A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet | Hacker News Reader

A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet

theguardian.com

116 pointsHooke142 comments

I briefly worked as a teacher for comp sci, math, and physics at a local high school. Luckily, I hardly ever had to interact with people higher up in the education hierarchy (DOE) but everytime I did, there was this attitude of "you know nothing about how to teach, we know everything". Like, you have to use tablets in math class these days, what am I thinking suggesting that pen and paper is appropriate??

The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-confidence that is really not grounded in reality.

And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything that's remotely related to user experiments, you must get ethics clearing, and that's not a joke. I'm amazed that new bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical considerations.

The sad thing is that this isn't even a one-off. Education has been repeatedly rocked by "someone had a whacky idea and now it's the law of the land". The original "New Math", and several things after it labelled "New Math". "Whole word" reading, and a whole zoo of related "what if we took how we've been successfully teaching reading and just hypothesized that something else might work better maybe" initiatives. The concept of "learning modes", which everyone believes is real but science strongly suggests don't exist very strongly at all. The solution to every educational problem being to push standardized testing even harder. Just over and over.

IIRC, New Math (at least the original) had the strongest pilot success of the lot. However, it failed in mass adoption because teachers didn’t want to retrain and parents threw fits that they could no longer drill their kids in math facts using half-remembered methods from their schooling.

I'd be intrigued to see that, at least if we're talking about the same New Math that was basically "Hey, let's teach kindergartners number theory and 'cardinality' and the soon-to-be-vital skill of doing math in octal so they can use computers". The name got tagged on to a lot of things over the years, and some of them have some merit, but I'd have a hard time believing the original New Math ever tested well in a fair analysis. It's a violation of basic developmental theory, expecting young children to handle levels of abstraction they won't be ready for for another 5-15 years to do basic concrete math.

I may be misremembering, but I think we had simple topology, linear programming (mainly just 2D, but I remember a 5D problem at the end of the section), matrices with eigenvalues and eigenvectors, set theory, and a bit of group theory. No programming, though there was some in the text book. It was pretty good fun. I don't remember anyone finding it conceptually difficult.

It would also be worth mentioning Nuffield Physics. I thought that was a really great course for learning how to do physics. Very oriented towards finding solutions, devising experiments.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. New Math was targeted at elementary school students.

If you're having a hard time squaring that with "cardinality" and "set theory"... yeah, that would be the problem.

School Mathematics Project covered secondary school, and was very much part of the New Maths project. And yes, we did cover set theory in primary school.

Having taught for about 15 years, your feeling that pedagogy, as taught in most professional development sessions, is quackery, is not wrong. There are so many hucksters writing books and doing seminars.

pedagogy is borderline quackery

maria montessori developed her education methods using scientific experimentation with good outcomes.[0]

various ways to teach have been tried and we know the results. it is baffling to me why the ones that work aren't applied more.

of course not all of them are universally suitable. waldorf for example apparently also has decent results, but if there is one that i would put on the top of the list of education quackery, then waldorf would be it. so where do the good results come from? because they do one thing right: "Its educational style is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity. Individual teachers have a great deal of autonomy in curriculum content, teaching methods, and governance."[1], which is something that could be applied without basing it on steiners esoteric ideas.

it looks like it is not just quackery that is the problem. it is politics, NIH, probably the unwillingness to admit that they are wrong. unwillingness to change. in that context it is surprising that ITA got even off the ground. but it is also wierd that apparently the reason ITA fell out of fashion was not because it failed on its own but because that educational theory turned away from phonics.[2] that's like one mistake cancelling out another. even more surprising is that the ita foundation appears to be still active.

WAT?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet

With that kind of "separate specialist school" setup I think you would also need to be careful when analysing outcomes to avoid confounding effects from "the parents are actively interested and engaged in their childrens' education, and have the resources to support it", which I suspect is pretty well correlated with good outcomes.

Don't also forget sampling effects; if you randomly assign children to schools that are of different sizes, the small schools will have higher variance and thus tend to represent both the best and worst items in the set.

