Unifon

Last updated
The beginning of the Lord's Prayer, rendered in modern Unifon (two fonts), and in standard English orthography Lords-prayer-unifon.svg
The beginning of the Lord's Prayer, rendered in modern Unifon (two fonts), and in standard English orthography

Unifon is a Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by Dr. John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant.

Contents

It was developed into a teaching aid to help children acquire reading and writing skills. Like the pronunciation key in a dictionary, Unifon attempts to match each of the sounds of spoken English with a single symbol, though not all sounds are distinguished, for example, reduced vowels in other America dialects that don't occur in Chicago. The method was tested in Chicago, Indianapolis and elsewhere during the 1960s and 1970s, but no statistical analysis of the outcome was ever published in an academic journal. Interest by educators has been limited, but a community of enthusiasts continues to publicize the scheme and advocate for its adoption. [1]

Alphabet

The modern Unifon alphabet Unifon-alphabet.svg
The modern Unifon alphabet

The Unifon alphabet contains 40 glyphs, intended to represent the 40 "most important sounds" of the English language. Although the set of sounds has remained the same, several of the symbols were changed over the years, making modern Unifon somewhat different from Old Unifon.

Of the 66 letters used in the various Unifon alphabets, 43 of the capitals can be unified with existing Unicode characters. Small letters are printed as small capitals. Fewer of them are available in Unicode as dedicated small-cap forms, but the usual Latin minuscules can be made small-cap in a Unifon font. Unifon is the same as English but with extra letters. Some letters have IPA letters.

The Unifon alphabet for English
A Latin capital letter closed turned V.svg [Δ]BȻDE Latin capital letter reversed-E E.svg [王] Latin capital letter reversed-E R.svg [Ԙ]FGH Latin capital letter I with stroke and bottom bar.svg [Ɨ]JKLMN Latin capital letter phonotypic Eng.svg [ᴎ]
/æ//eɪ//ɔ, ɑ//b//tʃ//d//ɛ//iː//ɝ, ɚː//f//ɡ//h//ɪ//aɪ//dʒ//k//l//m//n//ŋ/
O Latin capital letter O with bottom bar.svg [ჲ] Latin capital letter vertically barred O.svg [ⵀ] Latin capital letter O with low half vertical bar.svg Latin capital letter O with high half vertical bar.svg [ტ]PRSS̸ [Ꞩ]T Latin capital letter unifon Dh.svg [Ћ] Latin capital letter unifon Th.svg [Ⴌ]U Latin capital letter closed U.svg [Ū] Latin capital letter U with bottom bar.svg [U̲]VW Latin capital letter reversed Z.svg [Z]YƵ
/ɒː//oʊ//ʊ//aʊ//ɔɪ//p//ɹ//s//ʃ//t//ð//θ//ʌ, ə//u//ju,jʌ//v//w//ʒ//j//z/

Other letters include: .

Other letters used in Unifon [2]
C Latin capital letter turned enlarged small H.svg [Ч] Ǝ Latin capital letter I with long stroke overlay.svg Latin capital letter stirrup I.svg Ø Latin capital letter O-with-right-half-horizontal-stroke I.svg Latin capital letter Theta.svg Latin capital letter U with vertical middle bar.svg Latin capital letter Tl.svg X
/s//tʃ/[tʃ]/ɝ, ɚː//eɪ//aɪ//ʊ//ɔɪ//θ//ð//ju//tɬ//x//ɣ/

Some fonts may have Unifon symbols in Private Use Areas. [3] [4] [5]

History

Under a contract with the Bendix Corporation, Malone created the alphabet as part of a larger project. When the International Air Transport Association selected English as the language of international airline communications in 1957, the market that Bendix had foreseen for Unifon ceased to exist, and his contract was terminated. According to Malone, Unifon surfaced again when his son, then in kindergarten, complained that he could still not read. Malone recovered the alphabet to teach his son. [6]

Beginning before 1960 and continuing into the 1980s, Margaret S. Ratz used Unifon to teach first-graders at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. [7] By the summer of 1960, the ABC-TV affiliate station in Chicago produced a 90-minute program in which Ratz taught three children how to read, in "17 hours with cookies and milk," as Malone described it. In a presentation to parents and teachers, Ratz said, "Some have called Unifon 'training wheels for reading', and that's what it really is. Unifon will be used for a few weeks, or perhaps a few months, but during this time your child will discover there is a great similarity between Unifon and what he sees on TV screens, in comics or road signs, and on cereal boxes. Soon he finds with amusement that he can read the 'old people's alphabet' as easily as he can read and write in Unifon."

