All can read with akses notation
by James H. Kanzelmeyer 
www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws02.htm    www.unifon.org/akses.html

This comparative notation approach to writing systems may be quite different from the one that the authors of these systems use.  If you want to read the original, go to Jim Kanzelmeyer's website: www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws02.htm    www.forcomm.net/allread/

All Who Speak English Can Easily Learn to Read and Write AKSES

1.  What is AKSES?
     1.1 AKSES concept
     1.2 Characteristics of phonemic writing
 2.  How AKSES writing looks and works
     2.1 The 20 vowels and 24 consonants
     2.2 Examples of AKSES text
3.  How AKSES differs from spelled systems
     3.1 Traditional spelled orthography
     3.2 Reformed spelling
     3.3 Phonemic orthography (including AKSES)
4.  Why children read and write early and with little effort using AKSES
5.  Implementing AKSES

James H. Kanzelmeyer   jimk@forcomm.net
5219 Webb St.
Aliquippa PA    15001-4943
Phone:  (724) 378-4349

1. The claims:  AKSES reduces time to mastery by 50%
2. What do the AKSES characters look like?
1. 20 AKSES vowels
2. Sample text in the AKSES notation

Children arrive at school with a vocabulary of over 3000 words and an innate sense of phonology - the differences in sound that mark differences in word meaning. 

Akses builds on this understanding of English speech.  All languages are 100% phonemic. Understanding is totally based on differences in sound and interpreting these sound signs.  If there is a graphic equivalent of those sound signs, then the skills of reading and writing are relatively easy to acquire. 

English speech is 100% phonemic.  Unfortunately, the English writing system is only 40% phonemic.  Supporters of traditional orthography often claim it to be 85% phonetic (It it were 100% phonetic, each letter would represent a sound).  Such claims exaggerate phonemicity by a factor of two [see polyvalence].  The traditional orthography  [TO] is so far removed from that ideal to make it impossible to establish any TO equivalent of the self-learning starting point for AKSES.

If the writing system is also highly phonemic, then it is quite easy to convert meaningful segments of sound into marks on a page. Comparative studies have shown the remarkable advantage enjoyed by learners of phonemic writing systems. Flesch reports that Russian school children achieve a level of proficiency in three months that English speaking school children have difficulty matching in three years.  The children are not smarter.  The teaching methods are not better.  It is just an easier system. Dyslexia is no where near the problem it is in English speaking nations. In many countries with phonemic writing systems it is unheard of.  It is the complexity of the task and the lack of consistency that brings on the symptoms.

When there is a one-to-one correspondence, children can write the way they talk.  Decoding is also simplified enabling children to pronounce any word in a book or sound out any letter combination of letters.

Combining and blending sounds is not as easy as memorizing the building blocks or basic elements of sound.  Fortunately, there are only 40 or so important sounds and their graphic equivalents that need to be memorized.  Phonemes and letter pairs are associated both ways.  Given the letter, the child can parrot back the sound.  In AKSES, there are no letter names that are distinct from letter sounds.  Given the sound, the child can write down the associated letter.

While this may sound like the phonics approach, it differs in one important respect.  There are no word signs or logograms.  There are, of course, number logograms in the form of numbers but no words that cannot be broken down into the sounds of component letters.

The name *AKSES is an abbreviation for access to reading. The first word in this phrase would be spelled *akses in this phonemic notation.

AKSES is an attempt to match the phonemes in the child's head with a mark or series of marks on a page. 

By the first grade, children have already mastered the phonological structure of their native language.  The easiest form of reading and writing would be in a notation that matched that structure.

AKSES looks like a variant of new spelling.  In New Spelling and I.T.A. the long vowels are ae ee ie oe ue.  In access the long vowels are a e i o u with an underbar or overbar [macron] is used to mark the difference between the [short a] /ae/ and the [long a]  /ei/.  New spelling uses the letter e as a marker, Akses uses the macron.

AKSES also resembles Pitman's i.t.a.  This 1959 notation was another variant of Ellis' New Spelling [circa 1900].  AKSES, however, is advanced as an alternative writing system and not as a prelude to the traditional writing system.  AKSES is not a transitional alphabet.   Kanzelmeyer has doubts the effectiveness of transitional alphabets.  Children could learn i.t.a. over twice as fast as TO, but that advantage was lost when they had to transition to TO in the third grade.  Akses is proposed as a major restructuring of the printing industry.

it.a. was based on the psychology of skill transfer.  Once the skill of matching marks on the page with abstract phonemes has been mastered, this skill can be transferred to more complex reading and writing tasks.  Literacy in one medium can be quickly duplicated to another medium.  At least that is the theory behind a bilingual classroom or taking the trouble to use an i.t.a. 
http://www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws03.htm

AKSES is almost identical to New Spelling except the macron has been used to mark the long vowels instead of the [e]  AEIOU = ae, ee, ie, oe, ue Macrons are shown in the graphic above but below they are changed to underlines.

Three phonemic transcriptions new spelling, Akses, and Spanglish.

AKSES Her hair wuz fownd on dhu soefu, at dhu sinfuul seen uv dhu merderd herder. 
AKSES Her hair wuz fownd on dhu sofu at dhu sinfuul sen uv dhu merderd herder.
SS        Her heir waz found on the soafa att the sinnful sien av the murrderd hurrder.


20 consonants
The table doesnt quite match the short and long arrangment.  The sound in hook is short.
When there are no macrons available, the long vowels can be represented with underlines or capital letters.  [eel = el]   [monkey = munke]   [good food = guud fud]
 

20 vowels	comments	24 consonants
a = ax, at  ap = ape aar= are ej = edge el = eel ic = itch il = isle, rit-right, tim o = ambig. aw/aa dog oi+oy = oil od = ode aw = awe u  = up - lax midvowel uu = hook oo = hoop	underbars need to be replaced with overbars or macrons	n = ng er = 3:r not air air = er not Ar ear= ir not Er eks = x [no x character] t h = dh or duz hwich plural=z

This is incomplete.  I do not have 20 vowels or 25 consonants listed.

  The Speech sound table you have on the AKSES page is OK except for some overlaps and
  non-AKSES characters.  If we number the character cells from 1 - 24 down each column,
  these are the changes needed to show what you want:

  1-6, 8-9, 13-14, 16, 20-22 are all OK

  7 should contain a:    o.  The words seem OK

  10 characters OK.  Subst bawl for cost (/cost/) and law for loss (/los/).

  11 characters OK.  Delete duty which some pronounce /dyootee/.

  12 characters OK.  Delete silent which some careful souls may pronounce /silent/.

  15 should contain oi    oy.  Words are OK.

  17 should contain ju  ue  u.  Words are OK.

  18 should contain ju    ow.  Words are OK.
The characters of cell 18 should be:  au   ow.

  19 should contain a)   ar.  Delete ire (/ier/) and fire (/fier/) because they are written with
  /ie/ phoneme.

  23 and 24 should contain the phonetic symbols only.  AKSES has no comparable
  characters; these speech sounds are produced by combining other AKSES phonemes. 
  The word cells should be empty.

  The phonetic symbols in 4 and 7 should be footnoted (or otherwise marked) with the
  comment that these sounds are allophones produced by the same AKSES phoneme /o/,
  which means they all would be written with the same phonemic character, /olmz/,
  /wont/, and /woch/.

  The phonetic symbols in 6 and 12 should be similarly marked as allophones produced by
  AKSES /u/.  They would all be written with the same character, /ubut/, /ukut/, /ugo/,
  /sofu/, /atum/.

  This all goes to show that AKSES cannot provide the notation you seek for an
  international phonetic alphabet, a fact I pointed out to you in the beginning.  It is not an
  alphabet and does not show individual pronunciations.  It is a complete writing system to
  represent phonemic American English as the "average" American perceives he or she
  speaks and hears words.

  I hope I've not made any mental typos.  When the changes are complete, you will find a:
  and o as overlap characters for AKSES phoneme /o/, turned v and e as overlap
  characters for AKSES phoneme /u/, and the last 2 cells empty because they do not
  represent AKSES phonemes.  If I've made a mistake or indicated something you do not
  understand, please let me know. (It does come out to 20 vowel phonemes.)

  Jim

AKSES is a modified version of traditional English writing. It uses 1 spelling, not many, for each phoneme. 

