learning
to read so hard
when a child i found learning to read baffling
beyond words. only
by the age of eight, after years of vexation and tears at every attempt, could
i read with any ease and enjoyment. writing took longer. now that i read with some facility, i'm astonished i ever
learned. now i
can spell, with the aid of dictionary and editor, i'm astonished anyone ever
learns. the
english orthography monster has dogged my days till finally i present my peers
a solution i wish had existed in my youth.
the
phonogramarama defined
a
phonogram, as you know, is a phon-, smallest unit of speech composing a word,
from greek phone, ‘sound’,
represented by a graphic symbol, and gram,
from greek gramma, ‘something written’. with the addition of the suffix -orama (from
greek horama, ‘view’), one obtains
the word phonogramorama meaning an overview of graphic symbols, or set of
phonograms, representing all the individual speech sounds used in a
language.
the oxford english dictionary defines alphabet as:
the set of letters used in writing the greek
language extended to those used by the romans and hence to any set of
characters representing the simple sounds used in a language or in speech
generally.
and
in the hope that this phonogramorama might come to be used by simple folk for
everyday uses, such as recording unfamiliar names and suchlike,
writingsystems defined
even though a letter may defined as a written symbol
representing a speech sound, a phonogram is not a letter. one letter can represent several
speech-sounds, a phonogram only one. the roman alphabet
is composed of letters. a phonogramorama, composed of phonograms, is therefore not
an alphabet. alphabet,
as the name for any set of characters representing a language is misleading
since it's simply the first two letters of the greek alphabet used for the
whole. many
so-called “alphabets”, the sanskrit for example, begin with other
characters. therefore i shall use the
word “writingsystem”, instead of
alphabet, as a generic name for the not-altogether-phonetic sets of letters
used in writing different languages and
“phonogramoramas” for phonetic writing systems.
the visual strangeness of phonogramoramas
having developed an interest in the value of
phonogramoramas and phonogrammic transcription, naturally i tend to talk of the
matter. occasionally
the response is outright contempt in which i flounder unable to justify my
interest. sometimes
i gain the impression i'm making obvious assertions worth no more than an
indifferent “uh-huh” or two, before the subject is dropped. other times an
impression of aloofness, accompanied perhaps, by a sideways glance from the
eye, strikes me as embarrassment. then i'm uncertain as to whether the respondent is
embarrassed by herhis own ignorance, or by what is taken to be my craziness. but from such remarks as “i'll try and learn
your language one of these days,” or “what is that, welsh?” i conclude that though they appear to know what a
phonetic “alphabet” is, very often people do not. it isn't another
language, of course. phonetic
transcriptions do look unfamiliar with the kind of unfamiliarity associated with
other writingsystems such as the greek, russian, hebrew, sanskrit, arabic,
armenian, etcetera. does
this account for the confusion? but english could be written in any of these writingsystems
given various orthographic ‘rules’ in each to deal with the sounds there are no
letters for in english.
preservation of culture
speech, as a series of voiced sounds is thought
conveyed via the medium of air and like the sound of music, ephemeral. speech, as a series
of written characters is thought conveyed via the medium of matter and related
to preservation. we
cannot hear the musical or literary thought of our
ancestors, nor may our children's great grand-children “hear” ours, except the
manner of recording it be stable. resistance to change is related to preservation. the horse could not
be abandoned for the car till it was certain the car was more advantageous; nor
the hearth-fire for the stove; nor the candle for electrically generated
light. this
valuable and necessary conservatism is often provoked by fear, subliminal, it
may be. perhaps the resistance many
people have to understanding the significance of phonograms and the value of
using a phonogramorama, is caused by an intuitive fear that popular usage of
one would lead to complete chaos—that inability to convey meaning by
symbolization of speech would occur, perhaps even loss of ability to “read” the
writingsystem in which so much of our culture is recorded and passed on from
generation to generation.
will comprehension
be lost?
