bnr-unifon-blkblu60.jpgunifon-malone.htm         index.htm
http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-malone.html
Related pages:  Spelling Reform  Unifon Transcription
Unifon converter or translator:  www.unifon.org
 
C O N T E N T S L I N K S
 Secrets of the UNIFON
 or 1-sound per symbol  CODE

BASIC ALPHABETIC IDEA
One and only one symbol per sound
40 speech sounds represented by 40 sound-signs.  Efficiency: 100% phonemic

THE ENGLISH ROMAN COMPROMISE
In the traditional writing system there are over 200 spellings* or symbols per sound
      Tradspel Efficiency:  40/200 = 20%
*G. Dewey (1971) found 561 in the dictionary and 361 in a sample of 100,000 words of text. <8% efficiency.

 UNIFON:  40 symbols for 40 sounds
 isomorphic set. [that is, there is a 1 to 1 correspondence between a Unifon character and an IPA character].  IPA could be typed in keyboard Unifon and run thru a converter.  Alternatively one could just produce an IPA font based on the Unifon key positions.  Where there is a symbol for each speech sound category [or phoneme], the notation is said to be 100% phonemic

RULES:  Write words as they are spoken.
Since there is usually only one way to write a
particular sound, Unifon is largely self teaching.
Once taught the sound-symbol correspondences children can teach themselves [and each other] to write & read.

CONSEQUENCES: Literacy in this
efficient code can be achieved in 3 months
rather than 3 years or more for the compromised writing system.  No double letters, no silent letters, no digraphs result in 14% fewer letters in a paragraph of text and a significant reduction in spelling errors

If the efficiency of a code is measured by the number of words that can be pronounced as written, then Spanish and Italian are over 85% efficient while English is less than 40% efficient. Spanish is over twice as efficient as English so it is no mystery that this writing system [or any writing system over 85% efficient] can be learned over twice as fast.

The 90% increase in time to code mastery is nearly matched by an equally impressive reduction of the time required to master the traditional reading system.  Just as we can read Unifon without a key, learners who have mastered Unifon [and phonemic awareness] can decipher the traditional writing system.

Why Unifon is better tha Pitman's i/t/a
Unifon is a writing to read program that uses a
consistent teaching alphabet and peer to peer learning. Because proficiency in code is acquired so fast, it has few of the defects of the i.t.a.  The i.t.a. was basically a traditional basal reader program. Basal readers have been popular since the 1950's and are still used in many primary schools.

Basal readers introduce words based on their frequency of use.  The first group of words are repeated over and over in stories of the "See Spot run" variety until they are learned by sight.

Reading by letter sounds tends to be slow. With practice, learner's stop sounding out letters for short frequently encountered words.  These are read as word-signs.  Eventually, the practice of sounding out letters is used only for unfamiliar words.  Readers who have perfected these word attack skills are able to improve their reading skills over time.  Those who are unsure about how to do it often falter and make little progress on their own. Reading becomes a chore rather than a delight.

 Bart writes on the blackboard...
 "Dc dEr krost Dc rOd"
Teacher: What kind of spelling is that?
Bart: its ritcn in c wun simbcl pcr sqnd fcnEmik kOd. yU kan rEd it kant yU? See below if you do not have a Unifont installed.  <download>

Bart: Who cares, it communicates and anyone can learn code in a few months. It will take me years to learn to silly spell.

Teacher: We are here to teach you the proper way to spell. The way words are spelled in the dictionary

Bart: Code is in the dictionary too. It is the
pronunciation guide spelling. Its the spelling
you use when you want to know how the word is
pronounced or spoken.

Teacher: We don't use the pronunciation guide
spelling to write essays and books. We use the
authentic historical spelling.

Bart: Why couldn't I just write in code and send it through a silly spelling converter? That way
I wouldn't have to spend three years trying to
learn where to insert silent letters and other irregular spellings.  This way, those who had
memorized the dictionary would not have to
know how to sound spell in order to read my writing. 

hqevcr Der iz not Dat muK difcrens.  manE pEpcl kan rEd displA yUnifon wiDqt enE  trAniN.  99% kan rEd it aftcr les Dan 2 hqrz uv trAniN.