And if you _don't_ randomly assign, the effect is even stronger: students who are being well served by the standard/control school don't opt to change, while students who aren't are primed to jump as soon as the option is provided. So the alternative/trial school gets both ends of the bell curve on almost every metric (the main exception being athletic performance, since the larger school typically has more team sport options).

Don't worry. The pushing of tablets will soon be gone! To be replaced by the pushing of tablets with AI. Because it is inevitable, so they better get used to it in every aspect of their educational career.

I wish I could state with certainty that this post is a hyperbolic piece of irony.

It's funny - you would think that this new generation of "digital natives" is already so apt with everything IT-related that they could use their tablets like wizards and give additional value to the classroom that even surprises their teacher!

In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago. Like, say, they actually have trouble finding a file again they saved - mostly, because they don't even have a concept of the file system (thanks, mobile OS's!).

> In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago.

Absolutely. Every naïve mom and dad giving their kid a tablet to say oh he’s gonna be great at computers!

No. Your kid is gonna be a good user. To click the thing they’re told to click, follow the path laid out for them. It’s bad.

If only they became good users. It seems they are becoming excellent consumers instead.

In C. S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength", a character observes that no parent would ever let people experiment on their children, but they will happily send their children to an experimental school.

I mean that isn't true. Parents let people experiment on their children all the time it is how we test new medicines and such on them. My daughter was part of a clinical trial. On the other hand I would probably feel more cautious about sending them to an experimental school as that is a much longer time-frame to try and understand and will have a big impact on their social and academic life.

> The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery

I had this high school computing studies teacher, I’ll call her Dr B. She knew absolutely nothing about the subject she was supposed to be teaching us, but was beaming with pride as she told us about her PhD in education, for which she sat in on university-level engineering classes - she claimed she didn’t need to understand engineering to understand how engineering students learn

That said, once upon a time, I happened to stumble upon an education PhD thesis which I enjoyed reading and personally thought had something worthwhile to say: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ - even though I live on the other side of the planet, its accounts of the personal experiences of parents resonated with some of my own experiences

Not that I disagree with your overall point, but it's worth noting that in this case it wasn't enforced top-down:

> Even more puzzling is the way the system was rolled out. ITA was never adopted nationally, nor required. As Stainthorp explains: “At that time, there was no national curriculum – a headteacher could simply decide to implement it in their school, or a teacher in their class. There was no consistency.”

There are quite a few examples of very misguided educational strategies.

Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International

Liljedahl's "Building Thinking Classrooms" is the current poster child for this. Hugely influential in educational circles, but inconsistent with most of the reproducible research in cognitive science and likely quite deleterious to learning.

Bingo! It's exactly stuff like that that I had in mind. And I also pity the parents whose kids have to endure this nonsense instead of getting a proper education. I mean, you basically have no power. You give your kids to whatever the government's idea is of an education and all you can do is watch helplessly from the side.

People who are alive forget that there are people who know nothing stopping all born every day. Each thing we add to the "tutorial level" is going to have to be paid by the next generation.

Plain guess work, and excitement, and fads, and people profiting from being "the experts", and in general social noise that overcomplicates the simplicity of life.

> pedagogy is borderline quackery

A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief.

The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education for? What is its intended aim? The answer given will vary depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has been organized around, though usually, I don't think this question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question, because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims exist.

So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are more about funneling workers into industry than helping students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into discerning their vocation.

(This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is by far the best account of the proper norm.)

But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more fully human, of which the ability to known and understand the truth and to reason about life and the world are central. Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators). This realization has caused an increase of interest in curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from the trivium/quadrivium tradition.

The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated empirically to be disastrous.)

In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what it means to be human. Every society, every political order, every culture is guided by some anthropology, however implicit.

A quote for thought:

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I confess, I miss some of the experimental teaching techniques they tried in the late 60's. Education was a surprisingly dynamic field it seems.

In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school for what would have been my 4th grade.

What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called Suite 67.

The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken library in the center of the circle — the wedge-shaped classes going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were drinking the same Koolaid.)

Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another teacher would step in for science, math.

I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other group in Community 5 — the other group getting Math and Science in the early part of the day, English after.

And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory involving osmosis or some-such.

I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed that curriculum.

It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that Reagan would shitcan some years later).

When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory from the front desk staff about its wild history.

So sad.

Wow, was reading through this with a relatively detached interest and had to reread a few times to overcome the whiplash of you naming the city in which I attended elementary, middle, and high school.

If it’s any consolation, the modern Blue Valley school district is still considered excellent [0]. And there are still a few interesting ideas being pursued. The CAPS center [1] had some cool things going on when I graduated in 2018.

[0]: https://www.bluevalleyk12.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&M...

[1]: https://bvcaps.yourcapsnetwork.org/

Ha ha, which schools? I can list Pawnee, Apache, Comanche, Somerset, Meadowbrook and Shawnee Mission East (although the latter ones were in Prairie Village, KS).

Yeah, we moved around the 'burbs a bit.

Also: another experimental "Free" school in the 1970's for one year was P.A.C.E.R.S. in KCMO, and then a partial year at a Catholic School in KCMO: Saint Francis Xavier, ha ha.

Sunrise Point Elementary, Prairie Star Middle, and Blue Valley High. IIRC, SPE is a bit newer. But Blue Valley High has probably been there since the start of the district.

btw: just noticed you’re the person who wrote that color picker post. that was a fun read.

Would you mind naming which school replaced the experimental school you described in your original post? Or the name of the experimental school itself?

Comanche Elementary was the experimental school. It is still there, but is not the same round building that I remember.

I did find a number of articles about it at Newspapers.com. Around 1971 and 1972 there were a few good articles about the architecture and "Open Classrooms", "Team Teaching", etc. (Kansas City Star, of course.)

> "open"

New Zealand has just decided to scrap open plan classrooms: https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/07/16/no-more-open-plan-school-...

I thought they were a 70s thing but must of had a renaissance of the idea

There was a similar round school in Farmville, Va. which afforded children within walking distance an education _and_ local college students an easy/convenient student teacher position, which sadly has apparently also been demolished.

I encountered this in 1968. This was at Clarinda State School, in grade 1. The 1A class used ITA, and 1B used proper latin alphabet. My best friend, Steve Irwin (yes, _that_ Steve Irwin. Everyone had to go to school somewhere) was in 1A. Every afternoon after school he'd come to my place and we'd go through our readers for the day. I'd read the English one to him, and he'd memorise it to recite (pretending to read) to his teacher the next day. I assume he was taught properly when he moved to Queensland in 1969.

I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.

Bright, but it sounds like he was also overcompensating. Many celebs, leaders in thier respective fields, get there by being massive good at something. Often they get that good as mental cover for some other self-percieved failure. The drive required to be the absolute best is itself rather unnatural, requiring some sort of trigger. Being a totally friendly extrovert seems a logical cover for poor reading ability.

I've taken my time to respond to this. Firstly, that's a big statement about someone you only know from TV.

Secondly, he was one of the most functional human beings I've ever met.

The reason he was so good at herpetology is because he was raised with dangerous reptiles. The backyard of his home in Botany Circuit was crawling with snakes, crocs and goannas. I rarely played at his place, because it un-nerved me. He was very confident and capable, and understood animal behaviour even at 6yo.

I was better at playing with spiders though, no doubt that changed as he grew older.

That's a lot to read into a story about a kid memorising books

Wild. I can read this, no problem, and I can see that it is a clear improvement over standard letters and spelling. Latin letters are (quite literally) a poor match for the English language. They don't match the sounds required to speak English.

I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible to make such a drastic change. It would have global repercussions.

I think the issue is that, missing a clear correlation between spelling and sound, there's no unique pronunciation for words across countries and accents. Trivial example: data. It's either "dayta" or "dahta". Or privacy- pri-vuh-see or prai-vuh-see. You'd have to choose one.

Why? We've managed to live with color and colour without destroying the space time continuum somehow.

Indeed, but there's not just US and UK. In northern Ireland house is sometimes pronounced "hoyse" (rhymes with choice). Time is "toyme" in Australian. Pen is "pin" in New Zealand. Etc.

Speaking of which, it seems that the only case of spelling adapting to pronunciation in English is the commonly used spelling "me" for "my" in Irish dialects.