the impression that the concern of linguists is to maintain
difficulties in language use so it might remain esoteric and elitist, may simply
be a more sophisticated expression of the fear that any interference with it's
current state might have extremely destructive ramifications. there are among them
many conservationists who insist on the value of retaining written languages
just as they are, writingsystems intact.
there's the matter of phonology, for
instance. the
forms a concept can take, following automatically performed rules of the
english tongue, cause our pronunciation (generally in the vowel phones, to vary
as concept changes from noun to verb, or adjective to adverb. in receiving speech,
or reading speech phonographically represented, a certain effort of
concentration is necessary for comprehension.
according to phonologists this effort becomes
unnecessary when reading english works written with our traditional
writingsystem since concepts are instantly visible. our orthography,
they say, makes apparent the etymological and semantic relationships among
various words which phonography (that is, phonogrammic spelling) would conceal.
dictionaries will still preserve the history of words
i hardly think this makes a case against
phonography, since in a phonogrammic dictionary all variations could be
referred to one aspect of the concept where their relationships could be
explained. in researching a dictionary,
when an international phonogramorama is the norm, people would be looking up
an unfamiliar pronunciation, or studying the variety of pronunciations a
certain concept can undergo without changing meaning, or contemplating the
history and meanings of a particular concept.
they would no longer be researching a dictionary, as we so often have
to, on how to spell, or hyphenate, or pronounce what they already know how to
pronounce and therefore how to spell, and therefore how to hyphenate—where else
but where one sy-lla-ble be-comes a-no-ther?
the formular: ‘hyphenation follows phonological
rules" is particularly inapplicable when used in lyrics written below music
since the word breaks are frequently not where they are sung.
phonogramoramas preserve the living language
when middle-english was spoken our own writingsystem
was more phonetic. a
word “spelt” aloud was its pronounciation. with the
introduction of the printing press into
this fact seems to have led over the centuries to
the need for spelling reform, sometimes called urgent. but spelling reform
of english simply cannot occur without more characters. the twenty‑six
letters, twenty-three if you discount the redundant c, q, and x, of the western
writingsystem are insufficient for the number of phones made by english
speakers, let alone the addittional phones of other tongues. the pronunciation of
a word in all its dialectical variety is the meaning-conveyance, the living word itself, of which the current
spelling is an inadequate symbolization.
the living
word is ‘sound’ cognizable by the ear, and must be graphically symbolized in
order to reach understanding through the eye.
the introduction of the printing press has
led, not to the need for ‘spelling’ reform, but to the need to reform the
identification of each simple verbal sound with a single consistent written
character. it
has led, in other words, to the need for the general adoption of a
phonogramorama, rendering spelling reform redundant. there are several
phonetic “alphabets”, or phonogramoramas to be more exact, which necessarily
have more characters, but they have never caught public attention as a solution
to this problem. why
is that? language
teachers and opera singers may be among the few people (apart from linguists
themselves) who make use of the i.p.a. (international phonetic alphabet). but like all such
alphabets (and there are many, most dictionaries introducing variations of
their own on the several systems in existence), for lay use the i.p.a. has two
fundamental deficiencies—it is exceedingly difficult to memorize and it is
difficult to write by hand, too difficult.
many phonogramoramas are difficult to write because,
like the i.p.a., they use miniscule, or lower-case style, grams which when
written by a hurried, or awkward hand easily become confused with other similar
but different phonograms. additionally they are unaesthetic, more of a discouragement
to use than is generally realized. evidently they were not designed to be written by hand and
used with pleasure, but to be typed on a specialized key-board in pursuit of
other serious studies.