Teacher: How will sound spelling help you improve your reading? I am here to teach you how to read.

Bart: Since half of the words in the dictionary are
sound spelled, I can sound out half of the words on the page. I can memorize a short list of 50
word-signs such as [the, of, to, as, ...] I think
that this will enable me to read as well as most of those in this class.

 I just don't want to bother memorizing the dictionary. I don't want to bother learning how to silly spell. .
                           ~  ~  ~  ~

.kEbOrd Ynifon is c litcl difcrent frum hand ritcn Or tIpset Ynifon. UNIFONT required

KEBORD UNIFON IZ 3 LIT3L DIF3RENT FRUM HAND RIT3N OR TIPSET UNIFON UNIFONT simulated

kEbOrd Ynifon iz c litcl difcrent frum handritcn Or tIpset Ynifon
Check out the Unifon converter at
http://66.41.60.21/UFLookup/UFXlate.htm

    source:  check  www.unifon.org
The Case for Unifon - an isomorphic spelling for English 
 Unifon is isomorphic or in 1-to-1 correspondence with the IPA and the phonemes of English speech.
[based on an article by John Culkin]

The nature of language consists of the vocal use of a uniform set of speech phonemes or sound packets each a complex of phonetic elements made by human lips, tongue, teeth, nasal cavity throat and windpipe.; these phonemes are taught be imitation trial and error by parents associates, siblings, playmates, and in more recent times radio, recordings, and TV.  regime

Reading, the reflection of speech, consists of fitting these phonemes to regular visual patterns or letters, and using them to convey meaning.  Such systems seem to have been made first in the Middle East and parts of India about 5000 years ago.  About 3500 years ago the first ordered set of sound signs appeared in a Phoenician coastal city of Ugarit.  The first two letters of this sequence were 'alef beyt.  When the Phoenician sound signs were borrowed by the Greeks sometime after 850 BC, the letter names became alpha-beta. 

The visual structures in non-Semitic writing are made up of vowel and consonant [or sounded with] markings.

Languages and dialects may have related consonants but can be rendered distinct by vowel or throat sounds.  Families of languages may sound familiar but will vary greatly through their basic vowel structure.

To write or render a clear visual record of a language requires that a distinct visual symbol be cast for each consonant and each vowel. One can record the spoken word without marking the vowels, as in Egyptian, Arabic, and Hebrew, but this reduces reading speed. Each trigraph or three consonant  letter combination can have multiple pronunciations and meanings. In written Semitic languages, unlike Indo-European, every  trigraph will generally have a closely related meaning.  So while it may be a problem to read Semitic text aloud, you can generally get the gist from the consonants.

Languages can have as few as 15 or as many as 50 phonemes. One of the goals of an alphabetical writing system is to minimize the number of phonemes. English speech has 36 uncombined phonemes but it is convenient to throw in a few combinations. Unifon adds several redundant characters, J for /dZh/, K for /tSh/, Y for /yU/, q for /oC/, Q for /xi/, I for /oi/. 

 The easiest languages to read and write are those with have a distinct letter for each phoneme.  If modern English has 40 phonemes, then a one for one [or isomorphic] mapping or representation requires an alphabet of 40 distinct marks or letters.

Thus a proper or ideal alphabetic written language should possess exactly as many graphemes [or sound-symbols] as there are phonemes [sound categories].  The closer a written language is to the ideal, the quicker it will be acquired by beginners. 

The best written language for facile reading and writing, has one and only one symbol for each sound.   Such an alphabet provides the minimum number of characters to reflect a spoken statement and requires the lest energy to learn.

Unifon is a perfectly isomorphic representation of American speech.  It requires 15% fewer letters than the traditional writing system with its abundance of digraphs, silent letters, and double consonants.

