Biodata for Tom Veatch

His first language was Thai, as his parents brought him to live in Bangkok as an infant. His degrees are from Stanford University (B.A. Linguistics and Cognitive Science) and University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. Linguistics, thesis title "English Vowels").

His four careers, so far, include academic teaching as Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford through 1993, the technology business in sales and software through 2005, a career as a union plumber in Seattle, and presently landlord for a few rentals during retirement.

Dr. Veatch has wide interests including everything linguistic especially phonetics, business, computer science, and human emotion as an academic subject. He is known for writing the currently dominant Theory of Humor.

Tom has written more than 150 essays on various subjects at his website, TomVeatch.com, which also has some language related software services.

Presently he is studying Sanskrit at University of Washington, where the Sanskrit program is continuous for more than 100 years.

Tom is focussed currently on basic phonetic literacy. According to his innovation, phonetics can be taught without academic requirements or even any particular language by using phonetic charts with line-drawings instead of Latin words. TomVeatch.com/read has such a chart. If successful, anyone over 5 years old can learn a phonetic script such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, with 1-to-1 relationship between sounds and letters, in a short time. Conveniently Roman letter (English) signage can be read usefully by a person who reads/writes IPA; usefully but imperfectly since English spelling is only 80-90% phonetic. He has come to India to create Teacher Teachers of this method of offering literacy to everyone.

On the personal side, Tom has been doing Siddha Yoga sadhana for 40 years, has been to India 7 times, speaks bad Hindi, and plays table tennis.

Contact details.