AKSES iz u modif§d verzhun uv trudishunul Iõglish r§tiõ. It ãzez 1 speliõ, not men*, for *ch fÇn*m. AKSES iz u modifId verZun uv trudishunul Inglish rItiN.  it Uzez 1 speliN, not menE for IC fOnEm

Introduction, Index, and Links – www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws01.htm 

Words in a standard Dictionary are printed in an AKSES dictionary using the 44 phonemic characters in phoneme patterns corresponding to the way words
are pronounced. Infants are taught names of phonemic characters approximating the sounds they produce in spoken words. When children become interested
in reading and writing, they do so almost automatically. They read by blending names of characters in the order they appear in written words and write words
as the same sequence of characters they would speak. They do not memorize the spelling of words, as they must with traditional orthography.

Comparisons between Traditional Orthography and AKSES – www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws07.htm

The complete AKSES program – www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws08.htm 
 
 

The first notation is IPA - International Phonetic Alphabet.  The 2nd is Akses 25 Vowel Phonemes for English - 12 pure Two Notations:  IPA - and Akses dark yellow cells are not listed as IPA phonemes 6 Chekt - short 6 Free - long Difthongs 4-7 with schwa æ-..a a:..o ai.'ie .i a'..ar| ai' .ir at, ax, ask,  cat alms, want, watch eye, ice, bite are, car    |  ire, fire e. e 3:. er ei. ae .a e'.. air edge, edit, elbow her, girl, skirt, urban ace, ape, vein air, care, there, barely i .i i: -.ee  e oi . oi/oy. i:'.ear it, in, index, ill eel, east, mere, very oil, boy, loyal ear, fear, deer, pier o turned a..o o: turned c.aaw. 'u .oe o or .. or - ox, otter, cot, pot awe, call, cost, loss,  oh, oat, low for, four, floor, more u .uu u: .oo ju. ue .u ju'.- yur hook, put, would ooze, zulu, zoo, duty you, few, fuse your,  sure |  tour, poor L. u ' turned e .u au. ou au'. our up, cut,a'bu't a'kUt ago, sofa, atom, silent out, down, cow our, flower, power IPA's turned e, a, v, and c are unavailable in ASCII and Latin-1 Darker shaded cells not members of Jones' minimum phoneme set Chart as Grahic  IPA chart

The 12 pure vowels are shown in the first two columns.  Akses can represent the long vowels with an e or with a macron. White cells indicate phonemes that are sometimes merged.

1-6, 8-9, 13-14, 16, 20-22 are all OK

  7 should contain a:    o.  The words seem OK

  10 characters OK.  Subst bawl for cost (/cost/) and law for loss (/los/). ball is the same as call
    and law is too close to awe.  key words are supposed to be different patterns.

  11 characters OK.  Delete duty which some pronounce /dyootee/.
         It still contains oo unless you are strictly ue.

  12 characters OK.  Delete silent which some careful souls may pronounce /silent/.

  15 should contain oi    oy.  Words are OK.

  17 should contain ju  ue  u.  Words are OK.

  18 should contain ju    ow.  Words are OK. The characters of cell 18 should be:  au   ow.

  19 should contain a)   ar.  Delete ire (/ier/) and fire (/fier/) because they are written with
  /ie/ phoneme.

  23 and 24 should contain the phonetic symbols only.  AKSES has no comparable
  characters; these speech sounds are produced by combining other AKSES phonemes. 
  The word cells should be empty.

  The phonetic symbols in 4 and 7 should be footnoted (or otherwise marked) with the
  comment that these sounds are allophones produced by the same AKSES phoneme /o/,
  which means they all would be written with the same phonemic character, /olmz/,
  /wont/, and /woch/.

  The phonetic symbols in 6 and 12 should be similarly marked as allophones produced by
  AKSES /u/.  They would all be written with the same character, /ubut/, /ukut/, /ugo/,
  /sofu/, /atum/.
This is a rationale for initially building literacy skills in the child's native language.  It is easier for the child and quicker.  This question has never been fully answered - is the indirect approach that seems more involved, actually quicker than starting someone on the complex task. 

This question is never asked in other areas of endeavors.  No one tries to teach algebra and calculus before the student has mastered simple arithmatic skills.  It is probably possible but clearly not the quickest way to achieve mastery.  We begin with the fundamentals and then build on them.

  Initial Teaching Alphabet
The initial teaching alphabet (ita) is an "initial alphabet" based on a phonetic spelling system for the teaching of reading to beginners, consisting of 44 symbols which represent the "40 sounds" of the English Language. Sir James Pitman's development of ita (initially called the "Augmented Roman Alphabet") was not an attempt at spelling reform, but the creation of a "medium" for the initial learning of reading. The archival work on the records of the ita Association was completed this year, and a Guide to the records has been produced. This was prepared by Gavan McCarthy, Helen Barber, and Lisa Cianci with Lisa O'Sullivan. The records will be deposited with the State Library of Victoria. 

What is wrong with aa for 'I' and aa bi, yu bi, wi bi for our usual conjugations of the verb to-be.   It is difficult to have a for ah like veryone else because we have at least 5 possible readings or pronunciations for the letter.

Learn how to read the native tongue or ethnic dialect first.  Have some books written in this vernacular.

An alphabet with 44 symbols, each of which represents a single sound, that is used to teach beginning reading of English. 

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cld/examples/pitman/

But the most important reason for teaching phonics is not because it is the best way to teach reading. The most important reason is because it teaches the child that the universe is an orderly place, that follows rules; that it is not arbitrary; and that it is worthwhile to  try to learn the rules or figure them out. Let me stress that point. When you teach phonics, you are teaching the basis, the intellectual  foundation, for science, logic, and mathematics. Absent this kind of instruction, your child will never learn the thinking methods that these disciplines require. You are also teaching your child to distinguish between truth and lies, between true religion and false  religion. People usually don't understand how very fundamental the development of thinking skills really is!

They speak of the "linguistic" approach to teaching reading. This method really appears to be a mixture of phonics and "look and  guess". It would be just as confusing as any other program that did not teach solely with phonics. One other method has been tried, which is called the ITA or Initial Teaching Alphabet. In this method, linguistic symbols were used, and all words were spelled totally phonetically. The only problem with this method is that it made lousy spellers, and children had great difficulty switching from these  special books to normal English print. It is largely out of use today.

Where does this come from.  Obviously there was difficulty but the setback was not so much as to elimintate the benefit of the approach.   http://www.seghea.com/homeschool/Read.html

Frequency of letters  [don't agree]
           e t a o n s h i r d l u

1. spanglish in a nutshell
2. saxon-spanglish
3. saxon alphbet
4. phonemes
5. ebonics and ethnic vernaculars
6. ftp://express.xdrive.com/

 

AKSES notation can be approximated by using a capital letter in place of the letters with an overbar.  Alternatively, an underbar can be simulated with an underscore [ctrl-U] which is relatively easy to add.

Here is what akses looks like when converted 

This iz exampl text az it wud apir in iether hand-printed or taipset format.  With very fiu eksepshanz, werdz aar imiediatly identifaiabl bai TO competant rieders.  Ieven the haard werdz cann bi dicoaded with littl trubbl after a fiu seconds inspecshan.

TABLE 1.  Phoneme Names and Characters                      10/20/98
source: http://www.forcomm.net/allread/AMWS04.HTM

    24  CONSONANTS
Phoneme       Keyword      Character      Alternate for Printed Text
bu [buh]        bet          b,B
du              dot          d,D
f               fun          f,F
gu              get          g,G
h               hit          h,H
j               jet          j,J
k               kin          k,K
l               let          l,L
m               mat          m,M
n               net          n,N
pu              pin          p,P
r               run          r,R
s               set          s,S
t               tin          t,T
v               van          v,V
w               win          w,W
y               yet          y,Y
z               zoo          z,Z
ch              chin         ch,CH
ng              thank        ng              n-hook(eng)
sh              she          sh,SH
th (voiceless)  thin         th,TH
th (voiced)     this         dh,DH           (t-macron*) + h
zh              measure      zh,ZH

     20 VOWELS
a               sat          a,A
e               let          e,E
i               fin          i,I
o               hot          o,O  not?
u               bun          u,U

ae              fail         ae,AE           a-macron*
ee              feet         ee,EE           e-macron
ie              lie          ie,IE           i-macron
oe              snow         oe,OE           o-macron
ue              few          ue,UE           u-macron

ar              cart         ar,AR
air             fair         air,AIR
ear             fear         ear,EAR
er              her          er,ER
or             for          or,OR

aw              awful        aw,AW
oo              moon         oo,OO
ow              how          ow,OW
oy              toy          oy,OY
uu              book         uu,UU

      * macron:  line over the letter
 

Steve,

[JK]  Good questions and I'll try to answer them below.  Keep in mind that the answer to "What's best?" depends upon the standards for judgement, the answer to the initial question, "Best for what?"  Obviously my answers express my opinions, but I think I have reasons that some may agree with.