I wonder if it's possible to come up with an alphabet where different sound clusters are addressed by individual letters. For instance:

'h𐑬se' and 'aut' - where 𐑬 is read as 'au' in RP, but as 'oy' in NI.

The downside is that the said alphabet would have more letters and it won't be always easy to guess the spelling based on pronunciation (still easier than currently in English), but the upside is that one can always read any word correctly in their accent.

you see that to an extent with the use diacritics in some languages. for example "ch" or "cz" in czech is written as č.

here is an interesting article listing digraphs in various languages with latin script that have lots of examples where the same sounds have a single letter in other languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs

> Pen is "pin" in New Zealand.

I really want to hear a New Zealander quote "The pen is mightier than the sword".

When I was in school in the 80's, I remember seeing these books stacked up at the back of the classroom. There were other Ladybird books in English standard spelling (they were really common), but these were weird. The teacher just told us to ignore them. But weirdly, the text is really easy to read int he examples given. I never used or even read the ones in my youth, so it must just be easy for my brain to process (disclaimer, I am a speaker of basic Swedish and a little Norwegian, so I am used to reading words with odd spellings and going "oh right, that is X in English.")

They couldn't even get the phonemes right. For them "blue rimes with your." I'd buy the /u/ "you're" and "blue" but not "your" and "blue."

I didn't think so at first, but for certain British accents, I could see it

ITA looks like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to me. I like that. If all English text was written in this way it'd be really easy to learn (at least for me). It reads like a breeze.

I agree. As an Italian (where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read) it was straightforward to read. I have always wondered why English has so many weird pronunciation exceptions.

The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare grammar. This is funny because it's true.

Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.

> English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other

To give an example, number words are often covered 3 times in English - one from English (Germanic?) roots, one from Latin roots, and one from Greek roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number...

  one / uni / mono
  two / bi / di
  three / ter / tri
  four / quad / tetra

Other examples include: A dentist works on your teeth, a canine is a dog, the meat from a cow is beef, a foreword is a preface.

The monkey's paw curls a finger: "Today Donald Trump announced a new initiative to teach all children a new AI-normalized language known as Americish. All English signage will be replaced with Americish."

Absolutely tremendous! rocks out on invisible accordion

The sibling comments are good answers. Another factor is the fact that written English goes back a long time. In some cases, pronunciation has drifted over time, but the spelling didn't change. The silent k's in words like knight and knife were not always silent, for example, but you have to go back to old English for them to be pronounced.

Donald Knuth bucks the trend by insisting the KN to both be pronounced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

this somehow reminds me of niklaus wirth who supposedly said that you can call him by name or by value.

> where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read

surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where different people say the same word different ways though, right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation for their local dialect?

There are dialects, but they are more similar to different languages rather than different pronunciations. For instance dialect of Piedmont, my region, are somehow similar to French, because of geography and history.

It's common for people of one area to not understand dialects from a very different area, but the language is one, and you pronounce all the letters (almost, there are some exceptions, but they follow a rule), and if you were to write the dialect you'd write anything you say.

There are many variations on the cadence and on how some words are used, but generally speaking the language is the same everywhere. But then, of course, Italy is a small Country and only a few millions people speak Italian.

I wasn't hinting that one language is better than others, just that it comes very natural to us to read that alphabet. Once you map in your head some signs to some sounds it's almost all there (provided that you know enough English to infer which words are written for enough time to learn the missing signs).

Another factor is, sometimes different forms of words have different pronunciations (because of the phonology of English), but often the same spelling: compare "electric" where the final "c" has a hard K sound, and "electricity", where he same "c" has an S sound. The pronunciation change is predictable, but the spelling retains continuity between the two pronunciations. It breaks the idea of 1-to-1 relationships between sounds and spellings, but in these kinds of situations, I think it's a good thing.

Because we nicked so many words from so many different other languages, and kept (to some extent) their so many different spellings and pronunciations.

> And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of “through”, “though” and “thought”.

I live in Germany now but I'm American. The poem "dearest creature in creation" is always a fun party trick. German is difficult but it's a good reminder that English is, too.

If you're a non-native English speaker and you can get this poem even 50% correct you're doing really well. Most Americans (and, I'd imagine, other English native speakers) would also struggle with it.

https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....

Soooo long; I got bored about halfway through. There was only one word I was not familiar with though.

The fact it is so long, underlines the magnitude of the problem.

English is one of THE WORST languages when it comes to encoding its phonemes in its alphabet.

I am familiar with pretty much every word in that poem. Knowing the word isn't the problem. How these words are correctly PRONOUNCED though, that is the actual issue. And even I got tripped up on some of them.

I think the problem with the ITA, or other reform schemes, is that they try to change too much at once. So the new system looks silly and alien to existing speakers, and there's a backlash.

If I were reforming English spelling, I'd take a much slower, more incremental approach. Make a simple change like SR1[0], that doesn't change that many words. Smaller change; less backlash.

(And even in the worst case, if the reform doesn't take, it's easier for the people who learned it to re-learn "classic English" spelling.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1

I would have loved this growing up! The proposed spellings make so much more sense.

It made so much sense, what a great idea. This was literally debugging English.

So this is essentially the equivalent of teaching only hiragana for years and then immediately throw you into the deep end expecting you to suddenly know all the kanjis already, without any transition of gradually accumulating the mapping of morphemes to phonemes.

It seems to me that this ITA would have been quite useful had it served an annotative role taught in tandem with canonical spellings to build the morpheme-to-phoneme mapping. Akin to kana rubytext for kanji in books targeted for younger learners that are then elided for adult readers.

The story told in this article shocked me, even sending shivers down my spine. It was the first time I learned that such things had also occurred in the English-speaking world. China carried out its second round of character simplification in 1977[1], which has left many Chinese people, including my grandmother, unable to read characters normally to this day. They continue to write those weird "second simplified" in their lives. I always believed this to be one of the crime of the Bolsheviks destroying Chinese culture, and I never imagined such a thing could happen in the English-speaking world.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...

We should consider scale in this scenario. What the Chinese did affected millions of people. This story is about a relative handful of kids.

I also find it unfortunate that they bothered with this nonsense. If you're going to do anything just standardize the existing spellings with existing letters. Give long i a standard spelling and be done with it.

I did this at primary skool, not an issue, my spelling is orsum

It would be interesting to know more about why it failed. It's not obviously a dumb idea -it's basically Pinyin but for English, and that works very well for Mandarin as far as I know, which has a similar memorisation hump to get over.

according to the wikipedia page about IPA it was connected to phonics and fell out of fashion because in the 70s educational theory turned away from phonics. so it didn't fail on its own but it got canceled out by another mistake.

I wonder if it is included in Unicode? Could the people here claim their native alphabet, taught to them in standard institutions from a western country, is not represented in Unicode?

If anyone is interested in the history of spelling reform, I recommend Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell.[0]

It's light and fun -- good beach reading, if you're a word nerd. And it does cover the ITA, from the article.

One thing I thought was funny: English spelling became more-or-less standardized in the years after the printing press made it to England in 1476. And almost immediately after the spelling was standardized, 15th-century Englishmen started complaining that the new system made no sense. ("Why is there a b in 'debt'?")

More than 500 years later, we're still complaining ;-)

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063360217/

It's too bad that none of these reforms have succeeded. English has become the Lingua Franca due to the influence of the British Empire and American culture, along with it's ability to incorporate loanwords, but not because of it's spelling. Helping my kids learn how to read struck me by how insane English spelling really is.

I recently found out that Theodore Roosevelt had signed an executive order to adopt new spelling rules from the Simplified Spelling Board in 1906, but backtracked when the press began mocking it. If it had been a better organized release it could have succeeded but now it's a cautionary tale.

The future timeline extends out forever, if humanity is going to continue to primarily use an English-rooted language we need to make intentional improvements or we will be stuck with increased entropy, see the introduction of emoji's into text for example.

Agreed! It's sort of perverse: the more people speak English, the harder it is to reform it.

> Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand

And, apparently, also the inventor of time travel—we know that various forms of shorthand have existed since antiquity.

I had a shorthand kick and learned about the Tironian Notes shorthand, which last from "1st century BC – 16th century AD". Apparently the ⁊ symbol is still used in Scotland and Ireland today in place of "&".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes

There was another version of this where rather than a new alphabet, only the lower half of the letters were changed --- since text is easily read by only having access to the upper half of the letters, that made for a much easier transition.

Hm, I'm not a native speaker, but I had no issues reading that weird script, is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers?

Native speaker here (American). I can read it, it's not necessarily difficult but it's much slower. I would not voluntarily read any book or long form text written in this script. This feels very much the same as those experiments where the words contain all the correct letters, and the first and last are in the right position, but the rest are in jumbled order. For example, "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch" vs "According to a research" [0]. It's readable, but I hate it lol. EDIT: that said, I do recognize that it could be a useful tool for helping people that may not be native speakers or perhaps have some learning disability, or perhaps even a way to better encode text for text-to-speech uses or other accessibility purposes. I personally do not care for it, but I'm not against it.

0: https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let...

it's not hard to read for native speakers, but you have to go slowly, where ordinary reading is very fast. reminds me of the experiment that shows you can read words with all the letters scrambled if the first and last letter are not part of the scramble https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let... I assume that works in any language? but that "reads" fairly quickly whereas this one here for me at least is a little slower

It feels like I was able to read the text at the same speed as normal English text.

Yeah, and it's a matter of getting used to it for most. A bit like when text has an accent written out.

> is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers?

For mature readers, it is a big contrast because it requires "sounding out" the words instead of being able to decode them in chunks / a whole word at a glance.

I would say it's more of a publicity stunt than anything. It looks kind of like Old English (maybe) and definitely isn't recognizable at a glance, but the fact that the letters make only one sound in this decoding system is a major advantage for beginners.

That's not my experience from the short samples in the article, I could get the correct meaning out of all of them at a glance. The only slowdown was in returning to the text after the initial read, to try to puzzle out the exact definitions for the new letters. I'm pretty sure that I could read English in this alphabet almost as fast as the normal one even with no practice.

A contrast only by familiarity. I imagine the difference would vanish very quickly.

As a system for writing English it seems superior to what we have now. Spelling telling you how to pronounce something is how most languages work. English by comparison has no consistent framework, requiring a lot of memorization to build that mapping. ITA is only a stunt in retrospect because it never went anywhere

Not the lower-case-omega letter which is the oo in book, and the ou in you.

I guess I wrote UK English until I came to the US a decade ago and spell check fixes a lot of those issues for me. I could imagine that’s something similar here where it seems the mother has no problem reading, but when writing she seems to confuse the weird spelling they taught her.

The difficulty is apparently in the child learning it and then later transitioning to standard English.

As a radical spelling reform it may not have been so bad, as a pedagogical tool for graduating to "real" English it's not hard to see how it would have been a disaster.

Nope, it's a gimmick that's dumb. It's not as effortless to read as proper English, but it's still immediately obvious what the words are.

it’s a meme, in the format “If you X then you might be Y.”

So - “If you enjoy walking around the hardware store for no reason, you might be someone’s dad.”

Kind of misapplied in this case, but I think that’s the joke.

Fixing the half-arssed effort Sam Johnson is famous for is long overdue. Although we owe him a debt, that unnecessary B in debt is completely ridiculous.

The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing.

I wish this would have taken off (Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?).

Sadly, we'll need a dictator like Sejong the Great to make it happen.

Soundspel is my personal favorite proposal, it is easy for existing English readers to read, I suspect only a few hours would be needed to come to to full speed.

With most text being read on a screen now days, phones and computers could have a button to switch between spelling systems.

Sadly, it'll never happen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel

It's interesting ChatGPT can't produce anything close to SoundSpell no matter how I prompt it, it will invent its own system.

I'm sure it can be easily be trained to with enough samples just like it knows any other language, but for now it seems a good way to know you are reading a human generated text.

Interesting, but surely thought should be thawt instead of thot.

That one stood out for me too. I think there’s a lot of pronunciation nuance that would be lost with SoundSpel.

I’d distrust any top-down effort to change a language anyway. It belongs to the users and they’ll adapt it to their needs the way they see fit.

Honestly if we are using a perfectly phonical system, I feel the correct answer would be to spell it however your local dialect pronounces it.

For my Pacific Northwest accent, either pronunciation works fine.

> The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing.

Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't agree on how words sound.

So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few places to do it.

You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do it.

I think of English as being actually not a single language but rather dialects with many different pronunciations which share most of their written form. I also think this means any centralised effort to change how it is written will fall flat.

We can’t agree in my house how to pronounce “bath” so how will the entire English speaking world agree on the spelling of every such word with consistent meaning but differing pronunciation…

Been thinking about this and Finnish dialects can be misspelled mostly inside standard writing system. I see no reason why words should not have multiple spellings matching to different pronunciations. It is kinda a thing already when different local words are used. So why not go entire way. Write how it is pronounced even if someone uses different pronounciation.

> So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place

Which is how the language functioned before the printing press.

Curious what's wrong with 'they'?

Yup. “They” has been accepted in major style guides and it’s what I use. It’s at times a bit limiting because there can be ambiguity for singular and plural but overall it’s pretty much a non-issue.

Imagine having a language with no issues cobbling together significant portions of vocabulary from at least 8 different languages, and then ending up with the same pronoun for plural and singular, in both the 2nd and 3rd persons...

Might as well go full way and adopt also we for both singular and plural.

Or imagine dropping "thou" and using "you" for both singular and plural. Crazy!

It's why we have y'all

In my area it's "youse".

Outrageous! How dare things keep evolving after I’m done evolving?

the pluralis majestatis is really a missed opportunity.

Because using one word for two different things can lead to confusion, and over time will simply lead to us creating a different word.

They, as you probably know, is 3rd person plural.

You might look up the history of thee, thou, and you. And then consider why y'all is taking the world by storm.

Sweden has "hen". I often use it while writing

> Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?

We have one: ‘it.’ What we don’t have is a specific indistinct-gender pronoun; instead, English uses ‘he’ (and in a very limited case, ‘they’).

> Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?

We have those. "He/him/his" are gender-neutral pronouns in English. People simply assume they are male-only, but that isn't true.

Ambiguous pronoun/declination is not the same as neutral. We have the same problem in Polish.

People will assume the male gender even if it's technically correct.

θaŋks fə ʃɛəɹɪŋ ðɪs. ɪts æktʃuəli səˈpɹaɪzɪŋli iːzi tə ɹiːd ðɪs. bət ɪt maɪt biː bɪˈkəz aɪ æm fəˈmɪljə wɪð ði aɪ.piː.eɪ. ɔːlsəʊ ɛlɛlɛmz siːm tə duː ə diːsənt ʤɒb æt aʊtpʊtɪŋ tuː, səʊ ðæt teɪks əˈweɪ ðə dɪfɪkəlti ɪn lɜːnɪŋ tə taɪp əˈɡɛn.

aɪ ˈɹɪəli lʌv ðæt əˈpɹoʊt͡ʃ ðɛɹ ɪz ˈivən ə ˈkʌstəm ˌd͡ʒiːpiːˈtiː ðæt dʌz ðə d͡ʒɑb fɔɹ ju

ənˈfɔɹtʃənətli ˈnən əv ðə ˈwənz aɪ ˈtɹaɪd ɡɪv jə ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənəli ɪˈmidiət ˌaɪpiˈeɪ wɪˈðaʊt ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən ænd ˈnən əv ðəm ˈænsɚ ˈkwɛs.tʃənz ɪn ˌaɪpiˈeɪ bəɾ aɪ kən ˈfɪks ðɪs baɪ ˈsɪmpli kɹiˈeɪtɪŋ maɪ ˈoʊn ˌdʒiːpiˈti ðæt ˈdəz ɪɡˈzæktli ðæt

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipafy/

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6878bd78e06c8191bcdf6de7a57eac52-ipa...

PS: it might take some time to learn the difference between IPA and API but it will be worth it finally we created the spelling reform we've always dreamt about

If you want to talk about failed attempts at teaching reading, the best example is in the US:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-ca...

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/parents-sue-lucy-ca...

