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Initial Teaching Alphabet


The Initial Teaching Alphabet (I.T.A. or i.t.a.) is a variant of the Latin alphabet developed by Sir James Pitman (the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of a system of shorthand) in the early 1960s. It was not intended to be a strictly phonetic transcription of English sounds, or a spelling reform for English as such, but instead a practical simplified writing system which could be used to teach English-speaking children to read more easily than can be done with traditional orthography. After children had learned to read using I.T.A., they would then eventually move on to learn standard English spelling. Although it achieved a certain degree of popularity in the 1960s, it has fallen into disuse.

The I.T.A. originally had 43 symbols, which was expanded to 44, then 45. Each symbol predominantly represented a single English sound (including affricates and diphthongs), but there were complications due to the desire to avoid making the I.T.A. needlessly different from standard English spelling (which would make the transition from the I.T.A. to standard spelling more difficult), and in order to neutrally represent several English pronunciations or dialects. In particular, there was no separate I.T.A. symbol for the English unstressed schwa sound [ə], and schwa was written with the same letters used to write full vowel sounds. There were also several different ways of writing unstressed [ɪ]/[i] and consonants palatalized to [tʃ], [dʒ], [ʃ], [ʒ] by suffixes. Consonants written by double letters or "ck", "tch" etc. sequences in standard spelling were written with multiple symbols in I.T.A.

The I.T.A. symbol set includes joined letters (typographical ligatures) to replace the two-letter digraphs "wh", "sh", and "ch" of conventional writing, and also ligatures for most of the long vowels. There are two distinct ligatures for the voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds in English, and a special merged letter for "ng". There is a variant of the "r" to end syllables, which is silent in non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation but not in rhotic accents like General American and Scots English (this was the 44th symbol added to the I.T.A.).


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