During the following two years, Unifon gained national attention, with coverage from NBC's Today Show and CBS's On the Road with Charles Kuralt (in a segment called "The Day They Changed the Alphabet").

In 1981, Malone turned over the Unifon project to Dr. John M. Culkin, a media scholar who was a former Jesuit priest and Harvard School of Education graduate. Culkin wrote numerous articles about Unifon, including several in Science Digest.

In 2000, the Unifon-related web site, www.unifon.org , was created by Pat Katzenmaier with much input from linguist Steve Bett. It has served since then as a central point for organization of Unifon-related efforts.

Unifon for Native American languages

The Unifon alphabet for Yurok Unifon alphabet - adaptation to Yurok language.gif
The Unifon alphabet for Yurok

In the 1970s and 1980s, a systematic attempt was made to adapt Unifon as a spelling system for several Native American languages. The chief driving force behind this effort was Tom Parsons of Humboldt State University, who developed spelling schemes for Hupa, Yurok, Tolowa, and Karok, which were then improved by native scholars. In spite of skepticism from linguists, years of work went into teaching the schemes, and numerous publications were written using them. In the end, however, once Parsons left the university, the impetus faded; other spelling schemes are currently used for all of the languages. [8]

The Unifon alphabet for Hupa
Latin capital letter closed turned V.svg BCDEJGH Latin capital letter I with long stroke overlay.svg Latin capital letter stirrup I.svg KLMNO Latin capital letter O with bottom bar.svg Latin capital letter vertically barred O.svg Latin capital letter O with low half vertical bar.svg Latin capital letter O-with-right-half-horizontal-stroke I.svg Latin capital letter phonotypic Eng.svg STU Latin capital letter closed U.svg WY Latin capital letter Tl.svg XƵ
The Unifon alphabet for Karuk
A Latin capital letter closed turned V.svg CFH Latin capital letter I with long stroke overlay.svg Latin capital letter stirrup I.svg KMNO Latin capital letter O with bottom bar.svg P Latin capital letter vertically barred O.svg RST Latin capital letter Theta.svg U Latin capital letter closed U.svg VWYX
The Unifon alphabet for Tolowa
Latin capital letter Tl.svg XBCDEGH Latin capital letter I with long stroke overlay.svg Latin capital letter stirrup I.svg JKLMN Latin capital letter phonotypic Eng.svg O Latin capital letter vertically barred O.svg Latin capital letter O with low half vertical bar.svg Latin capital letter O-with-right-half-horizontal-stroke I.svg PRSTU Latin capital letter closed U.svg WY
The Unifon alphabet for Yurok
A Latin capital letter closed turned V.svg ɅCEƎGH Latin capital letter I with long stroke overlay.svg Latin capital letter stirrup I.svg KLMNO Latin capital letter O with bottom bar.svg Latin capital letter vertically barred O.svg Latin capital letter O with low half vertical bar.svg Latin capital letter O-with-right-half-horizontal-stroke I.svg PRSTU Latin capital letter closed U.svg WY Latin capital letter Tl.svg X

Encoding

Character set support

The special non-ASCII characters used in the Unifon alphabet have been assigned code points in one of the Private Use Areas by the ConScript Unicode Registry. [9] Efforts are in progress to add the characters to the official Unicode character set.

Meanwhile, several fonts devoted to Unifon are offered at the official website. [10]

Language tagging

IETF language tags have registered unifon as a variant subtag identifying text as written in Unifon. It is limited to certain language tags: en, hup, kyh, tol, yur. [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cirth</span> Artificial script in the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien

The Cirth is a semi‑artificial script, based on real‑life runic alphabets, one of several scripts invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works. Cirth is written with a capital letter when referring to the writing system; the letters themselves can be called cirth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">D</span> 4th letter of the Latin alphabet

D, or d, is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is dee, plural dees.

