1. unifon_transcription.htm  -  2  unifon-luvit.htm  -  3 unifon-intro    4 unifon-malone Unifon means one sound (per symbol). Unifon uses only monographic or unigraphic symbols.  Th,  Sh & other digraphs are reduced to T S & other single letters. Diphthongs such as oil & out also become unigraphs: Ql and qt. Table of Contents:      To view special characters download fonts Why Unifon Unifon transcriptions - Unifon on-line converter Unifon wall chart - 40 sound signs with pictures Keyboard entry system with chart or keyboard map Phoneme mergers in Unifon c = er+ur, u=uh stressed or unstressed IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and Unifon A true story (humorous transcription) Phun with spelling The reporter who couldn't spell Why Unifon?  Unifon looks like just another dictionary key or phonemic spelling of broadcast English.  There are already a dozen dictionary keys, why invent another one?  I don't doubt that a notation such as i/t/a or Webster (www.m-w.com) could work just as well as Unifon.  However, they have not been tested.  Unifon is the only pronunciation guide spelling shown to accelerate traditional literacy.  It is also one of the few notations that are consistently unigraphic.  There are no two letter symbols such as in the i/t/a and Truespel. Unigraphic means no two letter symbols for uncombined phonemes. The IPA is unigraphic but has two letter symbols for diphthongs.  Unifon reduces diphthongs to single symbols.  /au/ is reduced to /q/ on the keyboard which generates a symbol,  q, which looks like a merger of O and w.   A broad Unifon transcription can be difficult to read (see below) but compared to reading a narrow  IPA  transcription of an English dialect, it is easy.  (link) Unifon Transcriptions To convert any plain text document  to Unifon, go to www.unifon.org/convert   *Unifon uses the Carnegie Mellon University pronunciation dictionary at www.speech.cs.cmu.edu. To learn to code text or pronunciations in Unifon, you will need to memorize the sound-symbol correspondence table.  Fortunately,  you already know over 50% of the sound-symbol correspondences.  A = the sound in *ape, B = the initial consonant in *bat,  K = the initial phoneme in *cat and *kite, and so on.  Unifon is like a pronunciation key in a dictionary, there is one and only one symbol for 40 phonemes (the sound categories in American English). Instead of 26 letters, there are 41. In the traditional alphabet, the letters c q and x are redundant.  They are replaced with k, s, kw, and ks in Unifon.  Some of the traditional sound signs are only available as two letter symbols (or digraphs) such as ch and sh.  Unifon assigns a single letter to these digraphs. Some of the sound signs are combinations or diphthongs. Unifon assigns a single letter to /dZ/, /tS/, /oi/, etc.  Here is a complete list of letter values in the form of a wall chart:               If you have any trouble, send your questions to Dr. Bett (sbett&lycos.com). This chart by Scott White associates a Unifon symbol with a key word and an image. A as in Aprun (apron) or A as in  Ap (ape) D as in dog (dog) or D as in  dort (dart) O as in ork  (ark) or pot (pot) G as in gUs (goose) but not jem (gem) Traditional Spellings: apron ant ball bat chair dog eagle egg grasshopper fish goose house igloo ice jacks kite lion mouse nail ring are replaced with Aprun ant bxl Ker Some of the hard transcriptions are due to ambiguous pronunciation.   Is *orange spelled   Orunj xrunj or orinj?  Is it lIun lIon lIen ?  turtle could be tctul or tctil whale wAl could be hwAl garage is gcoZ (US) or garuj (UK) downloadfonts  When Unifon was used in the schools, parents were taught the code in a 2 hours group session.  For data entry, you will need to learn both the handwritten code (above) and the keyboard code. You have to become tri-codal.  This is not all that difficult because there is considerable overlap between the traditional code, Unifon, and the keyboard entry codes. Long vowels, for instance, are just upper case versions of the short vowels.  aeiouAEIOU. al lIks Al, Du elf lIks Elz and wind KImz. Du otc xt tU gO Al likes Ale, the Elf likes EEls and wInd chImes, the Otter OUght to gO. Notice above that *ARK is respelled ork.  This only works for the American accent.  The assignment of ah to o results in some visual disruption.  One can say that spa is just spot without the t.  It can't be done traditionally because a terminal o is long and associated with oh. It can be done in Unifon which has no positional spelling.  spot-spo ( see Unigraf.) The keyboard entry system The chart above does not tell you what key to press in order to display the Unifon code. In most cases, your first guess would be correct.  Only about ten key assignments are arbitrary and obscure.  For instance, ch is accessed with the cap-K,  The first character in unicorn is accessed with a cap-Y.  The terminal unstressed uh sound in panda is the same as the stressed uh in up.  The obscure short vowel in book is accessed with a turned U or cap-C  bCk. The keyboard assignments were worked out by ... Unifon keyboard maps: 1. The augmented Unifon alphabet and keyboard The keyboard character is shown on the top right in each cell.The traditional spelling of key words shown at the bottom of each cell Keywords in Unifon:  and, Ap, xl, bO, KiK, dU elf uDc foks 5 vowels are augmented to 15 2. 14 vowels + combinations      in alphabetical aeiou order Trad. long vowels include diphthongs Keywords in Unifon:  ad-Aviun elefunt-Il il-I, spot-spo hCk-Ot When some words are transcribed, they look a little strange.  This happens with all dictionary keys.  The unifon transcription may look particularly strange because there are no digraphic or two letter symbols as in the tradtional spelling.  Below,   *Sqtud looks so odd that you would not guess the word without chaining together the individual letter sounds.  Cap S= sh, q = ou, u =schwa.   d =/d/ http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-luvit.htm http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-malone.htm Can you read this?  