Jim,

If akses is an alternative to the traditional writing system and not an initial teaching alphabet, why all the effort to make it similar?

[JK] There was no effort in that direction.  The difference between i.t.a and AKSES is one is a temporary "throw-away" alphabet, the other a permanent "lifetime" writing system.

Keep in mind the most important criterion for either is to ensure it
represents the common (in the sense "same for all readers") phonemes
uniquely.  If this is accomplished and the "alphabet" is used to represent words in a
regular phonemic orthography, children acquire reading in the shortest time
possible.  This process is easiest if the children have not learned "ABC"
names.  They can start acquiring reading any time after learning their "/a/
/b(u)/ /ch/" character names and writing after they learn to form the
characters.

It is not surprising that i.t.a. chose about the same (but I do not believe
identical) phoneme set.  I have no idea why they chose the characters they
did, and they certainly are not the same as AKSES.  I chose AKSES character
set primarily to minimize the change in perception from TO to AKSES for
American readers.  It is possible my ideas of the most common spelling for
the phonemes may not be absolutely correct, but some compromises had to be
made where 2 phonemes compete for the same or similar TO "spellings."
 

[SB] When you get to dictate the code, why not choose a
convention more in line with international spelling or
a complete new letter shape rather than an old letter
with a diacritic such as a macron.
 

[JK] I think the criterion I mentioned above tells the whole story.  It is
intended as an American English writing system.  If Europeans are reading
and writing American English now, their acceptance of a transition from TO
to AKSES phonemic will be as easy as for Americans.  Substitution of less
obvious character assignments would make the transition harder for all
current readers of English.  The use of macron letters for "long vowels" is
a natural choice.  Most literate Americans recognize its significance
already, I believe.  It has been used in dictionaries and other pronouncing
aids and even in some national advertising for years.
 

[SB] You say that ae ee ie oe ue or a marked version of
these "long vowels" are just as good as any other convention.
 

[JK] If you accept the criterion I used, I believe that the Ve digraphs and
macron forms are fairly equivalent.  I personally prefer the macron form
where possible because I believe that its recognition as the
symbol for a "long vowel" will be quicker and more positive than the
digraph.  They do not look quite as weird to me, especially in multisyllabic
words, but that is just a personal observation.  New characters such as the
"continental" vowel spellings or new or non-English characters are certainly
not equal by my criterion; they would drive TO readers bananas.
 

[SB] Are you saying that all conventions are equal?  You add as long as they are used consistently.

[JK] This is a quote out of context.  To English-speaking beginners who have had no experience with TO, that statement is quite true.  As long as they can easily distinguished one from another and they are used consistently in orthography, the characters actually used are unimportant.  However, once you bring in the secondary criterion that AKSES should constitute as small a change from "spellings" TO readers will perceive as most representative of English phonemes, it is no longer valid.

I have argued that this is the problem, [1] if they are used
consistently, then many of the symbols become trigrafs
or [2] new letter combination symbols have to be
developed that have no relation to the component
letters.
 

Two AKSES symbols are trigraphs and 3 are digraphs only because they appear
exclusively before "r."  I chose these r-modified characters because I
believe their use simplifies reading and writing for everyone, beginner and old-hand
alike.  I do not understand what new letter combinations you are refering to
in point 2).
 

[SB] I think that it is probably wrong to perpetuate the
idea that [A] can be substituted for the [ey] in they
without a serious consequence.  It can be done but it
screws up the system and represents a rather careless
use of scarce resources [vowel letters].
 

[JK]  I recognize that this is your view, but I cannot follow it.  In the first
place, /ae/ is the replacement for /ay/, and a clearer (in my opinion)
a-macron is substituted for that where possible.  As a typographer, you see a-micron as
a "new" letter; as a user, I see it as an old letter that looks the way it
is pronounced.  To use AKSES, all will have to learn new names for the old
"old letters,"  /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/.

[AB] It is much easier to substitute ey for A than the other way around.

[JK] I do not see that is what AKSES is doing.  It substitutes /ae/ for long A.

[SB] You say "if akses were ever adopted to teach children" and yet elsewhere you indicate that using akses as an ita, the only reason that akses would be in the schools, would be no more effective than i.t.a. which in your estimation was not successful at all.

[JK] This is another quote out of context.  The full quote should read "children can only be taught with AKSES writing (in good conscience) if the country is started on the road to becoming an AKSES-using environment.  In other words, AKSES can be no more successful in teaching children TO than i.t.a. was for obvious reasons.  Turn that around and you have another true statement, "i.t.a. failed to teach children TO as it promised to do; AKSES does not make that impossible claim."

 [SB] The problem with macrons is not the fact that some
 dictionaries use them.  The problem is that so few
 fonts include them:  accents, circumflexes, and
 umlauts yes, macrons no.

 [JK] I did not state my preference for macron (overline)  forms based upon their  availability or lack of it.  I suspect that if AKSES  were to be adopted for  teaching all children in the USA, the necessary  technology of keyboards and  fonts would appear when needed, not as a miracle but
 because our economic  system wold move to supply the needed inovation and  manufacture.

Steve Wyn sez, "Pipl dont now wat they waant until wi show them" 

I agree with your point concerning some folk's luck or skill in developing a market.  Who knew we "needed" Beenie Babies, Palm Pilots, or even stick-on tatoos?  That was not really the point I tried (and miserably failed) to make.  I'll wager button hooks were not invented until lots of people had trouble buttoning their shoe buttons with their fingers, but that effective button-hook technology followed closely upon the emergence of a real need.  A corollary of
my point is that lack of fonts or even keyboards to support a particular phonemic character set should not be used to FORSTALL its consideration.  I have
demonstrated ways of adding the macron-marked vowels to the 2 most popular word processing programs so that we can see what they look like (and criticize
them to our hearts content.)  Admittedly typing characters by 2-key macros is not very convenient, but my point was that if adoption of a character set
requiring 6 or 7 additional keys provided a breakthrough in accessible English writing, the technology to make it easy would quickly follow its widespread use.

Good point aan thu roelerblaedz.  Ie invventid them bak in 72.  Wun weel in frunt and wun in bak.  Hue nue?

Due peepool noe wut thae waant?  Steev Win (Wynn) thu kusseenoe bilder sez "peepool doent noe wut thae waant til wee shoe them"? 

Ied liek tue shoe pairints wut truespel kood due.  Ied hav kidz (therd graederz} lern truespel az u prununseeyyaeshin gied.  Thae wood plae withh naansents werdz - naat Eenglish.  But theez werdz reelee woodint bee naansents werdz at aul but reel werdz in spanish, jermin, french,
japunneez.  Then ie shoe thu kidz that thae nou ken shoe thair pairints that thae ken reed theez laengwijiz.  This tue mee iz soe simpool tue due.  It just taeks wun kaamin funnetik speleeeng.

Thanks for the URL for your website.  Very interesting systems.  And I
 see why you make the simplifications you do.  The trouble is which
 simplification to use, when there happens to be two.  For example, in
 "the book", you can simplify it in at least TWO very common ways: (1)
 "the" becomes "duh" (as Hawaiians, Germans, and other would do)

 Steve, it is not Germans and Hawaians and uthers. It is aulmoast the hole
 world outside the english speeking world. In Europe, oanly 3 languages hav
 it, az far az i no: spanish, greek and icelandic. And oanly the spanish of
 Spain has it, and not eeven in the hole cuntry (catalan, andaluzian and
 galician dont hav it either). And outside of europe i cant remember havving
 herd it at aul.

 or (2)  "the" becomes "zuh" (as French people, Japanese, and others would do).
 So how do you decide WHICH simplification to use?  For me, the solution
 is just to try to represent the original sound, as closely as I can, and
 so "the" becomes "dhu" (or some such representation).

 i dont think germans say DE and the french ZE. I think sum peeple in enny
 cuntry wair thair is no TH try tu say it with D and uthers with Z. But i
 dont think it depends on the nationality.

 Of corse, if u want a hy-fidelity sistem tu reprezent the english sounds, u
 hav tu uze th or dh. If u want tu make it eezier for foreners (i gess moast
 of them dont say TH in THE or THAT ennyway, i dont say it ennyway (aultho i
 no i shood), since i actually just repeet wat english speekers say, and i
 cant heer the difrence between THAT and DAT, unless i lissen tu them very
 cairfully), u cood spel D az wel. I meen, if u considder that quite a few
 dialects hav D insted of DH (Northern england, blak americans, hawaiians,
 caribean peeple, eest africans - aul commonwelth peeple) and that the grate
 majority of english lerners dont say it, wich meens that probbably thair ar
 mor D-sayers than DH-sayers (of corse not the establishment of the english
 language), i think it is a quite vallid thing tu spel D.

 Just a sugestion. So this wood oficialize the D-pronunciation, and the
 DH-pronunciation wood be a variation. Anuther advantage wood be that a D is
 much cleerer for the ys than a TH. The mor consonants u hav in a word, the
 mor difficult it gets tu memmorize them.

 If u wer keeping TH, wel, it wood at leest hav the advantage that it is TS.
 At leest good for TS-addepts. But DH is neither good for TS-addepts nor for
 L2-lerners.

The Unifon augmented alphabet showing the
different sounds associated with the vowel letters

AT   AP   XRT   XL   CGO
UNIFON follows AKSES with respect to marking long vowels

The traditional system of vowel representation supported by Akses.

This chart needs to be corrected.  ummbrela, eicorn, iequalo, aivy, oaval, iunicorn
 

http://spanglish4.tripod.com/teachyourselfphonetics/

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Links

1.  What is AKSES?
     1.1 AKSES concept
     1.2 Characteristics of phonemic writing
 2.  How AKSES writing looks and works
     2.1 The 20 vowels and 24 consonants
     2.2 Examples of AKSES text
3.  How AKSES differs from spelled systems
     3.1 Traditional spelled orthography
     3.2 Reformed spelling
     3.3 Phonemic orthography (including AKSES)
4.  Why children read and write early and with little effort using 
AKSES
5.  Implementing AKSES
 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. AKSES incorporates a writing system consisting of reading and 
writing procedures similar to the natural procedures people use to speak and 
understand spoken words.  It visually represents words, precisely the 
major function of traditional spelled writing and is intended to replace 
it, first in government communications and education and ultimately 
throughout the nation.

  1.1 In their minds people store (remember) words as sequences of 
phonemes[ http://www.forcomm.net/allread/phonemedef.htm ].  As children 
they learn speech habits enabling them to express those words as speech 
sounds and to understand spoken words by interpreting speech sounds as 
mental phoneme sequences that match the phoneme/words in their minds. 
Linguists know that all English words are composed of a limited number of 
phonemes (about 40). The AKSES system identifies 44 commonly recognized 
phonemes of American English and represents each in writing as a unique 
letter or group of letters.  These AKSES phonemes and characters enable 
all who know English words to develop effective personal reading and 
writing habits quickly.

  1.2 Phonemic writing is much easier to master than traditional 
spelling because the basic system rules are simpler.  Each AKSES character 
represents 1 and only 1 phoneme.  To write, mark down the phonemic 
character(s) of a word in the same sequence your mind tells you to speak its 
sounds.  To read a word, match the written phoneme sequence against the 
phonemic patterns of vocabulary words in your memory.  If you do not 
find a word in your vocabulary, learn it by blending the phoneme names to 
create the word in memory and infer its meaning from context or look it 
up in an AKSES dictionary.
  English-speaking children learn AKSES writing much the same way they 
learn speech.  They learn 44 phonemic characters (not the 26 letters of 
the alphabet) and their names (not letter names). Most children 
consider this training fun and welcome it as a normal part of play activities 
shared with peers, parents, and caregivers. Soon they realize that 
phonemes pop up in words they hear and say.  When children learn written 
phonemics well enough to recognize all by name and shape, they are ready 
to read every word in their oral vocabularies when they want to. 
Learning to draw the characters gives them the skills needed to write every 
word they know when they decide to do so.  Soon after learning to talk, 
many children have a natural desire to read and write, but whether any 
specific child is motivated to make the effort as young as 2 or 3 or 
not until starting school, all children read and write all words in their 
oral vocabularies long before leaving first grade.
  If the AKSES system is adopted in the USA, people whose native 
language is not English will learn to speak, read, and write with AKSES 
orthography more quickly and efficiently than with spelled English.  They 
start by learning to articulate phonemic English sounds and to understand 
them when spoken.  These skills can be learned only from a person who 
already speaks understandable English.  No writing system provides the 
phonetic examples and individualized coaching a live teacher can. 
However, students who say all phonemic sounds of English (however 
imperfectly), are able to discriminate them by ear, and are able to name and 
write the AKSES characters are ready to read and write all English words in 
their vocabularies and to learn new words from printed text.  This kind 
of independent study greatly facilitates the progress of students who 
have no previous English language experience.
 

2  The AKSES writing system is based upon a set of phonemes and
characters with which all American English speakers can write their language 
from the words they already have in mind.  Phonemes are the mental 
elements of words in the mind.  Some are universal, especially those 
immortalized by the abecedary, children's illustrated alphabet books (A is for 
apple, etc.)  Children intuitively think them and recall the 
corresponding characters they have learned when undertaking to write rather than 
speak words.  Likewise, accomplished readers and writers can, when 
required will, decode phonemic words.  The AKSES character set is intended 
to make those processes instinctive.

  2.1 The 20 vowel phonemes and 24 consonant phonemes of AKSES are 
shown in Tables 1 and 2.    Phonemes were selected from many similar lists 
assembled by a number of authors during the 20th Century.  Characters 
chosen to represent them were also selected from diverse sources 
including pronunciation guides of dictionaries.  Because they are applied 
consistently, phonemes and phonemic characters make sense (seem right) to 
children whereas the correct spelling of many words does not.  Current 
readers and writers remember enough of the word-sense they learned as 
children to understand the logic of the AKSES phoneme selections and most 
characters assigned.  Details of selections are given elsewhere 
[http://www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws03.htm ].  The following paragraphs 
explain basic differences between spelling and AKSES:
  Consonants -- AKSES treats consonant phonemes about the same as 
traditional spelling except that it has no silent letters.  The following 
notable differences contribute to the consistency of AKSES:  "q" and "x" 
are not needed; "c" appears in AKSES only as part of digraph /ch/ as in 
/cherch/ ("church"); "g" is only hard /g/ as in /gag/ while "j" is soft 
as in /jorj/ ("george"); /ng/ in /sing/ and /tangk/ ("tank") differs 
from /n/ in /sin/ and /tan/; voiced "th" is /dh/ as in /dhat/ ("that"); 
and voiced "sh" is /zh/ as in /plezher/ ("pleasure").
  Vowels -- AKSES vowel character groups are short (unmarked letter), 
long (vowel letter marked with macron, underline, or following "e"), 
r-modified, and miscellaneous digraphs.  Except for the miscellaneous 
group, these characters are generally recognized by the speaking public as 
representing the corresponding phonemes.  AKSES adopts 2 conventions to 
distinguish the miscellaneous phonemes: 1)  /aw/ as in "awe" and "law" 
is distinguished from /o/ as in /sot/ and /on/; /ow/ and /oy/ are 
chosen over the competing spellings /ou/ and /oi/ as in "out," "owl," "oil," 
and "toy;" 2) The phonemes contrasting "moon" and "spool" from "look" 
and "book" are both commonly perceived as "oo," but AKSES retains /oo/ 
for /toon/ ("tune") and /fool/ and employs an invented character /uu/ to 
represent the phoneme in /buuk/ ("book") and /shuud/ ("should").

  2.2 Infants and young children are taught phonemic words by parents, 
peers, and other caregivers, but from the start they develop their own 
speech habits, continuously refining spoken words against the speech 
they hear from all sources.  Soon after learning to talk, children become 
aware that words can be expressed in writing.  Unfortunately, 
conventional writing springs from narrow scholarly traditions rather than from a 
contemporaneous universal source as does speech.  Except to a few elite 
scholars, educators, and literary academics, the obscure roots of the 
traditional writing system have no value; its complexities do not serve 
regular communication purposes.  In fact, the task of memorizing its 
spellings is at once the first and the most pervasive barrier to 
acquiring literacy American children encounter.
 

