Could have a chat similar to the one for italian.
could use x X for la law CJ available.
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(page 3 of 5 ) ENgliS 1 2 3 4 5 ENgliS is an augmented alphabet for the
representation of the sounds of spoken English. In addition to being used as the dictionary key in a children's dictionary, ENgliS also serves as an initial teaching alphabet. The letters that most preschoolers are familiar
with retain their name values: AEIOU. This is sufficient to write Ace,
East, Ice, mOst, and Use. Mixed cap spelling can be very
annoying to literate adults but not to novices. The notation is annoying
to adults because it can destroy the "eye rhyme" or shape of the
sight-word. No dictionary key spelling looks like the traditional spelling more than half the time. ace = /ás/ or /eIs/ Unlike the traditional writing
system, most children can master ENgliS or any simple phonemic writing
system in 3 months. ENgliS is a highly phonemic written code for spoken English. Thus it too can be mastered in 3 months. After 3 months of practice, children can write over 2000 words and read aloud a newspaper transcribed into ENgliS. Reading aloud does not mean full understanding. If the children do not understand a word in conversation, they will not understand it when they read it aloud. Decoding is important but not the only skill involved in reading comprehension. The goal in school is to learn to read the traditional writing system. Learning a dictionary key first seems to many like a detour. It isn't. It is a way to make sure that every child has a solid foundation in phonemic awareness with a minimum amount of drill. Children are eager to learn to write and communicate with their peers and teaching the easy code first enables them to do what they like to do almost immediately. Some students pick up the code very quickly. They become the teachers of their friends. In this writing to read program, every child reaches the minimum performance standard. No one is left behind as they so often are in a traditional class. Once one becomes literate in any code, becoming literate in a more complex code is much simpler. Some have said that you only become literate once. Once you build confidence in your ability to decode sound signs and once you get the big picture, the second time around is a cake walk. Many famous writers (Twain, Shaw, Wells, Dickens, Steinbeck, Asimov, ..) have called for a phono-graphic alphabet and a phonemic writing system for English. ENgliS is one solution to the alphabet problem. There are hundreds of others. The main advantage for ENgliS is that is easy to type. ENgliS is pronounced <ing-glish> where E=/i:/ This is not a new pronunciation, just a new spelling that clearly indicates a broadcast English dialect. • keyboard friendly ENgliS can be typed or keyboarded
rapidly. There are less than 6 arbitrary sound assignments. e.g., V
for hook and W for /u/. ENgliS can be used as the keyboard map for any phonemic writing system that does not use monographs or unigraphs for diphthongs and glides. ENgliS is not particularly transition
friendly due primarily to the odd sound assignments: eg, axe=qx While it can be read without a key it takes time to adjust to mixed caps sight-words. The cap convention is eye-rhyme disruptive.
Since 60% of the words in English are not spelled as they are pronounced, 60% of the words are going to be respelled in any consistent phonemic writing system. rekognYzabl rEspeliNz The challenge is to do this while making the spellings recognizable to those adept in tradspel. The challenj iz tu du this wail meiking the spelingz recognaizabl tu thowz adept in tradspel. Da Cqlanj iz tw dw
Dis
There are no points for originality in orthographic design. ENgliS borrows ideas from many others systems. See http://www.m-w.com/ for a very similar orthography used as a pronunciation guide in a dictionary. Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences ENgliS defines the upper case AEYOU as shifted pronunciations of the long vowels. The letter names are AEIOU and except for changing "wai" to "ai" the letter sounds are the same as their names. Y looks more like an "eye" and is a more distinctive shape than the capital I. It looks more natural in words such as FLY than FLI. The letter name for the Y shape should be "ai" or i: rather than wai. The nearest Greek letter in terms of shape is the upsilon. j can be used for yod. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In many ways, Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, which first appeared in 1755, followed the same pattern as the Spanish dictionary, using quotations from canonical figures to put a word's usage in the proper context. In his introduction, Dr. Johnson noted that language was in constant mutation. Still, he said, his mission was to honor his country so "that we may no longer yield the palm of philology without a contest to the nations of the continent" and to give "longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence Chart for ENgliS and
Spanglish
This chart can be used for both
ENgliS
& Spanglish
The goals for any new orthography
for English are: phonemic, consistent, compact, keyboard friendly, and
learner friendly [easy to teach and learn]. The new script should be
readable by tradspel adepts witout a key. Anyone can read Spanglish
but not without a little effort. It takes more effort to read a
system like ENgliS which uses "caps" as a diacritic. A somewhat less
keyboard friendly version can be created by using another diacritic -
accents. "Time flies like an arrow, but fruit
flies like a banana" [present day
spelling] The ENgliS GP [grapheme-phoneme] or symbol-sound table
Comments: [send your comments to sbett@lycos.com] http://www.iqliz.com /analysis.htm http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej25/m2.html Cobuild © 2002 BETA | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Send comments and questions to Steve at sbett@lycos.com
username: sbett
password: 922sbr
website: MBUG