The story is supposed to contain all the phonemes of spoken English. The quick brown fox jumped over each thin dog, look out, I shouted to her, for he's foild you again. To view the Unifont, download and install the following fonts:  download  fonts letc nAmz lCk strANj  A bE sE dE E ef jE AK I jA kA el em en O pE kY or es tE Y vE* eks wI zE Letter names look strange when sound-spelled in Unifon.  Some letter names are strange to  begin with:  aich, wie, .double-ew the pronunciation of the name seem to have little connection to the sound of the letter.   tU mAk it mxr veksiN, Der sImz tU bI nO komun ekplanASun fxr Du od speliNz Any text may be converted to a pronunciation guide spelling at http://66.41.61.116/UFLookup/UFXlate.htm The 600 word conversion (below) took 40 seconds and was displayed in the Unifont. To view this in a typographically pleasing upper case font, you usually need to download the new Data-Control Font data-unifon.ttf  (also  www.unifon.org) The font by Vic Fieger is based on an old OCR (Optical Character Recognition) font.  As yet, nothing has been done to take advantage of the machine legibility of these sound-signs.  Fieger's font has not been updated yet: There is no ligatured 3R. For more fun with spelling, try reading a description of English as it is spoken.  In a pronunciation guide spelling, words that rime are going to be spelled the same.  phun for fun is a homophone in tradspel but is not a possibility in a phonemic, one symbol per sound, system.   fun                 This chart fails to write every word in Unifon:  Akxrn, kat, fiS, gRl http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-luvit.htm http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-malone.htm Can you read this?  The story is supposed to contain all the phonemes of spoken English. Can you read this transcription? The case for Unifon  Literate adults when first exposed to a Unifon transcription think that they will have to learn to read all over again in order to decipher the alphabetic code.  Actually they only need to learn 17 new letter-sound correspondences and only a few of these are arbitrary assignments. unifont-sampletxt.gif           Lower case "aeiou" represent the short vowel sounds.  Upper case "AEIOU" represent the long vowel sounds.  Unifon, which means one sound, is also unigraphic.  This means that the traditional digraphs Sh, NG, Ch, and  Th are going to be reduced to one letter: <Sh> and <NG> become S and N.  <CH> becomes K, and <Th> is expanded to Dh and Th and reduced to D and T as in Da Tug for the thug.  The unstressed "uh" or schwa is assigned to a U. <ee> = E on the keyboard and a crossed I in the display font e.g.,  sOsIutE  or simulated: SÓSÍUTÉ  or if you have installed the unifonts: sOsIutE or in the older Data Control font sOsIctE (see converters)    Phoneme Mergers:   U = /V/ or /@/ in SAMPA notation.   The sound in up and ago  /Vp/ /@'go/ In the Unifon keyboard map this would be up and ugO. With the Unifont installed, this would display as UP and UGÓ   c = /3`/ and /@`/  in SAMPA notation.  The two sounds in surfer:  /'s3`f@`/ In the Unifon keyboard map, this would be scfc. This would display as S3RF3R Unifont download: unifonk05.zip www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifonk05.zip Character sets and sound symbol correspondences www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-ipa-EN.gif www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-ipa-keyboard.gif   Missing Material:  The CBS TV show on UNIFON hosted by Charles Kuralt, interviewing John Culkin.  It was called “The Day They Changed the Alphabet”.  Date: ____________ If you have any leads on how to get more information, please contact someone at www.unifon.org or post it at unifon@yahoogroups.com Ynifon iz u fonEmik nOtASun fxr umerikun ENgliS.  wcdz or speld az DA or prunqnsd and prunqnsd az Da or endOdud.  spOkun wcdz or rEdUsd tU u striN uv sqnd sInz.  Ynifon haz 40 uv DEz. aftc lcniN Dem Y kan spel enE wcd Y kan spEk, xr sqnd qt enE Ynion speliN. If you haven't installed the unifont, what you are viewing above is keyboard Unifon.  Unless they are keyboarding, the kids never see this version.  What they see and use can be simulated as follows:                 A poem by the American humorist, Bennet Cerf                             UNIFON IZ U FUNEMIK NOTASUN FOR UMERIKUN ENLIS Simulated Unifon above, InterCap below YnifQn iz u funEmik nOtASun for umerikun ENgliS Únìfon iz à fònémik nótáshìn for Àmerikàn Éngli$   WLO UNiFQN iZ & F&NEMiK NOTAsh&N FOR &MeRiK&N EnGLish DiS iZ RiT&N IN INT&RKAP - NO SPes&L FQNT REKWIRD Explanation of InterCap notation:  (h is a silent letter above) When Bob says he has trouble reading Unifon, I think he means he has trouble reading the keyboard mixed case notation.  I can't see why anyone would have difficulty with display Unifon. To see the Unifont, either download it at www.unifon.org or check out the converter at http://24.245.76.208/UFLookup/UFXLate.htm At the University of Chicago Lab School in the 1950's, preschool children learned the Unifon-code in less than 3 weeks and mastered it in 3 months.  There is a difference between flash card rote memory of the sound-symbol correspondences and code literacy.  It was the complete mastery of the phonemic code by all students that accounts for the success of this program over other forms of synthetic or explicit phonics instruction.  After 3 months, the CLS kids started reading comic books or traditional all cap text.  We might do it a little different today.  We might introduce the 4 high frequency ways that sounds are spelled in Engish.  A = a, ai-ay, a..e, ei-ey, ... Steve    The Data-Control Unifont required to view the following  /unifon_transcription.htm This is an older transcription with c used for schwa.  Classical Unifon did not have a free standing schwa.  The c was used only with R to represent the unstressed er and the stressed ur.  