  Words came from all parts of the world and all epochs of history to 
be incorporated into the collective English public mind in phonemic 
form.  Individuals remember them in the form of the common phonemes we pass 
on to our children and they eventually will pass on to theirs.  A 
phonemic writing system permits every English speaker to express all 
vocabulary words in writing using mental processes in much the way they use 
them to express words in speech.  Several examples illustrate the 
phonemic regularity of AKSES writing.  Examples 1 - 3 are the 1st verse of 
Stevenson's "My Shadow" in traditional spelled text, in AKSES text with 
macrons, and in AKSES text with e-marked long vowels, respectively.

  Compare Example 1 with a phonemic version (Example 2) and observe 
several curious facts:  1) Few words are written identically in both 
systems;  2) Most phonemic elements of words are represented by the same 
letter in both systems.  Fact 1:  In counts of extensive running texts, an 
average of only about 1 of 6 words are written in AKSES text exactly as 
they are spelled.  Stated differently, less than 20% of  words children 
attempt to read and write have spellings that match the phonemic words 
they have in mind.  Fact 2: In counts of running AKSES text, ignoring 
silent letters, over 80% of phonemic elements of words are represented 
by the same character in both systems.

  Considered together, these facts explain 2 other observations that 
supporters of traditional spelling seem unwilling to consider:  1) Though 
all children have little trouble learning to encode and decode words 
written phonemically, those skills do not help them learn to encode and 
decode spelled words; to master conventional writing, they must memorize 
the spelling of all words because they do not know which 20% of 
phonemically written words are spelled correctly; 2) Any readers and writers 
who know conventional spelling have little difficulty reading and 
writing AKSES words; they directly associate over 80% of phonemic characters 
with corresponding spellings of words and instinctively know which 
characters replace the relatively few non-phonemic spellings.

  Children nurtured on phonemic characters instead of letters of the 
alphabet find learning to write as easy as learning to speak.  The 
phonemic words they remember as their oral vocabulary drive the phonemic 
characters they use to fashion written words in the same way they do the 
sounds of spoken words.  Which symbols they learn are not important; any 
that are reasonably distinctive and relatively easy to draw (such as 
Latin-style letters) are quite satisfactory.  Add macrons to vowel 
letters to distinguish long from short vowel phonemes (2nd example).  For 
fonts that do not provide macron letters, indicate long vowel phonemes 
with digraphs "ae," "ee," and so forth (3rd example).  The consistency 
with which AKSES writing represents children's oral vocabulary words 
permits them to learn to encode and decode written words with little more 
instruction than they needed learning to talk.

  Most linguists, if they permit themselves to express an opinion about 
English writing, solidly support the idea that traditional spelled 
orthography is superior to any other possible writing system.  Orthodox 
views of reports of rampant illiteracy are that they are grossly 
exaggerated, children fail to learn to read and write because they are not smart 
enough or have not been taught properly, or (a last-ditch argument) 
illiteracy is no real cause for alarm because, to a greater or lesser 
extent, it is a common problem with all languages.  A small but vocal 
minority suggests that English ought to be written according to their speech 
habits.  If a proponent speaks the British RP dialect, all should spell 
words based upon the actual phones he utters rather than on phonemic 
words he shares with all other English speakers.

  In the past 150 years, only a handful of authors have had the 
temerity to suggest that phonemic writing would move English from the most 
difficult to among the most-easily learned of European languages.  None 
have had the courage to state that adopting a phonemic program like AKSES 
would reduce the legendary difficulty of learning to read and write 
English, permitting all to become equally fluent in both spoken and 
written communication.  An expert on written languages, Florian Coulmas, 
noted that written language had its earliest emergence in ancient societies 
among religious and secular ruling groups, early equivalents of the 
monks and the scribes.  Its possession and use were usually enshrouded in 
mysticism or secrecy, an important element of social and political 
power.  Some of these attitudes seem to continue in modern times and 
perhaps explain the ferocity with which a modern-day linguistic priesthood 
defends the traditional writing system.  A brief quote, transliterated as 
Example 4, describes Coulmas's rather dispassionate view of the way 
linguists, educators, and the literary community lightly dismiss this 
important topic.

 3.  All major Western languages are alphabetical, meaning that they 
are written as words fashioned from character sets called alphabets. 
Written words usually correspond 1-for-1 to spoken words of the same 
language.  The basic word elements (phonemes) differ enough that each 
language uses similar, but somewhat different, alphabets.  However, these 
differences do not explain why most Europeans learn to read and write 
their native languages more easily than people who speak English.  To 
understand that anomaly, we first must realize that written English deviates 
more from the ideal than the writing of other European languages.

     3.1 In Great Britain, written English was always an instrument of 
religious, political, and economic power wielded by members of the 
educated and ruling classes.  That it should be difficult to learn and use 
correctly was not an important consideration in the early development 
of its final form.  The English-speaking public readily absorbed 
anglicized versions of foreign words into their speech vocabulary, but the 
academic and literary authorities created a written language primarily for 
their own use directly from the foreign spellings (or stylized versions 
of them) that did not always follow the common vernacular.
     Samuel Johnson published the first generally accepted Dictionary 
of the English Language in 1755.  In it he spelled words the way he 
considered "most English," that is, with the spellings he found in literary 
sources derived from the original languages (the presumed etymologies). 
At the time, most "properly educated" British educators, scholars, 
authors, and publishers agreed with this concept; their modern counterparts 
continue to support it unquestioningly.  The result is that a majority 
of written English words are divorced from real (oral) language, a 
peculiarly English characteristic that makes it the most difficult major 
modern European language to learn to read and write

     3.2  Modern spelling reform schemes either respell words or 
attempt to spell words as they are pronounced.  Neither approach provides a 
simple self-learning path for either speakers or non-speakers of 
English; neither relates written words directly to the way they are stored in 
the mind.  Respelling is nothing more than requiring certain 
traditionally-spelled words to be spelled differently, for one reason or another. 
A beginning reader/writer is given no more clue to the new spelling of 
a word he has in mind to write than if he wanted to write it in 
conventional spelling.  Speech sounds are not reliable guides to spelling 
either.  All people's speech habits differ, sometimes markedly, yet they 
understand nearly all words spoken by other English speakers.  A learner 
with speech habits significantly different from the authority proposing 
a new sound-based spelling system is unable to spell correctly except 
by memorizing the new letter patterns.  This is no easier than 
memorizing conventional spelling.

     3.3  Phonemic systems write words with characters that represent 
mental phonemes, the elemental components of words in people's minds. 
Writers convert thought-words into written words via their individual 
writing habits to form the characters, mental processes analogous to 
speech habits.  People are able to write all English words they know once 
they master these simple writing habits for forming common characters to 
represent the commonly-shared phonemes.  AKSES is an especially 
suitable phonemic system for English; its 44 characters are a carefully 
selected set of the most intuitive of the conventional spelling patterns. 
Thus, AKSES enables beginners to read and write English words directly 
from the words in their minds while allowing conventional readers and 
writers to use their intuitive phoneme sense.  Beginning readers acquire 
sight-reading words directly from printed text; experienced conventional 
readers easily acquire sight-reading habits based upon phoneme, not 
letter, patterns.

  4.  Infants begin acquiring language as soon as they interact with 
people around them.  Without specific schooling or training by 
professionals (unless you consider parents and peers linguistic professionals), 
they learn phonemic elements of their language naturally, use them to 
remember words, and develop mental processes (speech habits) for 
expressing mental words orally to be heard and understood by others.  At the 
same time they learn complementary mental processes for understanding 
words spoken by others.  Such communication is possible because children 
who speak the same language acquire approximately the same sets of 
mental phonemes, although their speech habits may be different.
     Soon after children master the essentials of speech (and while 
busily adding more words to oral vocabularies), they become aware of 
written language.  Often it so interests them that they pretend they can 
read and write.  They become especially motivated if exposed often to 
written text and its elements during play and entertainment.  Parents or 
caregivers sometimes seek to encourage early reading and writing skills 
by teaching children to recognize and say the letters of the alphabet. 
Unfortunately, recognizing and forming alphabet letters does not permit 
children to read and write many of the words they have already acquired 
for speech.  A word's spelling often does not correspond with its 
mental phoneme pattern.  In fact, that systematic relationship seems to 
occur only randomly in about one-sixth of spelled words in running text. 
For this reason, readers and writers usually memorize spelling patterns 
on a word-by-word basis.  Systematic teaching methods for spelled 
orthography differ from this traditional approach only in requiring written 
words to be memorized in groups that have similar spelling patterns. 
In other words, children cannot read and write spelled words in the 
spontaneous manner they previously were able to learn to speak them.
     AKSES provides a learning path based upon the systematic 
representation of phonemic words as they are stored for speech.  Parents and 
caregivers can encourage early reading and writing of AKSES text by 
teaching children to recognize and say the names of English phonemic 
characters.  This strategy actually works!  When children know the AKSES 
characters by name and can write them all, they are ready to learn to read 
and write all words in their oral vocabularies.  The mental processes to 
recall phonemic mental words from their phonemic visual images are as 
easy for children to master as to understand phonemic mental words from 
their sound patterns.  Likewise, mental processes children develop to 
write AKSES characters to represent words as they think of them are as 
easy as expressing them in speech.  In other words, children can learn 
to write and read words in the AKSES system as naturally as they have 
already learned to speak them.

