Resources required to develop the instrument include a linguist/phonetician, a graphic artist, and one or more native speakers, preferably educators with literacy-teaching experience and with good knowledge of local dialects.
Resources for field tests, refinement, and prototype deployments and followup surveys include the ongoing participation of the above individuals along with assistance from two to five local people such as students or door-to-door salespeople who can be inexpensively employed for wide-ranging travel and trained for careful implementation of the delivery protocol, as well as for pre-delivery and followup testing and careful data collection.
The lead in this project is Thomas C. Veatch (tv@sprex.com). His Ph.D. is in Linguistics, from the University of Pennsyvania; he was briefly a professor at Stanford University teaching statistics for linguists, phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics. Thereafter entering the business world, he founded and now works in various capacities for Sprex, Inc. On a visit to India in January 1998, he learned that the Tamil language has no voicing distinction (among non-geminate consonants) and therefore its consonant phonology can be represented in a two dimensional table representing the place and manner of articulation. This insight formed the basis of this concept for learning an alphabet. Dr. Veatch is a competent speaker of Hindi (trained by the American Institute of Indian Studies in the mid-80's in New Delhi), and gets around comfortably in India (see tomveatch.com/else/tv/india.report.php for some travel writing).
Local primary school teachers and other native speaker language informants can be recruited through a variety of personal and internet-based contacts, including contacts at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, at the Christian Medical Center in Vellore, linguists specializing in Tamil at the University of Pennsylvania, and expatriate Tamils in the U.S. Many of the best contacts will be made in the planned visit to India, but once we learn of your interest in pursuing this to the next stage, we will obtain suitable declarations of support and commitment to participate from the needed resources. We have found that people are generally eager to help.
Will you help us? Please contact the PI, Tom Veatch, at tv@sprex.com, or 206-367-7741 and offer your support, so that many who hunger for knowledge can finally be given what they need.