The latest Unifon orthography uses c for a bound schwa+R.  This makes it equivalent to classical unifon and compatible with the CMU pronunciation dictionary.  If this displays as mixed caps, you have not installed the Unifont: data-unifon.ttf purfcktlE gCd iNglcS wurdz or getiN u mEniN mAkOvcr wen Der bcginiN letcr <f> iz substitUtud wiD pE-AK <ph>. TiNk uv phat, phishing & phood and yU mIt wundcr wut Dc pE-AK (ph) iz gOiN on. Perfectly good English words are getting a meaning makeover when their beginning letter F is substituted with PH..You might wonder "what the PH is going on!"  The converter cannot handle non-words.  fat, fiSiN, fUd, pI-AK.  If the word is not in the dictionary, it does not get transcribed. letar nAmz lCk strAnj A bE sE dE E ef jE AK jA .pE kY or es tE Y- eks wI zE Letter names look strange when sound-spelled in Unifon.  Some letter names are strange to begin with:  aich, wie, ... tU mAk it mxr veksiN, Der sEmz nO komun eksplunASun fxr Dc rEspeliNz. Unifon Transcription  of    Phun with Spelling   credits phat - fat, mEniN verE gCd, eksclcnt xr seksE, iz sed tU bE afrckcn-cmerckcn orgct dAtcN tU at lEst 1963, xlDO sum lAt tU Dc portE hav mAd c vulgcr akrcncm uv it. phishing - fiSiN  yUzd tU mEn ctendcN c konscrt bI Dc band Phish (c nAm poscblE dcrIvd frum Dat uv band membcr jon fiSman). but mxr rEscntlE it iz bEcN yUzd fxr an intcrnet skam Dat trIz tU bAt pEpcl cntU givcN qt paswcrdz, kredct-kord numbcrz and uDcr purscncl dAtc. it cpercntlE spriNz frum fOn phreaking, c fxrm uv hakcN Dat torgctcd telcfOn kumpcnEz cn Dc 1970es. phood - fUd iz raDcr nU xr phresh - freS ,cn hip-hop leksckon. it dcskrIbz nUtriScnclE cnhanst prodckts and iz an cmalgcm uv formcsUtckcl and fUd az iz pharming, fxr agrckclKcr'z brAv nU wurld. and c web surK yEldz sevrcl mxr pEAK cgzampclz. fxltE rEzcncN bckxz uv mAl SOvcnizcm? c phallasy. "Der or difcrcnt inspcrAScnz fxr menE uv Dem," sed jesE Sheidlower, hU runz Dc cmerckcn xfcs uv Dc oksfcrd iNglcS dikScnerE. Dat sEmz tU pQnt tU wun lcNgwistck eksplcnAScn: "DA or dclibcrctlE misspeld cn c hyUmcrcs wA." komck respellings or c lxNstandcN trcdiScn cn cmerckcn iNglcS, givcn wut Sheidlower kxlz its "verE flekscbcl xrTogrcfE. fxr enE givcn sqnd Der mA bE c lot uv wAz tU spel and prcnqns it." riKcrd bAlE, an iNglcS prcfescr and hcstxrEcn uv Dc laNgwcj at Dc yUncvursctE uv miScgcn, rOt cn an E-mAl cksKAnj: "pcrhaps Dc mOst cndyCrcN uv DEz [komck respellings] iz 'oll korrect,' wiK rapcdlE turnd cntU Dc mOst cmerckcn uv wurdz, 'OK.' it furst cpird cn print morK 23, 1839, and sUn tCk xf lIk wIldfIcr." cn an xfcn-kwOtcd 1926 ortckcl, lUEz pqnd rOt uv "Dc Kraze fxr kA," Dc menE orthographic mcnipyclAScnz at Dat pirEcd uv kA fxr sE. SE portlE ctribyctcd it tU urlEcr efcrts at spelcN rcfxrm, wiK sEmd tU kaK on prImerclE cn advcrtIzcN and brand nAmz (kleenex - klEneks, tastykake-tAstEkAk, kool - kUl, etsetcrc.) and entcrtAnmcnt (krazy kat - krAzE kat). "xl cn xl," SE rOt, "Der iz nO mcstAkcN Dc kxl uv 'k' Ovcr qcr kountry, qcr kurious kontemporary kraving fxr it, and its konspicuous yUs cn Dc klevcr koinages uv kommerce." sO iz pEAK Dc nU kA? ckxrdcN tU Dc OED, pEAK and kA hav bin c tag tEm sins AnKcnt tImz, substctUtcd fxr ef and sE qt uv kcnfyUZcn Ovcr Der grEk and latcn fxrmz. cn Dc 15tEAK TrU 17tEAK senKcrEz, menE iNglcS wurdz Dat had bin speld wiD an cniScl ef wcr KAnjd tU pEAK (cnklUdcN formcsE) cn port bckxz skrIbz tCk Dc latcr spelcN tU bE mxr lurnd and Dus kcrekt. but respellings cn Dc modcrn erc hav uDcr purpcscz. ralf emcrscn, an indcpendcnt lcNgwistcks skolcr, sed DA mA bE yUzd tU difcrenSEAt Dc mEncN uv wurdz ÿ Dc pEAK cn phat, fxr cgzampcl, signcfIz wun izcnt txkcN cbqt fatness ÿ xr tU dcstiNgwcS c wurd xr nAm tU mAk it EzEcr tU kopErIt. bAlE sed Dat "komck respellings or yUZcwclE scbvurscv. at Dc verE lEst, pEpcl hU cnvent Dem dcfI Dc cTxrctEz and sA, 'I kan spel Dis wurd hqevcr I lIk.' "  The following example transcribes the first paragraph in Valerie Yule's story, The Beautiful Princess.  The story uses most of the 40 sound signs in Unifon and includes some difficult words.   The Data-Control OCR font by Vic Fieger is a version of an old machine legible OCR font.  The name on the black background is written in PMF an alternate one-symbol-per sound writing system.  This is an example of a converter transcription ... it didn't always work. Dis iz fAmcslE trU in rap and hip-hop (E.jE., Dc grUps pharcyde and non phixion). but webstcr'z xlsO gets litcl rcspekt frum hakcrz, hU konvcrs cn intcrnet-bAst laNgwcjcz Dat mA kombIn letcrz and numbcrz. fxr cgzampcl, c web sIt dikScnerE fxr el33tE ("clEt") spEk dcskrIbz az an Old standbI Dc scbstctUScn uv pE-AK fxr ef, az cn Ph- EE-R PEE-ACHE-EE-ARE or  pEAKEor (fear = "fEr" ). cn hiz E-mAl, bAlE nOtcd Dat Dc intcrnet iz fCl uv reshufflings uv pEAK and ef Dat or ment tU bE hyUmcrcs: fizzics fxr fizcks and phinancial fxr fcnanScl, fxr cgzampcl. www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-ipa-EN.gif www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifon-ipa-keyboard.gif .is speliN stil importcnt   In classic Unifon:  L3RN U BET3R KOD  This is the same transcription.  The only difference is that it uses a different Unifon font.   lcn u betc kOd Download the font at www.unifon.org purfcktlE gCd iNglcS wurdz or getcN c mEncN makOvcr wen Der bcgincN letcr <f> iz substctUtcd wiD pEAK <ph>. TiNk uv phat, phishing and phood and yU mIt wundcr wut Dc pE-AK iz gOcN on. Perfectly good English words are getting a meaning makeover when their beginning letter F is substituted with PH..You might wonder what the PH is going on.  The converter cannot handle non-words.  