5. Most people in America want their children (thus all children) to 
learn to read and write.  The emphasis on education by the President and 
many members of Congress is sufficient proof of this fact.  With AKSES, 
all children will achieve that goal. There are no reasons to doubt that 
the AKSES system allows all children to master reading and writing 
before they leave first grade. For the moment, set aside political 
questions that will convince our leaders to make the irrevocable decision to 
undertake this change.  That topic must be discussed elsewhere because it 
is complex and has little connection to learning and using English 
language.  With that simple decision behind them, they find steps to 
implementing AKSES obvious, simple to legislate, effective, and easy for the 
country to adopt in the natural course of events of the subsequent 10 
to 15 years:

5.1 Congress and the President - The government initiates and 
implements programs and services that benefit all Americans.  In this role, they 
plan and initiate the system for their own use and to enable educators 
to train all future citizens using this vastly improved literacy tool. 
The plan consists of 4 overlapping phases:  1) Legislate AKSES as a 
legal American writing system and declare it the future official writing 
system for Congress, the Executive branch, and their offices and 
agencies, 2) Commission, publish, and adopt an AKSES dictionary to be 
federally subsidized and distributed country-wide as an interim standard for 
American written English, 3) Adopt a time schedule for the integrated 
systematic conversion of all government written communications, forms, 
documents, and publications to AKSES text over a 4 to 8 year period, and 
4) Prepare and disseminate educational and promotional materials that 
explain AKSES and provide information, guidance, and suggested strategies 
for state and local governments, schools, businesses, parents, and 
other individuals.

5.2 State and local governments and agencies - States address their 
responsibilities in 3 overlapping phases:  1) Adopt AKSES as their legal 
writing system and phase it into their communications and operations in 
an integrated systematic way, 2) Begin immediate introduction of AKSES 
into school instruction and curricula (starting at the primary grade 
levels) with guidance and assistance from states' Departments of 
Education and teacher training institutions, 3) Disseminate promotional, 
educational, and instructional information to help businesses, individuals, 
private caregiving and literacy agencies, and parents become familiar 
with and learn AKSES reading and writing skills.

5.3 Individuals - Each individual makes a personal decision to learn 
AKSES reading and writing (and when) based upon their perceptions of the 
right thing to do.  Parents most likely will immediately start teaching 
their children to recognize and name phonemic characters, will acquire 
and use children's books with AKSES text, and will themselves learn to 
read and write it if only to be able to help their children with 
schoolwork.  Elementary school teachers and government employees will receive 
instruction to familiarize themselves with the system as needed.  Most 
other people will naturally pick up the skills they need by gradually 
encountering AKSES text when it appears in newspapers and advertising. 
People able to read and write spelled text can teach themselves to 
communicate with AKSES in a few months with little concerted effort.

5.4 Conclusions - The proven concept of a phonemic writing system is 
presented complete with a practical plan for its implementation.  It 
enables all American children to read and write English (as well as they 
speak it) by first grade.  The plan starts with a government sponsored 
standard orthography developed by dictionary publishers and used to 
ensure adoption of AKSES writing throughout federal agencies and offices and 
in their publications.  The immediate goal is to introduce AKSES into 
the educational systems of all 52 states as quickly as possible.  A 
growing population of young AKSES readers and writers will stimulate the 
development of publications that meet their needs while the necessity for 
businesses and individuals to communicate with the federal government 
will promote the spread of AKSES text within businesses, commerce, and 
the general public.

COMMENTS

Yes Brian.  Well said.  My point is that written English having the same advantages as written Spanish should be pushed by the linguistic and educational establishment for the purpose of eliminating the reading and writing problems caused by spelled orthography.

JimK
From: Brian Schend <derludwig@hotmail.com>
Date: Saturday, January 20, 2001 1:34 AM
 

>>The studies in the book seemed to show no problems with writing Spanish
and Italian (0 interest in spelling), few problems in German classrooms (very few discrepancies of phoneme to character), more concern with French (still not affecting significant numbers of students), but English was all alone in its own class (major problems with many students.)
>>
>>Might it be concluded that only with English is a special memory-aid
>>program like Phonics worth the effort of developing it for classroom use?
>

Jim Kanzelmeyer
James H. Kanzelmeyer   jimk@forcomm.net
5219 Webb St
Aliquippa PA    15001-4943
Phone:  (724) 378-4349    FAX:  (724) 203-9246

Believe it or not, I didn't adopt any particular system - that
AKSES uses the same symbol as some other system is either
by accident, or my accepting a random proposed solution
(such as dh for voiced th) from old literature because it was
as suitable as any. Specific comments below. 

Here is some of the text from the AKSES page I
am building. Thanks for the charts. I don't think there
were any surprises.  You follow the same conventions as
truespel http://www.unifon.org/truespel-short.html  EAR
for IR/eer is a little different I believe. [AKSES has 44
phonemes (not 40 sounds) so there are a number of
differences. 

Truespel claims to be only an alphabet, AKSES
is a program for transitioning from TO to a phonemic writing
system using the Roman alphabet as the basis for 44
phonemic characters (phonemics). 

AKSES has characters to represent "eng," /o/, /ue/, and /ear/ that seem to be absent from Truespel (truespel /y/+/ue/ would = /ue/). 

AKSES uses vowel+consonant digraphs /aw/, for /au/; /oy/ for /oi/; and
/ow/ for /ou/ to avoid confusions that might arise from the
additional vowel letters (it is clear the consonants are not and
could not be pronounced.) The r-modified /a/ is written as
/ar/ rather than a separate /aa/. 

AKSES uses /oo/ for the phoneme in "moon" and /uu/ for the phoneme in "foot." AKSES voiced "th" is /dh/. 

The 5 traditional long vowels are represented as Ve (note different use of /ue/ in Truespel) but, believing they would be more compact and probably more easily recognized as the macron form [and dh as th(overline)], these alternates are allowed. I view /i/+/r/ as a possible rendering for "ir" as a prefix in words like "irreverent." M-W suggests it to be /iREVrunt/. In "hear, chear, mere" the phoneme is quite different (an r-modified
phoneme). M-W does not hear the difference I hear between
the previous and "beer, byre, and wherry." 

Maybe I've been"blinkered" (Kates term) by TO into hearing /ee/+/r/ in
those. M-W doesn't recognize any of the latter, using /bir/ for
the 1st 2 and /hwerEE/ (they use e-macron for EE) for the
last.] All the digraphs have to be interpreted as unique
symbols not made up of the component letters. This makes
them a little harder to master. [But not much if you make
certain that "ea" and "ai" do not compete with /ear/ and /air/
as phonemic symbols. Kids pick right up on "bee, meet, feet,
and moo, moon" without a blink.] ir is easier than ear. To
learn TO you have to learn both forms. [As I pointed out,
TO uses both /i/+/r/ and /ir/ (by M-W symbols).]  er is
easier than air which is ire if each letter were pronounced.
ah-ee-r. This of course, is the way that some people
pronounce air. [I think M-W struggles to place "air," giving
the "ai" like /mop/ as first choice and combines it with -r /her/
as 2nd. Neither one comes close to us mid-Americans who
give it the distinct sound of a separate phoneme in my
suggested system. Of course an added bonus is that this
character provides a strong link between TO spelling and
AKSES writing for a large number of words.]  [The
description you have written is terrible! If you want to
present a fair description, use that given at
www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws02.htm . 

This link was included at the head of the table page I submitted. Presenting
the link only, labeled "description of AKSES" (with no added
text) is preferable to the distorted version below.] 