Since the body of spoken English has grown over the past 1200 years and the English as well as most European languages have tried to fit the 22 or 23 Greco Roman character alphabet into a reasonable reflection of the tongues with too narrow a range of characters, the difficulty has persisted and gotten worse, as wagons rutting and ill chosen road.  There has been no standardization of pairings and since the common law society of England has  had only the past to follow, there has grown up a spelling system that defines learning by rational beings who have been able to master such isomorphic representations of Arabic numbers, musical notation, chemical and engineering symbols an the rigorous markings of higher mathematics.  Most of the world now utilizes a rigorous decimal monetary system.

One of the great wastages of human effort is to teach English reading to otherwise rational children or non native speakers. 

The task of teaching reading in English has become so wasteful that enormous effort and three years are required to accomplish what in countries with phonemic writing systems accomplish in as little as three months.  In English speaking countries, 20% of the population never quite learns to read and write. 

 

  

 Transcriptions   



The schwa symbol has been changed above.  It is not just a mirrored e.
The U with serifs also needs some work to make it distinct from the O. 

u2- unifon development group

 Unifon and Spelling Reform

Unifon and the i/t/a were at best temporary spelling reforms.
The highly phonemic writing systems were used as intellectual scaffolding and like the scaffolding at a building site, they were discarded as children transitioned to the more complex code. 

Unifon is at best a temporary spelling reform.  It is basically just a dictionary key writing system introduced as an initial teaching alphabet.  As originally deployed, the unigraphic sound signs were not retained for dictionary key spelling.

The same can be said for the initial teaching alphabet or i/t/a.  Neither writing system was permanent.
The current bicodal approach to teaching reading and writing retains the basic code for a dictionary key and a way of talking about speech sounds.  This represents a significant methodological change.

Unifon was taught the same way that Laubach taught literacy in a foreign land.  The method might be called explicit phonics because the sound-symbol correspondences are introduced first.  To make sure that the correspondences were over-learned, Unifon used a writing to read approach. 

The i/t/a, on the other hand, was taught the same way that reading was taught in a whole language classroom.  The only difference between an i/t/a classroom and a "look-say" classroom was that words were spelled using an augmented alphabet.  The i/t/a did not change the method.  It only changed the medium, the alphabet.

The basal-reader approach uses a restricted vocabulary and repetition to encourage students to read whole words rather than strings of sound-signs.  When 50% or more of the sound signs are ambiguous, this avoids many problems.  Reading by sound-signs is slow even when the referenced sound is clear.

Although children could read the transcribed text twice as fast as children using traditional text, the focus on whole words had two unintended and counterproductive consequences.  1. Many children never over-learned the i/t/a sound-symbol correspondences.  2. Most children over-learned the i/t/a word shapes.   

Downing argued that to transfer a skill, that skill must be over-learned.  If as many as 40% of the i/t/a trained children never over-learned the code, then they would have difficulty transferring skill in the i/t/a medium to a new more complex task. 

What they did learn in the i/t/a class, word patterns or shapes, would inhibit their ability to relearn new word shapes for the same concept.  If shoe = show, then the letter sequence SHOE might be difficult to associate with foot-ware. 

The i/t/a students completed the 5 books in their basal reader series almost a year ahead of their traditionally taught counterparts.  In a 1962 experiment involving about 1000 students, Downing documented that students in the i/t/a class progressed twice as fast thru their school books. 

At the start of the 3rd year of school, the i/t/a students had to transition to the traditional orthography. This went fairly smoothly for about half of the students because i/t/a spelled words were the same as traditionally spelled words 40% of the time and close 70% of the time.  As a group, there was a significant drop in reading ability.  It took at least a year for most to regain their former skill in the new medium.  By this time, the conventionally taught group caught up. 

Some experiments in the U.S. continued to track students in later grades and failed to find a significant difference between i/t/a trained students and traditionally trained students in the 6th grade and later.

Some students  had difficulty with the i.t.a. because they never over-learned it in the two years that they were exposed to it in the form of a basal reader.  Downing was unable to document that the i/t/a trained students had over-learned the i/t/a code.

Another problem with the i.t.a. was that children tended to learn whole words because they were so frequently repeated.  These whole word patterns had to be forgotten in order to transition to the traditional complex code in the third year. If you are used to spelling shoe as shue and show as shoe, it takes a little time to unlearn the associations.  Many students were perplexed for a few months after they were told to read traditional text.