fat, fiSiN, fUd, pI-AK. tU mAk it mxr vekscN, Der sEmz nO komcn eksplcnAScn fxr Dc respellings. phat, mEncN verE gCd, eksclcnt xr seksE, iz sed tU bE afrckcn-cmerckcn orgct dAtcN tU at lEst 1963, xlDO sum lAt tU Dc portE hav mAd c vulgcr akrcncm uv it. phishing - fiSiN  yUzd tU mEn ctendcN c konscrt bI Dc band Phish (c nAm poscblE dcrIvd frum Dat uv band membcr jon fiSman). but mxr rEscntlE it iz bEcN yUzd fxr an intcrnet skam Dat trIz tU bAt pEpcl cntU givcN qt paswcrdz, kredct-kord numbcrz and uDcr purscncl dAtc. it cpercntlE spriNz frum fOn phreaking, c fxrm uv hakcN Dat torgctcd telcfOn kumpcnEz cn Dc 1970es. phood - fUd iz raDcr nU ÿ xr phresh - freS ,cn hip-hop leksckon. it dcskrIbz nUtriScnclE cnhanst prodckts and iz an cmalgcm uv formcsUtckcl and fUd ÿ az iz pharming, fxr agrckclKcr'z brAv nU wurld. and c web surK yEldz sevrcl mxr pEAK cgzampclz. fxltE rEzcncN bckxz uv mAl SOvcnizcm? c phallacy. "Der or difcrcnt inspcrAScnz fxr menE uv Dem," sed jesE Sheidlower, hU runz Dc cmerckcn xfcs uv Dc oksfcrd iNglcS dikScnerE. Dat sEmz tU pQnt tU wun lcNgwistck eksplcnAScn: "DA or dclibcrctlE mcsspeld cn c hyUmcrcs wA." komck respellings or c lxNstandcN trcdiScn cn cmerckcn iNglcS, givcn wut Sheidlower kxlz its "verE flekscbcl xrTogrcfE. fxr enE givcn sqnd Der mA bE c lot uv wAz tU spel and prcnqns it." riKcrd bAlE, an iNglcS prcfescr and hcstxrEcn uv Dc laNgwcj at Dc yUncvursctE uv miScgcn, rOt cn an E-mAl cksKAnj: "pcrhaps Dc mOst cndyCrcN uv DEz [komck respellings] iz 'oll korrect,' wiK rapcdlE turnd cntU Dc mOst cmerckcn uv wurdz, 'OK.' it furst cpird cn print morK 23, 1839, and sUn tCk xf lIk wIldfIcr." cn an xfcn-kwOtcd 1926 ortckcl, lUEz pqnd rOt uv "Dc Kraze fxr kA," Dc menE orthographic mcnipyclAScnz at Dat pirEcd uv kA fxr sE. SE portlE ctribyctcd it tU urlEcr efcrts at spelcN rcfxrm, wiK sEmd tU kaK on prImerclE cn advcrtIzcN and brand nAmz (kleenex - klEneks, tastykake-tAstEkAk, kool - kUl, etsetcrc.) and entcrtAnmcnt (krazy kat - krAzE kat). "xl cn xl," SE rOt, "Der iz nO mcstAkcN Dc kxl uv 'k' Ovcr qcr kountry, qcr kurious kontemporary kraving fxr it, and its konspicuous yUs cn Dc klevcr koinages uv kommerce." sO iz pEAK Dc nU kA? ckxrdcN tU Dc OED, pEAK and kA hav bin c tag tEm sins AnKcnt tImz, substctUtcd fxr ef and sE qt uv kcnfyUZcn Ovcr Der grEk and latcn fxrmz. cn Dc 15tEAK TrU 17tEAK senKcrEz, menE iNglcS wurdz Dat had bin speld wiD an cniScl ef wcr KAnjd tU pEAK (cnklUdcN formcsE) cn port bckxz skrIbz tCk Dc latcr spelcN tU bE mxr lurnd and Dus kcrekt. but respellings cn Dc modcrn erc hav uDcr purpcscz. ralf emcrscn, an indcpendcnt lcNgwistcks skolcr, sed DA mA bE yUzd tU difcrenSEAt Dc mEncN uv wurdz ÿ Dc pEAK cn phat, fxr cgzampcl, signcfIz wun izcnt txkcN cbqt fatness ÿ xr tU dcstiNgwcS c wurd xr nAm tU mAk it EzEcr tU kopErIt. bAlE sed Dat "komck respellings or yUZcwclE scbvurscv. at Dc verE lEst, pEpcl hU cnvent Dem dcfI Dc cTxrctEz and sA, 'I kan spel Dis wurd hqevcr I lIk.' " Dis iz fAmcslE trU cn rap and hip-hop (E.jE., Dc grUps pharcyde and non phixion). but webstcr'z xlsO gets litcl rcspekt frum hakcrz, hU konvcrs cn intcrnet-bAst laNgwcjcz Dat mA kombIn letcrz and numbcrz. fxr cgzampcl, c web sIt dikScnerE fxr el33tE ("clEt") spEk dcskrIbz az an Old standbI Dc scbstctUScn uv pE-AK fxr ef, az cn Ph- EE-R PEE-ACHE-EE-ARE or  pEAKEor (fear = "fEr" ). cn hiz E-mAl, bAlE nOtcd Dat Dc intcrnet iz fCl uv reshufflings uv pEAK and ef Dat or ment tU bE hyUmcrcs: fizzics fxr fizcks and phinancial fxr fcnanScl, fxr cgzampcl. a trU stxrE an eldclE lAdE in flxrudu did hc SopiN and, upxn ritcniN tU hc kor, fqnd fxr mAlz in Du akt uv lEviN hc vEhikul SE dropt hc SopiN bagz and drU hc handgun, prusEdiN tO skrEm at Du top uv hc vqS, "i hav u gun and I nO hQ tu Uz it: get qt uv Du kor. aDu fxr men didunt wAt fxr a sekund invitASun da got qt and ran lIk mad. Du lAdE, sumwut SAkun, Den prusEdud tU lOd hc SopiN bagz intU Du bak uv Du kor and got intU Du drIvc'z sEt. SE woz sO SAkun Dat SE kCd not get hc kE intU Du igniSun. SE trId and trId, and Den it dxnd on hc wI. A fyU minuts lAtc, SE fqnd hc On kor porkt fOr Or fIv spAsuz forDc dqn. SE lOdud hc bagz intU Du kor and drOv tU Du pulEs stASun. Du sorjunt tU hUm SE tOld Du stxrE kCdunt stop lafiN. hE pQntud tU Du uDc end uv Du kqntc, wer fOr pAl men wc rEpxrtiN A kor jakiN bI A mad, eldclE wCmun diskrIbd az whIt, les Dan fIv fEt txl, glasuz, kclE whIt her, and karEiN A lorj handgun. nO Korjuz wc fIld. if yCr gOiN tU hav A sEnyc mOmunt, mAk it A memcubul wun          www.unifon.org Cell 1: The sound of A as in and. Keyboard  [a].  Cell 2:  The sound of A as in Ape. Keyboard [A].  Note that the upper case A is a not assigned to the same sound as the lower case a.  This is famously true in rap and  hip-hop (e.g,, The groups Farside  Pharsyde fxrsId fxrsId and Non-Fiction Non-Phixion  non-fikScn non-fikScn). but Webster's also gets little respect from hackers, who converse in Internet based languages that may combine letters and numbers (Cf. Texting). For example, a web site dictionary for Elite speech describes as an old standby of substitution of PH for F as Pheer (fear)  pee-ache-ee-are.  pE-AK-E-or  or fEr  (non-rhotic) fEc In his e-mail, Bayley noted that the Internet is full of reshufflings of P H and F that or ment to be humorous.  fizzics (fizcks) for physics and phinancial for financial (fInanScl), for example.   file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Steve/My%20Documents/My%20Webs/unifon-ken-transcription.htm Can you read the Unifon text? It starts out -The hottest day of ... It would be keyboarded: Dc hotcst dA uv Da sumR sO for woz drxcng tU c klOz and a drqzE sIlcns lA OvR Da lorj skweR hqzcz uv privct drIv. The chart includes 40 sound signs but not R for cr or LMN for the syllabics.  R would generate a cr ligature.    "As a first step, someone needs to transcribe all of these words [the 100 most frequent used in children's books] into Unifon."  Attached to this message is a PDF file of the Fry 1000 list. (see www.unifon.org)  These (more than) 1000 words represent 89% of all the wards used in newspapers, magazines, everyday correspondence and children's books and they are listed in their frequency of use.  They are supposed to be learned over the first four grades.  With Unifon, of course, they should all be learned in pre-school, along with 5000 more. The file is in English with the Unifon equivalent. Alternate Transcriptions Links 2  unifon-luvit.htm  -  3 unifon-intro Phun with spelling: It's a grand tradition in this country, OK? --------------------------------------------------------------- by Charles Storch, Chicago Tribune Seattle Times, Sunday, May 02, 2004 : Living http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=phun02&date=20040502&query=phun+with+spelling RiteSpel page http://tinyurl.com/2gkj4