“the
use of the familiar roman letters can only cause more confusion than it
eases...”, is an objection raised to phonogramramas which the i.p.a. affirms,
“...and if there's to be a phonetic system all the grams should be new
characters...” but when i consider the
enormous bid from out-there for everyone's time and attention, i
conclude expecting anyone to learn to recognize and be able to reproduce approximately
forty—that's the minimum required for english—utterly new hand-drawn signs
for sounds on the off-chance they might find them useful, is unrealistic and
could never happen. besides,
the number of simple shapes it's possible to draw with a few hand movements,
specially if they are to be easily distinguished from each other, is
limited. the
so-called shaw alphabet uses entirely new signs. likely a reason it’s
fallen by the wayside. but as bernard shaw himself pointed
out, the roman alphabet is commonly represented by
more than one set of signs—and each of these in any one written work, is
presented two different ways, by the upper-case capitals and lower-case
miniscules.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy
a phonogramorama could always use upper-case
letters after the style of roman capitals, with some seventeen additional grams
designed to match, giving uniformity to the whole. there need be no
question as to what system was in use when reading or writing. confining the
traditional orthographic part of this essay to lower-case miniscules is not
mere affectation.
the i.t.a. (initial teaching alphabet), also called
the single-sound alphabet, uses lower-case characters, but did not succeed in the purpose it was designed for. it may have failed
because it was so difficult, as all phonetic “alphabets” are, to memorize. this difficulty
arises because the new phonograms are arbitrarily scattered about within the
existing alphabetic order, which is completely arbitrary to start with. the excuse their progenitors might make for
the position of these phonograms, in the case of those before the phone -B- for example, is that
though they're all different sounds it's possible to find sample words in our
orthography where they’re all spelt with the letter a. thus the complete
set may still be called an alphabet.
western musical notation is now standardized
world wide so the symbolic representation of the musical tone A:
____________
always means, to whoever knowledgeably sees it, the
pitch 440, no matter what instrument is in use or piece being played. this standardization
has emerged from usage. a similar standardization of phone notation, though
difficult to achieve, is what we need.
having been achieved it would have the peculiarly pleasing consequence
that knowledge of what phone each grammic symbol represents can only be
conveyed from one person to another by live communication. even a recording as
adjunct to written material on the subject, though better than just written
explanation, as this, would still be unideal since the record would be unable
to verify attempted imitation. no doubt a computer might
o it with a sound/visual
feed-back, a la the biological
feedback systems. recent advances in
identifying sound elements have obviously been made by the computer industry,
so the whole subject of phonogramoramas may be redundant. notation by human
hand, though, i doubt that's been considered.
if the individual
elements, the word bits, the phones, could be relatively specifically delimited
by anyone, and relatively easily delineated by anyone, surely the use of a
phonogramorama could encourage increased consciousness and comprehension. the realization that meaning resides in the
sound of words, rather than in their written symbolization, might cause more
attentive listening, might bring about more careful articulation» might free
language from its shackles. how much simpler for the child first learning to read and
write. all
these complaints about functional
illiteracy coupled with worried observations on the minisculity of john’n’joans
vocabulary...if twere altogether easier to read and write in the first place
wouldn't these “problems” diminish?
