The Initial Teaching Alphabet was developed by Sir James Pitman (the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of a system of shorthand, who himself took up the issue of spelling reform with a variant typeface) as a tool for teaching children to read English. Although it was popular in the 1960s, it has fallen into disuse. It originally had 44 symbols, each of which is intended to represent a single sound. The firm which began this proposal likes to have the abbreviation of ita with periods after the letters. Sir James Pitman (the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman) inventor of the Initial Teaching Alphabet. ... Categories: Stub ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ...

There are two main uses of the concept: one which uses the distinct typeface, whose characters are all minuscule; and one which attempts to use both minuscule and capital letters of the existing typewriter keyboard or the basic ASCII character set to take the place of the distinct characters. This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Minuscule, or lower case, is the smaller form (case) of letters (in the Roman alphabet: a, b, c, ...). Originally alphabets were written entirely in majuscule (capital) letters which were spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. ... This Smith Premier typewriter, purchased around the end of the 19th century, was found abandoned in the Bodie ghost town. ... For other uses, see ASCII (disambiguation). ... A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ...

The special typeface has some letters used as capitals, though. These are simply of the same form as the minuscules, only expanded in size so as to extend beyond x-height both above the mean-line and below the base-line. In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the height of the lowercase letter x in any font, which is usually the same for a, c, e, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, and z. ... In typography and penmanship, the baseline is the line upon which most letters sit and under which descenders extend. ...

The special typeface has ligatures in the form of digraphs for each of the long vowels, and for "wh", "ng," "sh", and "ch". There are two distinct digraph ligatures for the voiced and unvoiced "th". There's a variant of the "r" to end syllables, which is essentially silent in Received Pronunciation but with a special sound in General American, Scots English and some other British regional accents. Each of the letters has a name the pronunciation of which includes the sound that the character stands for. For example, there's a backwards "z" to replace the "s" where it is voiced. The name of this letter is "zess". In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English language, sometimes defined as the educated spoken English of southeastern England. ... General American is a notional accent of American English based on speech patterns common in the Midwest of the United States and those used by many American network television broadcasters. ...

Also, there was later a little-known modification of the character set to accommodate local ways of pronouncing English, a form of "disambiguation". In the original set, a "hook a" or "two-storey a" was used for the sound in "cat", and a "round a" or "one-storey a" for the sound in "father". But Americans and Canadians generally do not pronounce the words "rather", "dance", and "half" with this latter sound, so a 45th character, the "half-hook a", was devised that could be taken either way by the appropriate linguistic community. There was another character added for similar reasons as well, perhaps for "wr".

See also

• Phonics

Phonics is the study of the way in which spellings represent the sounds that make up words. ...

External links

• BBC News story: Educashunal lunacie or wizdom?
• Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) page on Omniglot
• Phonics on the Web — Phonics rules including letter sounds, digraphs, r-controlled vowels, and more.
• Forgotten Phonics rules from the early 1800s. Organized in printable sections to use as "cheat sheets" when figuring out how to pronounce words. Includes individual letter rules, diphthongs, tripthongs, silent letter rules and substitute letter rules.