The article below was in the St. Paul paper. The section I have changed to red talks about the difficulties with the English language. This person sounds like someone who would be at least sympathetic to UNIFON. Maybe he'd even be willing to write an article on UNIFON or ... Ken, maybe part of your documentary idea. It really would be helpful if we found someone to write articles like John Culkin did in the 80's On this website http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/interact/longterm/stfbio/wpemail.htm / I found his email address. Thought I'd pass this on for anyone else who'd like to contact him. Steve Hendrix: hendrixs@washpost.com Travel staff writer, editor of Escapes column Pat   Posted on Sun, Mar. 13, 2005 The Reporter who couldn't spell Alphabet soup A good writer spills the truth about bad spelling. BY STEVE HENDRIX Washington Post SPELLING LESSON On a chilly December morning, I joined the ranks of little kids filing into Rolling Terrace Elementary School in Takoma Park, Md. They waddled under oversize backpacks and tugged Dora the Explorer rollaboard book bags through the double doors. I carried a black briefcase. We were all a few minutes late, and we all stopped like statues in the hallway for the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance, first in English, then in Spanish. Then, the kids melted into their classrooms, and I went into an office near the second-floor water fountains for my first spelling test since Donald Rumsfeld was the secretary of defense... under Gerald Ford. I didn't do very well. Melissa Salvesen, Rolling Terrace's reading specialist, quizzed me on a list of 27 words I chronically misspell. I had e-mailed the list to her myself. Even knowing what to expect, I botched 13 of them on a test featuring such grade-school softballs as elephant, piece, refrigerator, forest, towel, jewelry and trailer. "OK," she said, nodding her head slowly as she scanned the wreckage on my notebook paper. "You really can't spell." That I knew. What I wanted to find out was why. I am the world's worst speller. I have been all my life. My homework — from Miss Pedrow's third-grade language arts class to Dr. Gurevitch's doctoral seminar in persuasion and attitude change — all came back with the measles, solid red marks from top to bottom. "Good writing, atrocious spelling" was the verdict of just about every essay contest I ever entered (even those I won). I don't misspell just hard words (diaphanous, anyone? soliloquy?); I misspell words like maybe and because and famous. I misspell my own mother's name, Elfreida. My misspelling is epic. It's rich and vibrant and ever changing. It can even be fun. "I think of them as little puzzles," my Washington Post editor K.C. Summers once said of the find-the-funny-word challenge inherent in proofing my raw copy. But mostly it's just hugely embarrassing to be a professional writer who is routinely laughed out of Scrabble games. Not to mention perilous. I was put on probation at an Atlanta newspaper for causing excessive spelling trauma on deadline (a kindly copy editor began covering for me). And I've watched every editor I've ever worked for go through a sort of five-step process of realization (disbelief, anger, anger, resignation, anger) before finally assigning some beleaguered proofreader to shadow my every keystroke. At this paper, when one of my howlers (patrician when I meant partition) made it into print and drew a rebuke from the ombudsman, I reminded K.C. — ha-ha! — of her "little puzzle" comment from happier days. "I really think of them more like little land mines," she said this time. Let's take one example: itinerary. Itinerary ItincarI is one of the dozens of words that bring me to a complete standstill. I can be typing along at a brisk pace when my brain feeds a word like itinerary down to my flying fingers, and they freeze over the keyboard like mummified buzzard claws. Itinerary. I-T... E?... I? Pretty sure it's I. N is easy. Another E? or is it A?... R... Two Rs? A? A-R-Y. Itinerrary? I once spell-checked a 2,000-word article I had written for the Post's Travel section and found I had spelled itinerary four ways, none of them correctly. It was a pitiful tally, made worse by the fact that it blinked at me in the middle of a newsroom filled with some of the best writers — and spellers — in the country. I could hear them all around me, blithely tapping out the 100,000-plus words that go into the paper every morning, most spelled correctly on the first go. People who write for big-city newspapers are supposed to be able to spell. The island of misfit toys, this is not. Being humiliated by spell-check is pretty much a daily occurrence for me, but something about seeing four errant itineraries spurred me to action. I sat and repeated the word over and over and over, out loud, the way you memorize a phone number: I-T-I-N-E-R-A-R-Y. I was going to screw that simple nine-letter pattern into my brain if I had to repeat it 10,000 times. Hey, I can do it with an ATM number. Surely I could do it with the language I use every day to make my living. The chance to test myself came up within a day or two, as I worked on a story about backpacking through Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. "But as the weather soured again, the evening meal became more than an item on the... ." And I nailed it. Itinerary. I believe it was the first time — in either my 14-year professional life as a writer or my 39-year personal life as, um, a person — that I ever spelled itinerary correctly without any kind of assist from a dictionary, computer, copy editor or wife. The next week, I