xq_icebreaker

... English is one of the most difficult languages to learn to read and write. Unlike Spanish or Welsh, where letters have consistent sound values, English is a patchwork of linguistic inheritances. Its roughly 44 phonemes – the distinct sounds that make up speech – can each be spelt multiple ways. The long “i” sound alone, as in “eye”, has more than 20 possible spellings. And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of “through”, “though” and “thought”.

It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand – identified as the single greatest obstacle for young readers. In a 1953 parliamentary debate, he argued that it is our “illogical and ridiculous spelling” which is the “chief handicap” that leads many children to stumble with reading, with lasting consequences for their education. His proposed solution, launched six years later, was radical: to completely reimagine the alphabet.

The result was ITA: 44 characters, each representing a distinct sound, designed to bypass the chaos of traditional English and teach children to read, and fast. Among the host of strange new letters were a backwards “z”, an “n” with a “g” inside, a backwards “t” conjoined with an “h”, a bloated “w” with an “o” in the middle. Sentences in ITA were all written in lower case.

By 1966, 140 of the 158 UK education authorities taught ITA in at least one of their schools. The new alphabet was not intended as a permanent replacement for the existing one: the aim was to teach children to read quickly, with the promise they would transition “seamlessly” into the standard alphabet by the age of seven or eight. But often, that seamless transition never quite happened.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/06/1960s-schools-experiment-created-new-alphabet-thousands-children-unable-to-spell