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.
It was printed starting 1841 by Isaac Pitman, and published by F. Pitman at the Phonetic Depot, at 20, Paternoster Row, in London. The journal was initially in 12 small pages plus a 4-page advertising and information wrapper per issue. It published materials in traditional spelling as well as in phonetic spelling, and phonetic shorthand. It also included news of the Phonetic Society and its members.
The journal promoted The Phonetic Alphabet. It explained the alphabet promoted as "consisting of 36 letters, namely the 23 useful letters of the common alphabet (c, q and x being rejected) and 13 new letters included. The vowels a, e, i, o, u were used for their short sound as in pat, pet, pit, pot and put and all the other letters having their usual signification".
A proposed order of the alphabet was as follows:
Consonants: p, b; t, d; ç, j; k, g; f, v; [th], [dh], s, z; ʃ, ʒ; m, n, ŋ; l, r; w, y; h.
Vowels: a, ɐ; e, ɛ; i, [ee]; o, [o]; γ, σ; u, ɥ.
Diphthongs: ei (as in by), iu (as in new), ou (as in now), ai (as in ay), oi (as in ay).
The alphabet also included 9 "foreign sounds", 7 from French and 2 from German.
Further contributions for a proposed alphabet
Isaac Pitman, the founder of the journal published Phonotypy in 1844, his major work on spelling reform just three years after the founding of the journal. Pitman and Alexander John Ellis, an English mathematician and philologist jointly proposed in 1845 an English Phonotypic Alphabet made up of 40 letters based mainly on the Phonetic Alphabet of The Phonetic Journal and that of The Phonotypic Journal. Furthermore, in a book edited in 1848, under the title A Plea for Spelling Reform, by Alexander John Ellis, edited by Isaac Pitman, the authors compiled a series of articles from The Phonetic Journal. and from other periodicals, recommending an enlarged alphabet and "A Reformed Spelling of the English Language" as a "means of placing the arts of Reading and Writing within the reach of all who speak the English language or wish acquire it", as Pitman said in the intro.
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 is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. In official documents, it is referred to as the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. It is the official system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations. Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters, to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system makes use of diacritics to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts, or when writing non-Chinese words in Chinese-language texts. Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries. Hànyǔ literally means 'Han language'—meaning, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'.
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.
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos (narrow) and graphein. It has also been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys (short), and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys, depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal.
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.
Sir Isaac Pitman was a teacher of the English language who developed the most widely used system of shorthand, known now as Pitman shorthand. He first proposed this in Stenographic Soundhand in 1837. He was also the vice-president of the Vegetarian Society. Pitman was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1894.
Pitman shorthand is a system of shorthand for the English language developed by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897), who first presented it in 1837. Like most systems of shorthand, it is a phonetic system; the symbols do not represent letters, but rather sounds, and words are, for the most part, written as they are spoken.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the language's phonemes. 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; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:
Gregg shorthand is a system of shorthand developed by John Robert Gregg in 1888. Distinguished by its phonemic basis, the system prioritizes the sounds of speech over traditional English spelling, enabling rapid writing by employing elliptical figures and lines that bisect them. Gregg shorthand's design facilitates smooth, cursive strokes without the angular outlines characteristic of earlier systems like Duployan shorthand, thereby enhancing writing speed and legibility.
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.
For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. It 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 quicker learning, cheaper learning, 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.
A defective script is a writing system that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language. This means that the concept is always relative to a given language. Taking the Latin alphabet used in Italian orthography as an example, the Italian language has seven vowels, but the alphabet has only five vowel letters to represent them; in general, the difference between the phonemes close and open is simply ignored, though stress marks, if used, may distinguish them. Among the Italian consonants, both and are written ⟨s⟩, and both and are written ⟨z⟩; stress and hiatus are also not reliably distinguished.
Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet was Benjamin Franklin's proposal for a spelling reform of the English language. The alphabet was based on the Latin alphabet used in English.
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.
The Hebraization of English is the use of the Hebrew alphabet to write English. Because Hebrew uses an abjad, it can render English words in multiple ways. There are many uses for hebraization, which serve as a useful tool for Israeli learners of English by indicating the pronunciation of unfamiliar letters. An example would be the English name spelled "Timothy", which can be Hebraized as "טימותי" in the Hebrew alphabet.
The English Phonotypic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet developed by Sir Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis originally as an English language spelling reform. Although never gaining wide acceptance, elements of it were incorporated into the modern International Phonetic Alphabet.
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