consider this sentence:
off thou, oh
ardent rag-dove thing air borne, aim high -- seizure shook, choose edge ploy
it was concocted by me to incorporate the forty
phones commonly used in american-english
speech. each
phone is sounded once and
once only. using the capital letters of
the roman alphabet, but confining their value to one phone each so they become
phonograms, assigning new value to the redundant /c/, (redundant /q/ and /x/
becoming foreign grams) introducing a mere ten new vowel grams and six new
consonant grams for those sounds which cannot, in our orthography be
represented by a single letter, the above sentence may be phonogramically
notated as follows:
for the phone /o/ in /o/ff introducing the gram
0 –an oddly drawn capital O--
for the phone /ff/ in o/ff/
assigning F
as gram
--the roman
capital letter F—
for the phone /th/ in
/th/ou assigning ë --the
capital middle english thorn letter Ð, alt+0208—
for the phone /ou/ in
th/ou/ introducing the gram ê --an O like
the face of an owl—
for the phone /oh/ in /oh/
assigning O as gram --the roman capital letter O--
for the phone /ar/ in
/ar/dent introducing *
as
gram --typescript *, mnemonic star--
for the phone /den/ in
ar/den/t introducing the ^ as gram --typescript ^ the swallowed sound incorporates /n/--
for the phone /t/ in
arden/t/ assigning T as gram -- roman capital letter T--
for the phone /r/ in /r/ag
assigning R as gram -- the roman capital letter R--
for the phone /a/ in r/a/g
introducing an inverted @
as
gram --typescript @ for the sound /a/t--
for the phone /g/ in ra/g/
assigning G as gram --the roman capital letter G--
for the phone /d/ in
/d/ove, assigning D as gram --the roman capital letter D--
for the phone /o/ in d/o/ve
introducing 1
as
gram -- an inverted U, typescript 1 for
the second sound—
for the phone /ve/ in
do/ve/ assigning V as gram --the roman capital letter V
for the phone /th/ in
/th/ing introducing 3 as gram --the arabic numeral 3
for the phone /i/ in th/i/ng
assigning Y as gram
--roman capital letter Y
for the phone /ng/ in
thi/ng/ introducing û the
gram --reversed N with tail, much the
same as the i.t.a. gram ŋ--
for the phone /air/
introducing = as gram
--redundant greek letter pi--
for the phone /b/ in
/b/orne assigning B as gram
--the roman capital letter B--
for the phone /or/ in
b/or/ne introducing 4 as gram
--arabic numeral 4 inverted & reversed
for the phone /ne/ in
bor/ne/ assigning N as gram
--the roman capital letter N--
for the phone /ai/ in /ai/m
assigning A as gram
--the roman capital letter
for the phone /m/ in ai/m/
assigning M as gram
-- the roman capital letter M--
for the phone /h/ in /h/igh
assigning H as gram
--the roman capital letter H--
for the phone /igh/ in
h/igh/ assigning I as gram
--the roman capital letter I—
for the phone /s/ in
/s/eizure assigning S as
gram --the roman capital letter S—
for the phone /ei/ in
s/ei/zure assigning E as gram
--the roman capital letter E—
for the phone /z/ in
sei/z/ure introducing ä as gram
--redundant greek capital s, Σ--
for the phone /ure/ in
seiz/ure/ introducing 6 as gram
--typescript 6, the i.p.a. schwa character
for the phone /sh/ in
/sh/ook introducing $ as gram
--typescript $, S on its side
for the phone /oo/ in
sh/oo/k assigning U as gram
--the roman capital letter U in assuage,
wage
for the phone /k/ in
shoo/k/ assigning K as gram
--the roman capital letter K
for the phone /ch/ in
/ch/oose assigning C as gram --a new sound value to the roman letter C
for the phone /oo/ in
ch/oo/se assigning W as gram
-- the roman capital letter W, double U
for the phone /se/ in
choo/se/ assigning Z as gram
--the roman capital letter Z
for the phone /e/ in /e/dge
introducing ] as gram --reversed capital E
for the phone /dge/ in
e/dge/ assigning J as
gram --roman capital letter J
for the phone /p/ in /p/loy
assigning P as gram
--the roman capital letter P
for the phone /l/ in p/l/oi
assigning L
as
gram --the roman capital letter L--
for the phone /oi/ in
pl/oi/ introducing % as gram
--typescript %, all i can say for
this one is it's easy to draw.
if a semantic connection of some kind can be made
between phone and gram, usage is facilitated.
the remarks in parenthesis are attempts to
supply this connection. though the gram choices might be improved, i've found it
essential to settle on standardized characters to represent particular sounds
else confusion becomes rapidly rife.
these forty phonograms comprise the american-english
folk phonogramorama i'm offering. the sentence they compose is both a mnemonic, and a
potential order for the phonograms. an order is necessary not only for initial memorization and
use whereby they can be rapidly reviewed, but also for indexing a book written
in this phonogramorama or even, and surely such a day will come, for the
compilation of a phonogrammic dictionary.
