The English Phonetic Alphabet

“Come. Now!” the receptionist shrieked and disappeared down the hall. I left my students and trotted behind her towards the computer lab. I could hear a man shouting.

This is a friendly, polite little ESL school, nobody shouts here?

When we entered the lab, the technician looked up at us and snarled, “I can’t understand what she’s saying!” before turning on his heel and stomping away from a trembling young woman.

The computer room is lined with second-hand office computers that often need attention.  Grace Chan, a graduate of our school is employed as a teacher’s assistant to organize the language software and load discs into the computers. She stood alone pointing to a bulky old unit and whispered, “Too soun. Eeychoo. Too soun.” A single tear rolled down her porcelain cheek. She was ashamed of her accent and humiliated by the encounter with the red-neck technician.

I asked her what was wrong and she repeated, “Too soun. Eychoo. Too soun” pointing to the old computer.

“Can you write it down?” I asked, and gave her a pen.

In bold clear letters she printed E-C-H-O, and everything made sense. The computer was making two sounds; it had an echo. Grace knew the right word, but that didn’t help her. No one had ever told Grace that English letters don’t represent sounds. Spelling is random and no one can speak English from reading it.

For an honors graduate from a prestigious language school – you’d think this might have come up before? While it is not a secret that English is idiotic, teachers don’t address the issue because they don’t know what to say. Sometimes they repeat crazy things that someone told them like, i before e except after c, When two vowels go a-walking the first one does the talking or my personal favorite, Sound it out. But none of those sayings are really true so they just make the situation worse.

It turns out, the solution is easy - a new alphabet; a set of letters where each symbol represents one and only one sound (like other more sensible languages). Then people can read what English words sound like.

There is an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that was developed in 1888 and it has one symbol for each sound but the symbols are odd and confusing. No one likes them. IPA was on the right track but it didn’t work for English.

The recipe for an English Phonetic Alphabet is simple, 40 ordinary computer keyboard symbols, one for every sound in English and voila a brand new, easy to use, Latin alphabet-based English Phonetic Alphabet for reading the sounds of English. Now why didn’t I think of that?

24 consonant sounds:

/b/-boy, /CH/-church, /d/-dog, /f/-five, /g/-goat, /h/-house, /j/-July, /k/-king, /l/-lemon, /m/-money, /n/-number, /ng/-ring , /p/-people, /r/-red, /s/-summer, /SH/-shoe, /t/-time, /th/-the, /TH/-think, /v/-visa, /w/-woman, /y/-yellow, /z/-zebra, /Zh/-genre

16 vowel sounds:

/Ay/-gray, /a/-black, /Ey/-green, /e/-red, /Iy/-white, /i/-pink, /Ow/-yellow, /o/-olive, /Uw/-blue, /u/-mustard, /^/-wood, /Oy/-turquoise, /Aw/-brown, /Er/-purple, /Ar/-charcoal, /Or/-orange

There’s nothing to it.

Summary

·         English writing and English speaking are separate languages

·         Writing it down is an acceptable strategy if speaking isn’t working

·         /ekOw/ was the word Grace needed

·         Remember to fire the bastards that make your students cry