N, or n, is the fourteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is en, plural ens.

R, or r, is the eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ar, plural ars, or in Ireland or.

T, or t, is the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee, plural tees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shavian alphabet</span> Phonemic alphabet proposed for English spelling

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.

The Coptic script is the script used for writing the Coptic language, the latest stage of Egyptian. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the uncial Greek alphabet, augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic. It was the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language. There are several Coptic alphabets, as the script varies greatly among the various dialects and eras of the Coptic language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ligature (writing)</span> Glyph combining two or more letterforms

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.

A constructed writing system or a neography is a writing system specifically created by an individual or group, rather than having evolved as part of a language or culture like a natural script. Some are designed for use with constructed languages, although several of them are used in linguistic experimentation or for other more practical ends in existing languages. Prominent examples of constructed scripts include Korean Hangul and Tengwar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Everson</span> American-Irish type designer (born 1963)

Michael Everson is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over one hundred books since 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tagbanwa script</span> Native writing system of Tagbanwa languages and other indigenous languages of Palawan

Tagbanwa is one of the scripts indigenous to the Philippines, used by the Tagbanwa and the Palawan people as their ethnic writing system.

The ConScript Unicode Registry is a volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Areas (PUA) for the encoding of artificial scripts, such as those for constructed languages. It was founded by John Cowan and was maintained by him and Michael Everson. It is not affiliated with the Unicode Consortium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ou (ligature)</span>

Ou is a ligature of the Greek letters ο and υ which was frequently used in Byzantine manuscripts. This omicron-upsilon ligature is still seen today on icon artwork in Greek Orthodox churches, and sometimes in graffiti or other forms of informal or decorative writing.

Gaelic type is a family of Insular script typefaces devised for printing Classical Gaelic. It was widely used from the 16th century until the mid-18th century in Scotland and the mid-20th century in Ireland, but is now rarely used. Sometimes, all Gaelic typefaces are called Celtic or uncial although most Gaelic types are not uncials. The "Anglo-Saxon" types of the 17th century are included in this category because both the Anglo-Saxon types and the Gaelic/Irish types derive from the insular manuscript hand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qa (Cyrillic)</span> Cyrillic letter used for /q/ in Kurdish

Qa is a letter of the Cyrillic script. Its form is based on the Latin letter Q (Q q). Depending on the font, the uppercase form can look like a reversed Cyrillic letter Р, with the lowercase form also resembling a reversed Cyrillic letter Р.

L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.

J, or j, is the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is jay, with a now-uncommon variant jy.

I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is i, plural ies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turned h</span> Additional letter of the Latin alphabet

Turned H is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet, based on a turned form of H. It is used in the Dan language in Liberia. Its lowercase form is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the voiced labial–palatal approximant. It was also historically used in the Abaza, Abkhaz, and the Vassali Maltese alphabet.

References

  1. "Unifon.org". www.unifon.org. Retrieved 2022-11-08.
  2. Everson, Michael (2012-04-29). "Proposal to encode "Unifon" and other characters in the UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  3. "Quivira 4.1". www.quivira-font.com. Retrieved 2024-04-21.
  4. "Catrinity". catrinity-font.de. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  5. "にしき的フォント - TYPVS LITTERARVM NISICIAE". umihotaru.work. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  6. Malone, John R (May 29, 1960). "Do We Need A New Alphabet?". Chicago Sunday Sun-Times. p. 1. Retrieved November 8, 2022.
  7. Ratz
  8. Hinton, pp 244-245
  9. "Unifon: U+E740 - U+E76F". ConScript Unicode Registry. Retrieved 2012-05-30.
  10. "Fonts for Unifon". www.unifon.org. Retrieved 2023-04-30.
  11. "Language Subtag Registry". IANA. 2021-03-05. Retrieved 30 April 2021.

Sources