the grams are designed with ease of writing by
hand in mind assuming as most
common tool the ball-point, or other un‑shaped pen. their typescript
form is dictated by the hand-writ‑ten form. the ‘off-thou’
sentence in three forms the hand-written phonograms, their typescript counter‑parts
[i.e. what i have available on my equipment],
and their orthographic rendering are shown below:
0-F ë-
-ê ,
o-ff th-ou,
O *-D-^-T R-@-G
D-1-V 3-Y-û
oh ar-den-t r-a-g d-o-ve th-i-ng
= B-4-N,
air
b-or-ne,
A-M H-I
ai-m h-igh
S--E--g--6 $--U--K,
s--ei--z--ure sh-oo-k,
C--W--Z
]---J P-L-%-.
ch--oo---se e-dge p-l-oy.
even though semantically weird sense can be drawn from this sentence and i suggest, wrong, i insist, the arrangement i've made of the forty phones is easier to memorise than the following twenty-eight syllables:
ai-be-se-de, ee-ef-je-aitch, ei-jai-kai-el, em-en-oh-pe, kyu-
are-es-te, you-ve-doubleyou, eks-why-ze.
even if you were one of those fortunate children who have no trouble, perhaps enjoy, learning nonsense, yet you may have forgotten how hard they were to learn at first.
the sound for sign, phone for gram,
equality and identity must be grasped. this, the very kernel of the idea, is what is so exceedingly difficult to convey using the
traditional writingsystem. you might even say it's ridiculous to try and make sound
comparisons of words notated in letters, with other words notated in the same
ambiguous system. (see
note). many
may pronounce parts of the “off-thou”
sentence differently from the way i do, british born to a
lower-upper-middle-class family (when i left such complicated class
distinctions were still affecting speech patterns) from the south of
________________________________________________________________
[note from authrix to editor i
shall make a tape of this essay available to anyone interested, accompanied by
a phonogrammic transcript. the mnemonic will be sung for further illustration].
______________________________________________________________
for additional clarification and aid in accurately matching phone with gram, the sentence can become an acrostic for a series of monosyllabic words, these words becoming the phonogram names’ should names prove needed:
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hand drawn type-script alphabetic hand drawn |
Type-script
alphabetic phonograms |
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phonograms |
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orthography
phonograms |
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phonograms
orthography |
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0KS |
ox |
AË ache |
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F0KS |
fox |
ÍAK make |
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ë# £L
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thou'll |
HID hide |
Alt 0163 |
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£L |
owl |
ID eyed |
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OT |
oat |
SEST ceased |
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*RT |
art |
EST east |
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G*R^N |
garden |
{EG gigue |
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TW |
too
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2RG erg |
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RW |
rue
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$YN shin |
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@PT |
apt |
UYN win |
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GO
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go |
K9 cow |
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DO |
dough |
C9 chow |
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1PT |
upped |
WZ ooze |
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V£C |
vouch |
ZWM zoom |
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3Yû K |
think |
]ND end |
Alt 02519 |
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YC |
itch |
J%NT
joint |
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YûK |
ink |
P%NT point |
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=RD |
aired |
L]ND lend |
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BE |
bee |
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¥L oil |
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4D awed |
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NE
knee |
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i consulted the american heritage dictionary's pronunciation when in doubt as to how americans would pronounce these words, but the swallowed /den/ sound in gar/den/, and ar/den/t, is not found notated there. as no words in english begin with this swallowed phone, or with the /ng/ phone, the inital gar’ of garden and the /i/ of ink are there to give each of these phone a recognizable ord form and name. /
as an english speaker and long-time user of the anglo-roman writingsystem, as i anticipate most readers will be, it makes sense to me, to use the english letter names of four of the seven vowels to stand for those phones as the easiest and quickest way of recalling their gram forms:
A as is bate, E as in beat, I as in heist, O as in host,
but then
U as in soot, and W (double U), as in as suit, with Y as in sit.