I'm a speed-reader, and I'm able to speed read the images. Some words are harder than others, yet I'm still comprehending faster than I can "speak".

English is my third language, first two use phonetic alphabet. Blaming bad spelling on ITA is like German, Spanish speakers blaming own languages.

English spelling is a facade. Real English can be seen when sentences written in IPA. Having visual confirmation of sound feels refreshing.

ITA "lief ov a fisherman" is neither phonetic nor English. It replaced broken system with another broken system.

I always thought the exact opposite would be helpful: don't touch the alphabet but instead teach a fluent phonetic system in which each single letter has a sound and each word can be pronounced exactly as it's written. Remembering the spelling of a word is as easy as remembering its sound in the alternative phonetic system.

So if you want to remember how to spell "phone", you first have to remember "puh-hon-eh"? I'm not sure that'd be an improvement. How do you even make a phonetic word out of something like "rough"?

The problem will always be that that English has a lot more phonemes than it does letters, so a 1:1 mapping will never be possible. That said, I do think it would be a good idea to have a 1:1 correlation. Which is why everybody should just learn Esperanto instead.[1]

1: Joking.[2]

2: Well, mostly joking.

Phone: phoh-neh

Rough: ro-uh-g

Not that hard. Not perfect either (hs are difficult to pronounce) but still helpful. It could easily become a game for children to talk to each other in this "secret language". And by doing so, they would be memorising the correct spelling of the words.

How would this account for wildly different regional accents?

Or changes over time.

> Or changes over time.

In German, this problem is solved by the convention that the written form exists to preserve the "correct" pronounciation. So, if you don't speak the word in the way it is written, you likely pronounced it wrong (yes, there exist situation where the pronounciation cannot fully be reconstructed from the written word; also newer loanwords tend to be written as in the original language; but these are rather exceptions).

Phonemics is more important than phonetics for these things. Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same letter if they are similar and their difference is context-dependent.

Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.

Having a language in which the exact same letter(s) make different sounds only based on context is absurd.

Spanish, for example: everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds, a sane design.

The pronunciation of C in Spanish is context dependent. Before I or E, it shares the same sound as S. Before A, O, or U, the same sound as QU.

Or how about G? It makes one sound before I or E, another before A, O, UE, or UI, and yet another before UA.

Lots of folks think their language is simpler, but it's only because they can follow the rules so well they don't need to actually know them.

"Context dependent" here means a different thing than it means in English, where the pronunciation of letters depends on the word they're in, without any hard rule. To the point of being pronounced in different ways even in homonyms: e.g. "tear" noun and "tear" verb.

The fact that there are a few rules on how to pronounce combinations of letters (and even a few exceptions here and there) has nothing to do with the total mess that is English.

I think the point is that you can derive the pronunciation from the spelling (though not, arguably, the other way round).

Would it be sane to have a special letter to distinguish the "p" in "park" from the "p" in "spark"? In some languages, it's important, but these two sounds can be represented by the same letter in others because they don't "compete" for the same contexts.

(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)

I kept expecting this article about the ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for spelling words phonetically, now unused) to mention the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for spelling words phonetically, still widely used), but apparently there is no relation?

The article doesn't explicitly mention the IPA but the illustration with the character set compares each character with its IPA equivalent.

Same chart, from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet#/med...

I learned to read in foreigner and soon after moved to an English country at age 6.

I was an atrocious speller until I moved back to foreign-land and had to take English class with my schoolmates.

Learning how people mispronounce English phonetically fixed most of my spelling.

I'm English and an atrocious speller until I started learning Finnish and learned to pronounce the English words phonetically in my head using the Finnish phonetic system.

That's awesome, I'm Finnish but when at school in England I was very quickly one of the best spellers in my class.

I think learning to mispronounced English words is an under appreciated spelling technique.

Imagine how kids now will feel when they find out that prompting Claude isn't actually coding.

> The issue isn’t simply whether or not ITA worked – the problem is that no one really knows. For all its scale and ambition, the experiment was never followed by a national longitudinal study.

Indeed, another tale of pure waste. How many of the opposite experiments are there? Is there at least 1 perfectly set up non-trivial experiment that added definitive knowledge in this sphere?

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