Except for the use of macrons. I have replaced them with
underlines since I have no font with macrons. Then note
says to replace the underscores with overbars or macrons.
[No need to do this if you use the ASCII-compatable
characters.]  There is the one sample of AKSES that you
provided. 

Akses  by James H. Kanzelmeyer 

AKSES is an attempt to match the phonemes in the
child's head with a mark or series of marks on a page.  It
is a little more than an i.t.a. 

[Hey Steve - where did you get the above? It is not correct. It is my belief that an initial teaching alphabet has no experimentally proved benefit. Why
would I waste time on something like that? AKSES is a writing language program not an alphabet.] 

By the first grade, chldren have already mastered the phonological 
stucture of their native language. 

[My observation is that all but the slowest have speech well enough in hand by age 4 to make the phoneme/character associations needed to begin
reading phonemic words. I anticipate they will begin to do so
with little trouble when they decide they want to. An
extremely important part of the AKSES program is that
children are NOT to be introduced to the Roman letters by
name (ay, bee. cee ....) until they have firmly established
phonemic connections by name with phonemic characters
(/a/, /ae/, /b(u)/, /ch/, etc.)] The easiest form of reading and
 writing would be in a notation that matched that structure.

  innstittut for multisensory edyuceyshan  illustration of
the use of macrons for long vowels  Once the skill of
matching marks on the page with abstract phonemes has 
been mastered, this skill can be transferred to more
complext reading and  writing tasks. 

[Steve, you know I think this incorrect theory doesn't make sense. It has been thoroughly blasted by failure in the classroom. After much
fanfare and initial glowing reports, even you admit that just
such a program, i.t.a., withered up and blew away.] 

Literacy in one medium can be quickly duplicated to another 
medium. At least that is the theory behind a bilingual
classroom or taking  the trouble to use an i.t.a. [Wrong
again. I do not believe this. In fact I believe it is the failure of
this theory that doomed i.t.a.from the start.] 

http://www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws03.htm [The above
link is to the page detailing selection of phonemes and
characters and should be so labeled. If you do this, the
passage that follows is obviously not needed and probably is
not actually accurate (to judge by similar comments you have
already made).] 

AKSES is almost identidcal to New Spelling except the macron has been used to mark  the long vowels instead of the [e] AEIOU = ae, ee, ie, oe, ue [I
supplied you with a character table with macron forms only
because I thought that was what you wanted. The digraphs
for long vowels, voiced th, and eng are standard for use in
ASCII-limited reproduction. Another major problem here.
New Spelling must be an alphabet for use with a revised
spelling system, makes this comparison (like the i.t.a.
comparison) suggest similarities that do not exist and gloss
over big differences in goals and methodology.] Macrons are
shown in the  graphic above but below they are changed
to underlines. 

[I do not understand the need to show IPA equivalence. AKSES is not intended to show pronunciation, quite the contrary, it is intended to be a writer's hard copy of the phonemic (mental) words that elicit a speaker's spoken words. It should never be used in speech training or speech
therapy. Speech sounds readers make are their own phonetic
responses to mental phonemes; written words are a hard
copy of the same phonemes, not speech sounds.] 

[By implication and example, the following demonstrate that you
either do not understand the purpose of AKSES, or you
wish to disparage it by giving readers a wrong impression of
its character and use. I do not believe you would do this. 

At any rate, AKSES should not be used to represent phonetic
sounds and attempts to compare AKSES phonemics and
IPA phonetic characters are invalid because AKSES
characters are a conventional representation of abstract
mental phonemes, not sounds.] 

20 vowels  comments 24 consonants  a = ax, at  ap = ape  aar= are    ej
= edge  el = eel    ic = itch  il = isle, rit-right, tim 
 o = ambig. aw/aa dog  od = ode  aw = awe    u =
up - lax midvowel  uu = hook  oo = hoop 
underbars need to be  replaced with overbars or 
macrons     n = ng   er = 3:r not air   air = er not
Ar   ear= ir not Er   eks = x [no x character]   t h =
dh   or   duz   hwich   plural=z 

[If the below is the example of AKSES text, neither of the versions following
the TO sentence is in AKSES.]  AKSES is a modified
version of traditional English writing. It uses 1 spelling, not
many,  for each phoneme.   AKSES iz u modif§d
verzhun uv trudishunul Iõglish r§tiõ. It ãzez 1 speliõ, not
men*, for  *ch fÇn*m.  AKSES iz u modifId verZun uv
trudishunul Inglish rItiN. it Uzez 1 speliN, not menE for 
IC fOnEm

[The next section is OK.]   Introduction, Index, and Links – www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws01.htm

  Words in a standard Dictionary are printed in an
AKSES dictionary using the 44  phonemic characters in
phoneme patterns corresponding to the way words  are
pronounced. Infants are taught names of phonemic
characters approximating the  sounds they produce in
spoken words. When children become interested  in
reading and writing, they do so almost automatically. They
read by blending names of  characters in the order they
appear in written words and write words  as the same
sequence of characters they would speak. They do not
memorize the spelling  of words, as they must with
traditional orthography.   Comparisons between
Traditional Orthography and AKSES – 

www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws07.htm   The complete
AKSES program –
www.forcomm.net/allread/Amws08.htm 

[The next paragraph describes the i.t.a.-like alphabet you imagine
AKSES to be. 

I have told you that AKSES is a lifelong writing system, replacing the traditional writing system that serves us so poorly. Even if you do not believe that it is politically possible for this to happen, you must give
recognition that it provides all children mastery of a fully functional English writing system at the beginning of their formal schooling. That i.t.a. did just that is a matter of record, even though it failed to be a quick route toTO.] 

This is a rationale for initially building literacy skills  in the child's
native language. It is easier for the child  and quicker. This
question has never been fully  answered - is the indirect
approach that seems more  involved, actually quicker than
starting someone on  the complex task.

[NO, NO, NO. WE have the answer already. IT DOES NOT WORK! We know that it will fare no better than i.t.a. if you later change back to TO.] 

This question is never asked in other areas of  endeavors. No one tries to teach algebra and calculus  before the student has mastered simple arithmatic  skills. It is probably possible but clearly not the quickest way to achieve mastery. We begin with the fundamentals and then build on them. 

[The above serves no purpose in this discussion. Traditional orthography and the skills required to master it are so different from any phonemic
orthography and associated language skills needed to read
and write them that transfer is predictably absent or
negligible.]

[Steve, I do not know that you intended to distort
AKSES by dismissing it as "just another initial teaching
alphabet." If it cannot be represented as an innovative
alternative to spelled phonetic orthographies and phonetic
alphabets because it does not involve the concepts of either
type of traditional linguistic thinking, I would rather not have it
included in your pages.]

JimK

Valerie wrote
But certnly for those who are redy and able, The age at
which reading can be incorporated into a child's thought
patterns most effectively occurs shortly after they have
speech all figured out (very young by today's standards). /
There is some old reserch which reported that future good
readers would have read 250,000 words before they are
eight. The proportion of children reaching that level today
must be much lower than it once was - even a comparison
the books they are given to read sujests they wd not hav
much of a chance now. 

I said, "It is a little more than an i.t.a." which you seem to have interpreted as AKSES is little more than an i.t.a.

My thought was that people looking at AKSES would dismiss it as just another minor variation on new spelling.

As you have said, AKSES may look like Pitman's ITA and New Spelling, but it is part of a different plan and a different interpretation of the problem of reading acquisition.

i.t.a. was supposed to be a gateway to t.o. and while it was not as effective as an analysis of the comparative learning tasks would suggest, it was an effective medium for teaching. 

There is 1/10 as much to learn in a consistent writing system which suggests that people should be able to learn it ten times as fast as t.o.  Instead, they learn a consistent system 2 to 3 times as fast.

I think that you would agree that i.t.a. was effective until transition time. In fact, children could learn to read and write i.t.a. twice as fast as they could the traditional system. The same would apply to any phonemic system including AKSES.

Native English speakers could acquire reading and writing system skills in i.t.a. equivalent to children learning Spanish and Italian.

The transition time was around the third grade and was dictated more by the lack of i.t.a. based reading materials than anything else. 

You have argued, unconvincingly, that i.t.a. training had no lasting impact on any students progress in reading in the traditional writing system. 

There are at least ten good empirical studies showing that i.t.a. did make a difference.  The skills learned in mastering i.t.a. were transferable to the more complex taks.

The most recent summary of i.t.a. research is found in an article by Downing reprinted in the Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society last month.