got it wrong again. Itenerry. The other day, I spelled it itenirary. It's a shame, because I love words as much as they seem to hate me. I love learning them and using them and having fun with them. I'm an incurable punster — wordplays pop into my head so constantly I have to make an effort not to blurt them out like a Tourette's sufferer. My literary idols are such master wordsmiths as P.G. Wodehouse, William Faulkner, Patrick O'Brian and Richard Ford. I read tons. I have a robust vocabulary. I just can't spell. I know many people assume it's because I'm too lazy to reach for the dictionary. One of my colleagues recently summarized her 'nuff-said attitude toward misspellers by quoting to me the entirety of Stuart Little's curt spelling lesson to a class of grade-schoolers: "A misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone. I consider it a very fine thing to spell words correctly, and I strongly urge every one of you to buy a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and consult it whenever you are in the slightest doubt. So much for spelling. What's next?" Ah, the pitiless doctrine of Just Look It Up. It's hard to explain to my colleague, much less to E.B. White, that I'm "in the slightest doubt" with about every 20th word I write. Or that I'm sometimes too far at sea to even find it in the dictionary. (I once spent 20 minutes rewriting mosquito because I couldn't even get close enough for spell-check to take over.) Or that in the instant between looking up from the dictionary and turning to the keyboard, I can entirely forget what I've just seen (leaving me, at worst, with one index finger on the page while I peck out a letter at a time with the other). A far more appealing diagnosis of my affliction, if you ask me, is a growing body of evidence showing that some chronically awful spellers have an actual neurological misfire, a kind of dyslexia that keeps the most well-intentioned brain from remembering what words look like when it comes time to write them. One thing I can spell, people, is d-i-s-a-b-i-l-i-t-y. If this pans out, I may be able to get a better parking place at the mall. COLLATERAL CASUALTY But what most people tell me, particularly those who bemoan the national deterioration of spelling in this age of Toys R Us storefronts and "i luv u 2" e-mails, is that what failed me was liberalism. I am, they say, a collateral casualty of the Reading Wars that have raged through elementary classrooms since the 1970s. That's when disciples of "whole language" reading instruction — young academics addled by Vietnam and fed up with authority, rules and standards — sent the Friday spelling quiz the way of slate chalkboards and penmanship training. For decades, parents schooled under more rigorous methods have been puzzled — and often outraged — to see their kids' work come home riddled with the uncorrected errors of "inventive" and "magic" spelling. "We've been shortchanging spelling for about the last 30 years," says Richard Gentry, a Florida author who champions better spelling instruction in school districts across the country. Most whole-language approaches ignore the individual phonemes that are the building blocks of words — the /eye/, /tin/, /eh/, /rare/and /ee/that make up itinerary — in favor of teaching the "whole word," all of a piece and only in the context of other lessons. "The notion with whole language was that spelling wasn't all that important," Gentry says, "that if kids became good readers and writers, they would 'catch' expert spelling. We now know that they don't." It's not that all of those progressive enthusiasms were wrong, says Gentry, who ran Western Carolina University's reading center for 16 years. He cites the growing emphasis on good children's literature, for example, as a vast improvement over Dick and Jane's anesthetizing plot lines. And encouraging kindergartners to write, even in their emergent scribble-scrabble way, was a great leap forward. "A lot of good practice came out of whole-language theory," Gentry says. "The piece they got wrong was spelling. And spelling is phonics." Could it really be that itinerary stymies me to this day because a tie-dyed American pedagogy assumed that correctly spelled words would simply accumulate like sandburs as I explored the richer pastures of reading for pleasure and creative writing? Maybe it's time to go back and learn my letters. MASS CONFUSION Ours is a Gordian knot of a language, a tangled skein of threads pulled from dozens of alien dialects and balled into the richest, most expressive and downright maddening lingo on the planet. There's plenty of blame to go around — curse you, Greeks, Saxons and Normans — for the fact that oven doesn't rhyme with woven, laughter does rhyme with rafter and colonel is identical to kernel. The combination o-u-g-h variously makes the sounds of tough, through, though, thought and plough. O-e serves goes, shoes, does and amoeba. This is like an arithmetic in which 5 plus 3 sometimes equals 8, and sometimes 11, 23 or 75, for no particular reason you can learn other than memorizing hundreds of irregular equations. It doesn't need to be this way. Did you know they don't really have such a thing as misspelling in Italy, Spain, Portugal and other countries with a more straightforward orthography? Ask a fellow on the streets of Lima how to spell abogado, and he'll simply repeat the word more slowly. It's like asking someone in Washington to spell FBI. "Those are simpler, phonetically based systems," says Gentry. They enjoy something much closer to a one-to-one correspondence of a single letter or letter combination to a single sound. "In Italian, they have 33 letter combinations to spell 25 sounds. In English, we have about 1,120 letter combinations to make 44 sounds." It isn't confusing just for bad spellers when there are at least a dozen ways to spell the long e sound: peel, key, tea, phoebe, tangerine, protein, fiend, she, people, ski, debris and quay. The bizarro spelling makes English incredibly difficult