Dyslexia is a genetic syndrome which causes certain learning problems. Those of us with dyslexia can learn the letters in a word (or digits in a phone number) but not be at all sure of their order. Languages like English and French, with silent letters and multiple sounds for the same letter and multiple ways of representing the same sound, cause dyslexics much grief. Dyslexics are able to use phonics to learn to read and therefore can learn to read a phonetically spelt language much faster than English, since they can sound out the letters instead of having to memorize the words. See the article on dyslexia at English Spelling Reform for a discussion of dyslexia as a function of non-phonetic spelling. Even children without dyslexia frequently have difficulty learning to spell English correctly because of its lack of sound to letter correspondence, as do speakers of other languages trying to learn English. A language like Spanish, where every letter always has the same sound, is very much easier to learn to read. Having been exposed to several European languages like German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Russian and Greek, plus a few African ones (Shona, Swahili and Bemba), I have become convinced that the standard spelling of English is a major problem for those learning the language, and that it is much worse than the spelling of any of these other languages.

I was not aware of all the other attempts that have been made to develop a phonetic spelling for English until I put my webpage on the Internet and found that the Open Directory already had several other ones there. Some of them are obviously much more sophisticated than mine, being produced by people with formal linguistics training, and would represent the full range of sounds including the length that a vowel sound is held in speaking and the modifying effects of the letter r on a preceding vowel. I feel this over-complicates the system and makes it much harder to learn. My intention is to enable people to easily learn to spell English correctly, not represent every nuance of enunciation. I have tried to keep the number of different characters to a minimum and still have a character for every unique sound in the language. My list of 32 letters, 12 vowels and 20 consonants, is pretty minimal, I believe. It agrees with the number the number of unmixed vowels and has two less unmixed consonants than Steve Bett has in the table for Phoneme Inventory. The difference is j in jail and ch in church, which are mixed, actually, which he notes.

The ideas for the orthography which I have proposed come from other languages, not from other earlier alphabets. The use of sj for the sh sound comes from Dutch, the use of c for the th in thin comes from Castilian Spanish, the use of umlauts to produce six new vowels comes from German, though the actual sounds are not those of German. The use of umlauts rather than macrons, which would be preferred if they were more readily available, is a function of the letter sets available on the PC. An umlaut can be produced by typing control+: before typing the letter in MS Word and some other programs, there is no such code for a macron. This is just a suggestion, I am amenable to changes or to having parts lifted for other systems. I am impressed by SR1 P-A and Follick now that I have seen them (since posting the first page on the Internet), I think they could be improved by adopting the q and c for the th in then and the th in thin from my alphabet.Click Table to see a comparison of the alphabets. Note that they all use the well-defined consonants of traditional orthography, b, d, f, g, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, and z, so these letters are not shown on the table.

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See the Open Directory for many other sites on English Spelling Reform.

Mike Nassau, July, 2001