There were students who could master i.t.a. who could not master the more complex writing system. In one sense you could say that i.t.a. failed to prepare them for t.o. 

Downing argues that some students were moved to t.o. before they had mastered i.t.a. and in such cases one would not expect much in the way of skill transfer. Tey had acquired no skills to transfer

As I now understand, you want to avoid any suggestion that there are parallels between AKSES and i.t.a.  Eventually, you will get what you want.

I build pages by trail and error.  You are not the first to suggest that my initial effort misrepresented their message and included things that they considered irrelevant.

While it may take six months to perfect the page, I think the result will be better [in the sense of more meaningful to an outsider] than the page that you created on your own without outside criticism.

Eventually, all the references to i.t.a. will be removed.  The comparison to new spelling, however, seems unavoidable.

If you want do not be included in a website on alternative notations, you can opt out. Your notation is just one of 20 different notations that will eventually be part of the sit.

Perhaps you do not want to have AKSES reviewd in a comparative notation context.  If so, I can understand that.

The site has not been advertised and has not been indexed.  Other than the two of us, no one else is reading it. 

Please give me your final decision.  Do you want to be part of the comparative notation website or not?

If akses is an alternative to the traditional writing system and not an initial teaching alphabet, why all the effort to make it similar?

When you get to dictate the code, why not choose a convention more in line with international spelling or a complete new letter shape rather than an old letter with a diacritic such as a macron.

You say that ae ee ie oe ue or a marked version of these "long vowels" are just as good as any other convention. 

Are you saying that all conventions are equal?  You add as long as they are used consistently.  I have argued that this is the problem, [1] if they are used consistently, then many of the symbols become trigrafs or [2] new letter combination symbols have to be developed that have no relation to the component letters. 

I think that it is probably wrong to perpetuate the idea that [A] can be substituted for the [ey] in they without a serious consequence.  It can be done but it screws up the system and represents a rather careless use of scarce resources [vowel letters].

It is much easier to substitute ey for A than the other way around. 

--- jimk <jimk@forcomm.net> wrote:
> Steve,
> 
> I certainly cannot disagree with most that you
> wrote.  But, I do have
> different perceptions of details.  See below.
> 
> JimK
> 
> From: Steve Bett <stbett@yahoo.com>
> Date: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 7:34 PM
> 
> 
> >Jim
> >
> >original thread [only w'n speling p'r w'rd]
> >
> >The problem with macrons is not the fact that some
> >dictionaries use them.  The problem is that so few
> >fonts include them:  accents, circumflexes, and
> >umlauts yes, macrons no.
> 
> 
> I did not state my preference for macron (overline)
> forms based upon their
> availability or lack of it.  I suspect that if AKSES
> were to be adopted for
> teaching all children in the USA, the necessary
> technology of keyboards and
> fonts would appear when needed, not as a miracle but
> because our economic
> system wold move to supply the needed inovation and
> manufacture.
> 
> The early work to develop AKSES was in ASCII-limited
> printing systems, I did
> not even consider modified characters and digraphs
> for the "long" vowel
> phonemes were the first selection and are (to my
> mind) perfectly
> satisfactory alternates.  My point to Gus was that
> the characters I chose,
> ae, ee, ie, oe, and ue, are as good as any
> "spellings"
> in English or any other language for those English
> phonemes.  As long as
> they are used consistently in every word in which
> they occur, they are not
> more of a problem for ESL students to learn and use
> than for English
> speakers.
> 
> >I don't think that any 5 year old has any
> particular
> >bias as to how their phonological knowledge of
> speech
> >should be put down on paper.
> 
> Obviously, they do not know they have and use
> phonological knowledge, but
> they do know that what we force them to read and
> write doesn't match the
> words they speak and understand from everyone else's
> speech.
> 
>  Any system that marks
> >sound segments about the same as they do in speech
> >will do. This means that systems that do not have
> >enough symbols or which combine symbols in some
> >irregular way are inferior to those that don't.
> 
> 
> Right on, I think.  That is, any symbol set (even
> those including a few
> multigraphs) will work approximately equally well if
> it matches (in an
> easily identifiable manner) the phoneme set learners
> share with their speech
> community and it is used in a phonemically regular
> orthography.
> 
> >
> >I think this group is evenly split between those who
> >want to follow the linguists and those who want to
> >follow their 3rd grade teacher.
> 
> 
> I guess I constitute the sole member (Taam might
> claim partial membership)
> of a 3rd group, one that bases its orthography upon
> generally perceived
> phonemes rather than sounds perceived by individual
> phoneticists.  I'm not
> sure you would get many to admit rabid support for
> TO on its merits; some
> have loyalty to TO by habit perhaps, but not because
> it is simplest or most
> easily taught.
> 
> >
> >Scragg blames the 17th and 18th century
> schoolmasters
> >for the shifted system that Dr. Kelley calls "a big
> >lie."  Before they came along, the model was Latin
> and
> >people would talk about how the vernacular was not
> in
> >keeping with the Latin sound values.  This is the
> >basis by which some scholars [e.g., Zachrissen]
> have
> >been able to chronicle the shifts in pronunciation.
> 
> 
> The present classifications of speech sounds may
> well be historically wrong.
> But
> whether right or wrong, they do not affect choice of
> phonemes and
> the symbols selected to represent them unless (as
> most linguists seem to
> insist) words must be rendered into speech before
> being recorded as written
> words.  With TO they are rendered into "spellingese"
> for writing and
> visually matched with a spelling-based look-up table
> for reading, explaining
> the high-level intellectual activities required by
> the traditional spelling
> system.  Most "reformed spelling" would not be
> significantly better for
> learners because some form of the same processes are
> still required for
> mastering them.
> 
> If words are listed in a lexicon by phonemic
> writing, then those words
> become the standard for reproduction as both spoken
> and written words,  much
> simpler processes (attested to by the ease with
> which children learn to talk
> and pick up i.t.a.)  In contrast with a respelled
> dictionary, a phonemic
> lexicon is assembled by lexicographers from
> generally perceived phonemic
> words we all carry around in our heads, just as
> Johnson claimed he assembled
> his dictionary from the generally perceived "correct
> spellings" of
> his authorities.
> 
> >
> >After 12 years of schooling consistent with E = ee
> it is difficult to switch to i = ee.  Those exposed to
> >Latin or Spanish don't have this trouble.
> 
> 
>  But why should WE change?  The problem is not with
> the symbol used.  The phonemes /i/ or /ee/ are not perceived the same by
> speakers of romance languages and English.  Look at the trouble Ze is
> having with both the vowel
> and consonant phonemes of "ing."  It is typical for
> them to hear /i/ as /ee/
> and to change the "ng" to /n'/.  Native speakers
> have the reverse problem,
> telling the difference between "seen" and "sing"
> when spoken with such an
> accent.  Those with romance language background will
> swear that both words
> we hear as /seen/ are spoken to represent either
> "sing" or "seen" and they
> would be, we just cannot detect the difference.
> 
> >
> >If we had preference studies for different
> >transcriptions.
> >
> >I  think this iz  eezy      would win over
> >I  think this  is  e'zy      fastrspel
> >Y  TiNk  Dis   iz  Ezy       new unifon keyboard
> >Ay think thiss izz izy       spanglish   Ai think dhiss izz iezy
> >Ai thiqk dhis  iz  iizy.     nu romaji
> >
> >Giv  me  a brek  tuday       fastrspel
> >Giv  me  a braik tooday      RITEspel
> >giv  mE  c brAk  tUdA        new unifon keyboard
> >Givv mi  a breyk tudey       spanglish
> >giv  mii a breik tudei       nu romaji
> >
> >For some, this would be evidence of the superiority
> of
> >the more traditional system of notation.  However,
> >when compared to T.O. none of the alternative
> system
> >would be rated very high.
> 
> Which tells us that no other system will even be
> considered unless it
> carries with it a very high social and economic
> benefit. 

Jim wrote:
> There still is the problem that your thinking is
> from the phonetician's point of view, that reading
> and writing must involve conversion from thought to
> speech and the reverse, speech before thought.  TO
> doesn't do that and neither does AKSES.  None of us
> read or write that way, at least until we begin
> getting senile enough to start talking to ourselves.
> 
> I've looked at the beginning of the document and
> have made a few suggestions to get your reactions. 
> If you want to edit the actual language, fine, but I
> would like references to speech sounds to disappear
> (as well as terms such as phonograms or even
> phonemes used as the equivalent of allophones).
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