The Deseret alphabet is a phonemic English-language spelling reform developed between 1847 and 1854 by the board of regents of the University of Deseret under the leadership of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. George D. Watt is reported to have been the most actively involved in the development of the script's novel characters, which were used to replace those of Isaac Pitman's English phonotypic alphabet. He was also the "New Alphabet's" first serious user. The script gets its name from the word deseret, a hapax legomenon in the Book of Mormon, which is said to mean "honeybee" in the only verse it is used in.
English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.
The Shavian alphabet is a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and designed by Ronald Kingsley Read.
A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of 1990, which is still being ratified.
The Initial Teaching Alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet developed by Sir James Pitman in the early 1960s. It was not intended to be a strictly phonetic transcription of English sounds, or a spelling reform for English as such, but instead a practical simplified writing system which could be used to teach English-speaking children to read more easily than can be done with traditional orthography. After children had learned to read using I.T.A., they would then eventually move on to learn standard English spelling. Although it achieved a certain degree of popularity in the 1960s, it has fallen out of use since the 1970s.
Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic.
Alexander John Ellis was an English mathematician, philologist and early phonetician who also influenced the field of musicology. He changed his name from his father's name, Sharpe, to his mother's maiden name, Ellis, in 1825 as a condition of receiving significant financial support from a relative on his mother's side. He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.
Russian orthography is an orthographic tradition formally considered to encompass spelling and punctuation. Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the models of French and German orthography.
For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. Such spelling reform seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. Common motives for spelling reform include making learning quicker, making learning cheaper, and making English more useful as an international auxiliary language.
Sir Isaac James Pitman (known as James), KBE (14 August 1901 – 1 September 1985) was a publisher, senior civil servant, politician, and prominent educationalist with a lifelong passion for etymology, orthography, and pedagogy. He is best known for his attempt to improve children's literacy in the English-speaking world by means of an interim teaching orthography, known as the initial teaching alphabet or i.t.a. He was honoured with a knighthood in 1961 for his life accomplishments.
Inventive spelling is the use of unconventional spellings of words.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography.
Interspel, or International English Spelling, is a set of principles introduced by Valerie Yule that aims to address the unpredictability and inconsistency of present English spelling, while preserving its heritage of print through minimal changes in appearance.
SoundSpel is a regular and mostly phonemic English-language spelling reform proposal. It uses a 26-letter alphabet that is fully compatible with QWERTY keyboards. Though SoundSpel was originally based on American English, it can represent dialectal pronunciation, including British English. With roots extending as far back as 1910 but largely complete by 1986, SoundSpel was developed "in response to the widely held conviction that English spelling is more complex than it needs to be." The American Literacy Council has endorsed the reform because anglophones can easily read it. Additionally, according to its proponents, "[SoundSpel] is fully compatible with traditional spelling and can be mixed with it in any proportion desired."
The Phonetic Journal was the official journal of The Phonetic Society based at the Kingston Buildings in Bath, Somerset, England and is the first ever journal about phonetics. It was published subtitled as Published Weekly, Devoted to the Propagation of Phonetic Shorthand, and Phonetic Reading, Writing and Printing.
John Downing (1922–1987) was a British educational psychologist who started his career as a teacher then worked as an academic from 1960 until his death in 1987. He published over 300 academic papers in his 27-year academic career, specialising in both how children read and how they learn to read. His three main fields of study were the initial teaching alphabet, the psychology of reading and the comparison of reading methods across different languages and cultures. His principle works in each of these fields were Evaluating the Initial Teaching Alphabet, Reading & Reasoning and Comparative Reading. Fundamentally, Downing was an educational psychologist and his main lifetime achievement was the formulation of the cognitive clarity theory of learning to read.
In 1864, Pronouncing Orthography was released as a simplified version of traditional English orthography to help children learn to read more quickly and easily; it became widely adopted by the United States public school system and incorporated into most basal reading schemes of the time. It aimed to improve literacy education by eliminating the irregularities of conventional English orthography and adhering to the alphabetic principle, wherein every letter represented a specific sound. This allowed children to read words by combining elementary sounds using phonics.