Unifon did not record any of the transition problem experienced by some i/t/a trained students because there was no emphasis on learning whole word patterns and the writing system was abandoned as a reading system after 3 months.  The i/t/a was abandoned after 2 years.  In the 4th month, Unifon students started reading comic books.  Comic books are written in all caps just like Unifon. By the end of the first year, children were reading 3rd grade children's books.

Every Unifon student fully masters the code so there were no students who were confused about how to sound spell and convert written letters to sounds.  After three years of practice, high frequency words are not read sound-sign by souind-sign.  They are read as sight words or meaning symbols.  Since the students had no intensive experience reading Unifon other than as a string of sound-signs, there was very little to unlearn after the transition to traditional spelling.



Dv BRWN BAR/BAR/BER HAD FISh FOR                
ITS SvP3R AT Dv RIV3R AND                                     
DEN WENT INTU Dv FOREST.  (searching for Unifon II)

Spelling Dearest: Irreverant History of Spelling

www.spellingdearest.com

"Huked on foniks werked fer me!" 
Of course, phonics helps with 50% of the words, but it doesn't wurk with the other 50%. There is no consistent way to represent /3/ in English.  /@r/ can be represented <er> but it is also represented four other ways.  werked for /w3rkt/ works except that <er> usually represents the unstressed form as in /VD@r/ uther.  In one consistent notation, NBC English could be written:  "Hwkt on foniks wurkt for mé."

 Canadian, Niall McLeod Waldman,
published Spelling Dearest in September, 2004
The subtitle is how we came to spell the way we do.  - How we got
The practical title of the second, if we ever see it, might be, "How Can
We Rescue Our Spelling from Its Present Waste and Confusion?"

Dr. Abraham F. Citron, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University.

"The Oxford English Dictionary became the unofficial bible of British spelling. Unlike the real bible, though, if you break one of the Oxford English Dictionary's commandments, you don't go to hell — hell comes to you." --Niall McLeod

Niall,

I think that alphabetic and phonemic are about the same.  phonetic has a slightly different technical meaning.  There are several ways to estimate phonemicity or consistent sound representation.  One of the simplest is the way that Godfrey Dewey did in his book, English Spelling: Roadblock to Reading and in his article in the Spelling Progress Bulletin.  Dewey's World English Spelling could not predict the spelling of unstressed syllables.  I reprinted this in the J32 www.spellingsociety.org

Quotes from the book:
"

During the time of the Saxon Kings [Old English], the English writing system was 90% alphabetic [phonetic]. After Johnson [Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary], it was only 40% alphabetic."  (Dr. Steve T. Bett, Saundspel, Oct. 2000).

"

80 percent...of the words in English are not spelled phonetically...; it is evident, therefore, that English is not one language, but two — a written one and a spoken one." (Rolf Johnson, professor of English, University of Illinois. From an article in The American Mercury, 1948).

There are of course more than one way to determine irregularity.  The estimates range from 85% phonetic to 80% unphonetic.  Clearly not everyone is talking about the same thing.  Clearly, English spelling is not 85% predictable and no one has come up with a way to get a computer to move from a phonemic spelling to a traditional spelling. 

"Most English speakers never fully learn unpredictable English spelling and can spell better in a foreign language with a consistent orthography [spelling system] than they can in English." (Dr. Steve T. Bett, Saundspel, Oct. 2000).

A better quote is that second year students of German and Spanish can spell in the foreign language better than they can in their native language.  This has been studied by Chris Upward and others and the reasons for it should be fairly obvious.  In most languages, if you can pronounce the word you can spell it.  In English, you can spell it in four tries about 85% of the time.

This is where the idea that English is 85% regular and rule based comes from.  In other words, spelling regularities can reduce the options to about 4.  The chances of guessing it right on the first try are usually a little better than 25%.  Good spellers have to combine the probabilities with a photographic memory which is why when asked to spell a particular low frequency word, they have to write it out to see if it looks right. 

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