to learn, particularly for adults studying it as a second language, and it acts as a drag chute on efforts to boost literacy. Ever since a 13th-century monk named Orm, no doubt tugging his halo of hair in frustration at the unholy mess he was forced to transcribe, became the first evangelist for spelling reform, men of letters have called for some serious tidying up of the English lexicon. They've included Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, the editors of the Chicago Tribune and George Bernard Shaw, who famously pointed out that ghoti could logically be pronounced fish using familiar English letter combinations (the g-h from rough, o from women and t-i from motion). Until about 350 years ago, spelling didn't even count in English, according to Naomi Baron, an American University linguistics professor and author of "From Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading." Before the mid-17th century, Baron says, there was no notion of standardized spelling among the few who were taking quill to paper. "The Shakespeares and Miltons of the world might have spelled fish three different ways in a single work," Baron says. Shakespeare couldn't spell? And you're giving me a hard time? We orthographically afflicted love to cite luminaries who were famously rotten spellers, Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Woodrow Wilson and John Irving among them. Some people, even geniuses, just can't spell. BRAIN POWER "I see it all the time," says Salvesen, the reading specialist. "Some kids can just look at the word preposterous and spell it. Others can see it a thousand times and never get it right." And why, I ask as someone in the latter camp, is that? Richard Gentry thinks the research is now clear — it's in the brain. Recent studies using functional MRI analysis have not only begun to map the areas of the brain we use in reading and writing but they've also shown how a neurological glitch in about 20 percent of people may make them chronically poor spellers. In brief, according to Gentry's summary in his book "The Science of Spelling," when a kindergartner is learning to read, two areas of the left side of her brain are principally engaged, one in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the other back in the left parieto-temporal system. These two areas are where the constituent sounds, or phonemes, of a word are recognized, the /k/, /a/and /t/sounds of cat, for example, and then where they are broken up and put together to make a complete word: /k/+ /a/+ /t/cat. Both of these areas of the brain are relatively slow and analytical, methodically dissecting words into bits to understand what they mean. Think of how a 5-year-old sounds out words. But at some point, usually a year or two after the learning process begins, she crosses a cognitive threshold and shifts from being a beginning reader to a fluent reader, a skill that relies on a third area of the brain, the left occipito-temporal. Instead of analyzing parts to identify the word, this area instantly recognizes the entire word. Reading goes from a halting letter-by-letter toil to a lovely word-by-word glide. "It's like sailing on a nice breezy day," says Sally Shaywitz, the Yale neuroscientist who conducted most of the research cited by Gentry. "Reading becomes a pleasure." That third zone — the word form area — is your personal dictionary. Once you have read a word five or six times correctly, your brain has stored a model of it that includes all the word's important features: how to pronounce it, how to spell it and what it means. That is, unless you're one of about 20 percent of readers who have trouble bringing the areas in the back of the brain on line. For them, according to functional MRI scans, the left occipito-temporal and parieto-temporal areas stay relatively quiet, with most of the reading activity remaining in the frontal areas. They may build up compensatory pathways, but they're not reading the normal way. What researchers think they are seeing in those scans is dyslexia in action. And some of them think it's also the neurological core of bad spelling. "If you don't activate Area C, you'll never be a good speller," Gentry argues. "That's where you 'see' a complete word in your mind's eye, whether you're reading it or writing it. And if you can't visualize it, you're just winging it based on what it sounds like. In a language with as many irregularly spelled words as English, you're going to be wrong a lot of the time." Researchers have long known spelling and reading are tightly linked. Shaywitz says spelling is probably the more difficult of the two processes. "Reading is transforming letters into sound," she says. "Spelling is just the reverse, but you don't start with something you can see on a page." The dyslexia Shaywitz sees in her lab may explain why some people can never learn to spell. "Poor spelling may well be the last remnant of dyslexia that a person has otherwise compensated for," she says. "But it's something we haven't looked at directly." And what would she hypothesize about a person — a good-hearted, midcareer journalist, say — who writes tens of thousands of words a year, reads millions more and still can't pass a grade-school spelling quiz? "I'd like to study that person," she says. You're on. TEST SUBJECT It's snowing in New Haven, Conn., when I slip on the headphones at the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention. Soothing voices recite words and sounds into my ears, part of the battery of tests I face before I get my head examined. These modest rooms, in a low-rise building around the corner from the Yale Repertory Theater, are the epicenter of recent advances in the scientific understanding of reading and dyslexia. Shaywitz runs the National Institutes of Health-funded center with her husband, Bennett Shaywitz. A 2003 cover story in Time magazine about her work is framed on the wall of the lobby where hundreds of parents and students come each year — drawn by her national reputation and her best-selling book "Overcoming Dyslexia" — to solve the painful mystery of what went wrong with Johnny's reading. The center is a place filled with stuffed animals and feel-good posters, reflecting the age of the typical clientele. "Am I the first person you've ever tested who wasn't wearing Hello Kitty sneakers?" I ask examiner Jennifer Koch as she has me assemble patterned blocks. "Oh, no. We test a lot of Yale undergrads, as well," she says. That's who I meant, but I let it go because it's time for my appointment with the MRI. The four-block walk to Yale-New Haven Medical Center is a strangely stirring one. Am I about to learn that something is amiss with my brain? I have some of the symptoms of dyslexia: horrible spelling, serious difficulty remembering names and numbers, a failure to learn the rudiments of a foreign language despite two years of college French and a summer in Normandy. But I'm missing the big one — profound reading trouble. Although I'm a slow reader, I'm a voracious one. I read for pleasure every night of my life. We don't have cable. "You're not a classic dyslexic, no," Bennett Shaywitz says in his office two floors above the basement MRI room. "But it's very possible that you had reading problems you've been able to compensate for very well." They finally roll me into the dark opening of the MRI machine. For 40 minutes, magnets grind around my head, taking pictures of my innermost thoughts. (I focus on pure ones — it wouldn't do to have a compromising picture of Liv Tyler pop up on the monitor.) The actual test amounts to clicking a button in response to a variety of word games and patterns projected on a screen at my feet that are designed to stimulate the suspect areas of my brain to see them at work. When Sally Shaywitz calls after a few days, she has good news and bad. "Well, you're really smart," says this eminent authority on brains. "On our vocabulary tests, you scored about as high as you can possibly score. Also on the reasoning part, you're way, way in the superior range." I wonder if she could put that in letter form, addressed to: All Editors, The Washington Post. And on spelling and reading? "Let's call it average," she says. Specifically, I land in the frankly so-so 44th percentile on the part of the Nelson-Denny comprehension exam given under strictly timed conditions. But on the part with relaxed timing, my level doubles to a gentlemanly 85th percentile. "You have all the elements of reading," Shaywitz says. "But they're not firmly ingrained. When you're forced to do it quickly, you lose something." The MRI confirms it. The Shaywitzes see the lights go on in the usual reading areas of the left hemisphere. But they also find an unusual level of action on the right side of my brain, in the areas where dyslexics tend to build new pathways to make up for misfires in the normal ones. "It all fits together, our clinical exams and our neurobiological exams," Shaywitz says. "You had the underlying threads of dyslexia, but you've compensated for it really, really well. When you have time, you do well. But when you have to do things very quickly, it's not automatic. Your autopilot, for spelling and for reading, just isn't there." As a youngster, Shaywitz says, I was probably getting just enough information and pleasure from reading to push through some amount of dyslexic drag. And the more I read, the more compensatory tricks my brain wired into itself until I became fluent, at least under relaxed conditions. It's only when the heat is on that my reading goes a little wobbly and, even more often, my spelling collapses in a heap. It's probably one of the lesser beaten tracks to a career of deadline writing. On the train home from New Haven, I work on my Rolling Terrace spelling assignments. Sitting across the table from a man reading the Financial Times, I beaver away on work sheets decorated with cartoon dogs and elephants. Our eyes meet, and I realize I've been practicing the short e sound out loud. A few days later, I'm ready for Melissa Salvesen's final quiz. I flunked my first one, bungling 13 out of 27. This time I miss 14. Including itinerary. Poor Mrs. Salvesen. There will be no "By-George-I-think-he's-got-it!" moment between her Henry Higgins and my Eliza Doolittle. Despite her best efforts, I still drop my h's (although I tend to add an unnecessary one to crystal). "You finished all the work sheets?" she asks skeptically. "If you had regular direct instruction, I'm sure you would improve." I'm sure I wouldn't. If my brain hasn't figured out a way to spell itinerary by now, it probably never will. Science has spoken. And so, I look ahead to many, many more productive years of dismembering English words. Let's see, call it 25 stories for each of the next 30 years, about 1,500 to 3,000 words apiece, plus thank-you notes, e-mails and grocery lists, merrily misspelling at a rate of seven to 10 words per... . Well, it all adds up to quite a lot of "magic" spelling. I can't tell you exactly how much, though. I'm one of those people who just can't do math. Da brown bar had viS for its supar at tha river and Den went intw Da forast. ENgliS Ðè braun ber had fish for its sûpèr at ð rivèr and ðen went intü ð fôrèst. (WLO) The broun bair had fish for its super at the river and then went intu the forest New Spelling Du brqn ber had fiS fOr its supc at Du rivc and Den went intU Du forest. komik Ynifon d& BRauN BeR HaD Fis FOR ITS SuPr aT d& RIVr aND deN WeNT iNTu d& FOReST.   InterCap   LINKS The case for Unifon John Malone John Culkin NYTimes Article The Case Agasint SR Unifon home page:  www.unifon.org Discussion Group:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/unifon :Known  Unifgrafic soundspellers  "Ken Anderson" <kca@suscom.net>.,"Neil Stewart" <NRStewart@attbi.com>, "Bob Paddock" <paddock@designer-iii.com>, "Dan Knip" <d.knip@comcast.net>, "Scott White" <Scott_M_White@seagate.com>, "Roselyn D Clark" <NUVUECUE@aol.com>, "Greg Wright" <gtwright@tir.com>, "Vic Fieger" <vic@fieger.com>