1) Why watch this?
  • Meaningful
  • Gift to share
  • A real, empowering, new skill
2) Who?
  • 700M illiterate
  • Especially
    • poor
    • uneducated (e.g. old)
    • women
  • 3000 unwritten languages
3)
  • Globally 10%
  • Benefax: gift that multiplies your life's value
4) How?
  • Make teacher-teachers
  • Viral
5) Teach the easy path
  • build on existing knowledge: phonetics
  • 1 sound 1 letter: avoid unnecessary complexity
6) IPA
  • follows 1 sound 1 letter
  • full coverage: all sounds all languages
  • To know your own humanity
7) Why now?

     Because of an Innovation

  • Pictures as labels
  • Draw each feature
  • Line drawings are copyable.
8) Pictures are to:
  • learn
  • explain
  • remember
  • are universal
Now we can, so now we must.
9) Required:
  • Human
  • With Mouth
  • Self-perception
  • Curiosity
Not required:
  • No particular language
  • Any education level
10) A phonetic chart is a theory:
  • Features are real
  • Features combine
  • Features are re-used
C: sound with place
V: sound without place

A vowel is like a horn, the whole tube resonates together.

A consonant pinches the tube at some place audibly.

 

11) Benefits(1)
  • No more unwritten languages
  • kids speaking non-school languages get traction
    • write own language
    • write/learn the other
    • teachers help better
12) Benefits(2)
  • Curiosity up
  • negative judgment down
  • accuracy up
  • describe & understand better
  • capability up
  • intellectual power up
13) Benefits(3)
  • IPA Accelerates learning
    • Quickly achieve full success in a complete form of literacy.
    • Script problems written in IPA are no longer problems
  • A firm foundation:
    • once you know you really know
    • forms are unambiguously pronounceable.
14) Use to describe everything.
  • words, irregularities, rules
  • Signs 80% English in India,
  • 85% of English letters are IPA plus a few rules.
15) English to IPA consonant rules
  • h-decoding: { s,c,t,p } h -> { š, č, θ|ð, f }
  • Softening: "c" -> s /_{i,e} else -> k
  • degemination: CC->C
16) English to IPA Vowel Rules
  • Length-shift (silent e): VCe->V:C
  • Great Vowel Shift: a: -> e: -> i: -> ay, o: -> u: "ou" -> aw
17) Wikipedia Quote:
  • English Phonotypic Alphabet. In the 1852-1853 annual report of the Waltham's School Committee, the chairman Reverend Thomas Hill reported the effect of Phonotypy on the 800 pupils in the ten schools:

    "It has been proved in repeated experiment that if a child upon his first learning his letters is taught the Phonetic Alphabet and is confined to Phonetic Books for the first 6-8 months of schooling, he will at the end of the first year's schooling read common print and spell in common spelling better than children will ordinarily do at the end of four or five years' instruction." (boldface added)

Phonotypy was abandoned in Waltham after Hill's departure. I consider that a mixture of methods makes significance of letters uncertain as they have different and unpredictable phonetic meanings in different approaches, and particularly, any that may incliude English orthography and its pitfalls and betrayals. When mixed in they slow or prevent the solidification of intellectual foundations that a 1 letter to 1 sound phonetic approach offers, thus reducing the approach's effectiveness. Hence note the boldface point in the above paragraph.

Solution: teach IPA and surround phonetic writing with the identifying []'s, so students know what they are looking at, when to trust and when to mistrust. Then they are protected from every admixture of confusion.

18) Waltham's Transition Reader explains: The easiest and quickest way to learn Roman script (English) reading is to learn phonetic reading first. Those who have not been taught to read phonetically find it very difficult to learn Roman script reading.
17) Wikipedia Quote: