Did you know that Noah Webster invented the six written syllable types so people could understand how he wrote his pronunciation key in his dictionary? Until Noah Webster set out to standardize the pronunciation of American English in an attempt to eliminate dialectal differences, IPA symbols were used in dictionaries to indicate pronunciation. Webster also set out to reform American English spelling, but most of his suggested changes didn’t hold up, and for good reason. The English writing system isn’t speech written down. We need all of the various options to spell a phoneme so we can tell the difference between words when we see them on a page. For example, Webster proposed that spellings with <ea> spelling /i/ all be spelled with <ee> and that would give us *<beech> instead of <beach> and *<pleese> instead of <please>. Already, we can see why this didn’t work as we already have “beech” trees, and <ee> would be useless in <pleasant> and <pleasure>. The <please> family needs a digraph that can spell different phonemes.
Webster was unsuccessful in establishing a standard pronunciation, and his attempt to force written English into being a syllabary was also unsuccessful. Japanese and Cherokee have writing systems that are syllabaries, English does not. However, Webster’s dictionaries had such powerful influence that his pronunciation key and his invented syllable types made it into the English educational system and instructional curriculums and programs used to teach children to read and spell. What is surprising is that his invented syllabary system went unchecked until 2020. Kearns, the first researcher to closely examine the consistency of the invented syllable types, found that some are not consistent enough even to be useful and posed the question is they were worth the time and effort at all ( Kearns,2020). They add to the cognitive load of children and those with lower working memory and /or processing speed are burdened with additional information that is true a small percentage of the time. Written syllable types also mask the true structure of words adding a layer of difficulty for learners to dig through. For example if you teach a child to break a word into the syllables – sep/a/ra/tion- it masks the true structure <se + pare + ate + ion—> separation> or sel/fish instead of <self + ish—> selfish>. Written syllable types are so contrived they confuse the adults that try to use them.
Webster fought against the inherent structure of English spellings, but those strong Latin, Greek, and Old English roots prevailed. Spelling and writing’s primary job is to convey meaning; representing speech comes second. When honestly analyzing spellings, the only way to divide them is into structural units called morphemes.Morphemes are the English writing system’s more concrete building blocks. Some of them hold meaning, and some of them mark grammar . One morpheme, the connecting vowel letter (CVL), is frequently missed by programs and curriculums that young learners have fun discovering and learning about.
I recently had one child notice a CVL in a matrix he requested. He asked, “What is that < i > doing in the box all by itself!” and giggled a bit. When I showed him how the CVL worked in the spelling, his response was, “Woah, cool. “ This is a child with a profound language and literacy disorder but his intellect is perfectly intact. He learns these more concrete elements and the conventions of English spelling and retains them. He struggles with the more abstract elements of orthography. Three and four-letter words are next to impossible for him, but he generates possible suffixes to include in a family like a whiz. He is getting there slowly but surely with the phonology and grapheme-phoneme correspondence, but his success with the more concrete and procedural aspects of SWI has given him the confidence to keep going.
Webster would have done great service to the U.S. had he studied orthography rather than trying to reinvent a written language according to his narrow-minded standards. John Lawler, a professor at The University of Michigan, wrote, “Webster’s pre-steampunk notation system is the one nobody understands or learns because it makes no sense. Therefore, it is perfect for the American dictionary. Merriam-Webster has published Kenyon & Knott’s Pronunciation Dictionary of American English, with excellent IPA-based pronunciation, since the 1950s. Still, they continue not to use it anywhere else, for fear Americans might learn something. It’s like the metric system, “not invented here.”
He goes on to say, “Therefore, the rule I suggest to any English learner: DON’T use a monolingual dictionary published in the U.S. Make sure the pronunciations are in IPA symbols. If you see anything else, don’t trust that book.”
Janus Bahs Jacquet, a linguist, goes on to say, “IPA comes in varying degrees of broadness and fineness, and for dictionary purposes, broad IPA for English would be so much more efficient than Webster’s spaghetti.”
The IPA symbols are used worldwide to write down speech sounds. As a speech-language pathologist, I learned them as part of my undergraduate and graduate education to work with accent modification and articulation disorders. It was a welcome discovery that they could also be used in literacy instruction using Structured Word Inquiry. IPA symbols are used in question four to talk about the jobs of the graphemes. Here is an example of using IPA symbols to teach GPC:
Many programs and curriculums in education use letters to write down sounds. Using letters to write down pronunciation is confusing for me, so I can imagine how confusing it is for learners who struggle to learn to read and spell. < ee > is a vowel digraph, not a phoneme, the phoneme is /i/. <oo> is also a vowel digraph that can spell more than one phoneme /u/ and /ʊ/. No confusion there! When we see the slash brackets we know we are talking about a phoneme and not a grapheme . The only vowel phonemes that use two symbols together are diphthongs. For example, the <o> in “both,” is written /oʊ/ and the <a> in “face,” is written /eɪ/. There are two phones in these phonemes that glide together.
Spelling is not always a good pronunciation guide – but the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a reliable system that shows you exactly which sounds are in each word.
The IPA symbols spell one phoneme only. There is a 1:1 symbol-sound correspondence that is easy to read once the symbols are learned. When you use IPA symbols, you don’t have to guess how a word is pronounced. You can also transcribe words according to your dialect.
The only IPA symbol that made it into mainstream education was the schwa. It is so prevalent curriculum designers had no choice! Consider the word “banana.” The first and last < a > are spelling schwa. Because English is a stress-timed language ( rather than syllable-timed), schwa pops up all over the place. All vowels in unstressed syllables spell schwa. You can’t sound them out by guessing! Every vowel and vowel digraph can be reduced to schwa. The <ai> in “mountain,” the <au> in “authority,” and the <ou> in “limousine,” are all spelling schwa. So when children are learning a new word they need to hear the word spoken and know how to use it before they can learn to read or spell it. This is especially true for dyslexic children.
Adopting IPA symbols in literacy instruction and education would be a logical choice for anyone working with children. It would bring education closer to closing the gap for learners who speak a non-standard dialect. It would give dyslexic learners a way to make sense of the most abstract piece of orthography, grapheme-phoneme correspondence, and help all English speakers make sense of the English writing system. The English as a second language teaching community has long known this and has used IPA symbols successfully for decades, so maybe it is time for the rest of us to do as well.
Cover Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-tassel-159581/