it would’ be confusing to us english speakers to write the gram E for the phone "A", the gram Á for the phone "*", the gram É for the phone "E", the gram Ê for the phone "Y", or the gram Ö for the phone "U¢ as other european language speakers might assign grams if they were developing a phonetic system. but if an english developed phonogramorama became common coin, europeans learning english should at least find it easier than our complex orthography. there are many indications that english will become the international language.
by analogy with the alphabet,
reference to this phonetic writingsystem could be made by calling it the ‘offthou’
after the mnemonic sentence, or the ‘offfox’ after the acrostic. but since several
mnemonics can probably be made from the forty phonograms, such a name might
cause confusion. if
it has merit it'll acquire it's own name.
for this essay i've dubbed it a folk phonogramorama. i like the
alliteration and assonance of the
initial syllables, ‘fopho’, in brief. this name has the advantage of emphasizing that though phonetically based
fopho is simpler than a phoneticians phonogramorama, designed as it is for lay
use and convenience. it
doesn't claim to be definitive as to sounds made being in no way exhaustive of
vowel phones. “by
infinitesimal movements of the tongue”, as bernard shaw observes “countless different
vowels can be produced all of them in use among speakers of english”. perhaps there are
more english vowels to be identified and assigned gram forms. perhaps it's not
possible to identify every gradation between one sound and another, though identification
of sounds is also a matter of tuning the ear.
it may not even be necessary to identify every
gradation. many
more grams would be needed.
on the whole though, i think a gram should exist for
every phone identified. for example, as it stands fopho doesn't include the sound i
make for the word /our/, or the sound i make or the vowel part of the word
l/ure/. Neither, as far as i can tell
bear an equivalent in any american pronunciation guide
i've come across.
yet i'm not content to “make do” with the vowels
available in the american-english fopho, at least, not when writing phonographically
in your own idiolect. i
term these two phones “foreign”, foreign to the american-english dialect. they properly belong
in an international phonogramorama where they
have a place and a gram, along with the few other foreign phones i've managed
to identify and assign grams to. the british-english dialect you see, needs another mnemonic
which includes phones missing in the american.
i foresee more people gradually recognising the value of phonogramoramas, but dissatisfied with this or that aspect of those in existence, composing more satisfactory ones for themselves. by combining successful parts of one with another a consensus of usefulness might emerge which would eventually stabilize. perhaps a plethora is already a-sprout, like early music notation systems, or the first cars, or electrical sockets. if so fopho may already be one of a class of folk phonogramora as, just as there are many scholastic phonetic “alpha‑bets”.
supprisingly, bernard shaw, who
heartily endorsed and promoted the concept of a phonetic “alphabet”, thought
phonography of published material should be standardized. for the publication
of his “androcles and the lion” printed in the “shaw alphabet” with a parallel
text in the anglo-roman writingsystem, his
directions were: “pronunciation to resemble that recorded of his majesty our late king george V.” in so-doing he seems
to be depending on the concept of monarchy as the cultural ideal to which all
britishers aspire, or as least to which they turn for knowledge of the
ideal. every
standardization of spelling also conceals general pronunciation shifts, as made clear by our spelling which reflected pronounciation before standardization got underway. it inhibits learning and stultifies langauge, thwarting and hampering its evolution. perhaps groundlessly, i think, surmise, guess, imagine, yet intuitively i state: though standardization of phone for gram is imperative, standardization of phonogram arrangement in word notation would continue to deprive and falsify communication. isn't it possible we are no better at reaching consensus, and in general no better at communicating without constant irascibility in expression and, or, suppression of violent feelings induced by the frustrations of unreceived communication, because language has not been allowed to develope as it would without academic regulation?
to maintain consistency of usage the growth of quicker and more direct forms of communication has been pinched back, smothered, crushed. yet if we can’t learn to communicate more effectively as a species we'll likely not be here much longer to try. rules of spelling and pronunciation, like rules of grammar, more than ignore that “we are all born with a genetic endowment for recognizing and formulating language”, they appear not to know of it.
it is in the living, in the spoken word that changes of pronunciation occur. if phonograms are not used to
reflect this changing quality there's no value to a phonogramorama. probably standardization of ponogrammic spelling would simply, perhaps quite rapidly, bring about the very situation we have now: a phonography turned orthography--spelling which fails to match sounds and introduces all the rules with which i at least, became so painfully familiar long ago and am so utterly heart-sick of still having to remember whenever i write.
english orthography, even before it
crossed the atlantic, as already a
mish-mash of adoption from foreign languages.
many words came from tongues using the western
writingsystem but having different pronunciation
rules. some
words arrived from languages with other writingsystems, each transliterated
into the western writingsystem with different transliteration policies, and even the transliteration policies changing
over the years. this
process is excellently demonstrated by many people and place names in
pole, would fhink of pronouncing the name of the mezzo-soprano, ewa
podles, AV1 P0DL]$,
looks like ]U² P0DLÚ to me.
the pronunciation inconsistencies
of the anglo-roman writingsystem are particularly evident when you try
rendering some one's last name as phonetically as possible in our writingsytem in order to address them accurately on next
meeting. as if you'd written “ghoti” /gh/ as in cou/gh/
for the phonogram F, /o/ as in
w/o/men, for the phonogram Y, and /ti/ as in promotion for the phonogram (in
fopho: FY$, see note), which made sense
at the time since you were just leaving for a w/o/men's promo/ti/onal meeting
on gou/gh/ street. but on reading the
word a week later, you find you can't remember the sound value you assigned the
letters you chose and can only verbalise your rendition as G1C@ as in a/gh/ast,
1 as in m/o/ther, C ri/t/ual
and as in mer/i/ngue because you had
been watching a ghastly movie in which a m/o/ther ri/t/ually murdered
with poisoned mer/i/ngues.
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note: “ghoti” is bernard shaw's brilliant spelling of “fish”.
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but besides avoiding this kind of problem, fopho allows writing in one's own idiolect, however it happens to be compounded. that individuals should take responsibility for written attempts to convey meaning is not different from the fact we do so whenever we speak to another in anticipation of being understood. in fopho writing, emphasis would be where it should be, not on “correct usage”, but on “communication”. the criterion is comprehension, the touchstone, intelligibility. a splendid value of a phonogramorama is that it can reflect the way a particular person pronounces their words in speech. it is time to relegate the western world's beautiful but ambiguous roman writingsystem, and our english orthography, to the peacefilled studios of poets, philologists and other linguists. it could happen if people took to using a phonogramorama whenever it might serve their writing needs better than the alphabet, for of course there's no reason why the alphabetic writingsystem and a folk phonogramorama shouldn't jog along together, hand in hand awhile.
should you feel like experimenting
with the fopho to write phonographically, some learning is involved but it's
not extreme. i suggest rereading
the phonogrammic notation list above. think of the characters as phonograms (signs for
speech-sounds). associate
each gram with its phone, memorise the sentence the
list is composed of. you
have provided yourself with a phoogramorama by means of which you will be
able, well all of us should be able if we did, to do many things difficult, or
impossible with the a.b.c. the value of the “off thou” sentence as a mnemonic device will make itself apparent
once you begin writing.
verbalising as you goes is recommeded else you tend to
continue writing orthographically. if a sound seems missing, i'd recommend inventing a gram
for it (this is not easy), and giving your
gram as clear an orthographic example as possible. if it seemed reasonable
to throw your effort into an envelope addressed to noh quarter i should be glad to receive it, just to see if i could understand it at all. the system was
devised for my own purposes. i don't know how well, if at all, it will stand up to multi-person
use. but as
well as writing with phonograms as you pronounce
your words, it's also important to pronounce written phonograms according
to their phone value. they
must not be translated back into your own dialect or their purpose would be defeated
and the sacrifice of the alphabet, vain.