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ITA was a 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of UK children unable to spell
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- Authors
- Emma Loffhagen
- Published
- Jul 6 2025
- Word count
- 2592 words
As the article says, this doesn't seem too far off the current phonics system, except with some different glyphs. And also as the article says, thousands of people can't spell regardless of how they were taught to read. There's a reason spellcheckers exist.
My kid is just getting into Key Stage 1 (Grade 1+ in the US, I think) now and is a pretty good reader. They can figure out long words they've never seen before fairly easily because phonics is pretty good at giving them the tools to do that. But their speling is atroshus. The phonemes thay right are ushooaly korekt, it's just a crapshoot on the grapheme used. The skools focus on the reeding first and wurk on spelling latr. Which is entirely understandable, frankly.
This is all the fault of English. there are 20+ vowel sounds in spoken English but only five and a half vowels in the alphabet. Half our words are Germanic, half of them are Brittonic, half of them are Romantic and the remaining half come from anywhere else any spare vocabulary was lying around. Sprinkle some grammar at random and inconsistently and it's no wonder it's confusing and difficult to learn, because English is a whole hoard of linguistic raccoons fighting in a trench coat. Ultimately any attempts to simplify English reading or writing will struggle because you always end up having to unsimplify it later.
Whether phonics (or even ITA) is the right thing to mandate for national use is a different question and the answer is probably "sort of, maybe, sometimes" - because every kid learns differently. Some kids don't need a system, they can just pick up reading like they learn to walk. Some kids thrive with phonics. Some need a different approach. The answer is, as always, to fund schools better and allow teachers more autonomy because the people spending multiple hours a day on the ground with the kids are usually the people best placed to decide what's best for their educational needs.
I swear I'm not trying to "well akshually" on you, but it's one of my favorite weirdnesses of English that virtually no trace of Brittonic remains, in either the vocabulary or grammar.
You'd expect that a fair amount of a language displaced through conquest would survive, but that's just not the case for English vis-a-vis Brittonic (we'll set aside considering Welsh for now; it's OK, they're used to it). Most of the vocabulary derived from Celtic languages was adopted by Romans or their successors and comes down to us through French rather than directly from the Celtic Brittons, and what Celtic grammar English has picked up seems to have mostly come through contact with Scottish or Irish Gaelic centuries after the Anglo-Saxon invasions.
The Anglo-Saxon invaders were pretty ruthless in suppressing the native language and culture, even to the point where very little Latin in modern English derives from the Roman occupation of Britannia, outside of some place names. Nearly all of the Latin-derived words we use came to us through Norman French, Ecclesiastical Latin, or during the resurgence of Classical influence during the Renaissance.
It's even weirder when you consider that a similar thing happened several hundred years later to English, and nearly the opposite result happened: Old English remains the core of vocabulary and grammar for Modern English despite the country having been invaded by Norse-flavored French speakers. They were two very different kinds of invasion though, so you'd expect different outcomes, but it's weird all the same.
Huh, that is really interesting, thanks! Always happy to be akshuallied by fascinating facts :)
Isn’t that what happened in this case?
That is the case, but that was well before the National Curriculum was created. These days that's not how teaching is done in the UK. Teachers teach kids to read using one of a handful of government-approved phonics schemes.
I'm not really against the basic concept, it does matter that education in one part of the country is as comprehensive as elsewhere and that kids don't miss out on stuff because their teacher hates topic X or whatever - but it could do with a little more flexibility here and there. We were told that, officially, we were supposed to stick to reading with The Kid using books from the particular reading scheme their school uses. Unofficially the staff said any reading is good reading, please find any books they enjoy and enjoy them together as much as possible.
The problem I always notice with these types of proposed systems that attempt to reform english orthography is that they always assume a default or "standard" accent and base the vowel characters off of those, but vowel sounds vary wildly in english based on what regional accent you have - and the changes aren't always uniform - so anyone who doesn't speak whatever the chosen as the "standard" dialect are going to have to learn how to spell arbitrarily anyways because the vowel characters won't match their pronunciation.
For example, in the short sample from little boy blue, they have the words "blue", "your", and "looks" all spelled with the same vowel character, something like: "blω", "yωr", "lωks". But those vowels aren't pronounced the same in my southern american accent - in fact they're not all that similar. For me it would be more like "blɵu̯", "jɝr", and "lʊ̈k", and I know there would be other significant examples - for example, differences in accents with the "caught-cot" merger vs without.
This is absolutely true, and it's one of the major reasons why it would be difficult to make a coherent system for English without restricting it to certain dialects. Even only attempting to cover American English is fraught when it comes to vowels, and there's a lot more variation there in the UK, to say nothing of other countries.
This is a common objection to spelling reforms but I've always felt it's a total red herring.
Firstly, spelling differences already exist between variants of English, so it's not without precedent. We already teach our children the spelling of our own culture and then gradually introduce the minor differences that exist across the globe. With a phonetic reform, at least those differences would actually tell you about a real difference in pronunciation, unlike color/colour which is just pointless.
Secondly, most other languages manage to create a vastly more logical and consistent writing system than English’s despite the existence of dialects. The ridiculous complexity of English spelling isn't required just because of minor variations like the cot/caught merger or the presence or absence of rhoticity.
I don't think accents/dialects are the real reason for the pushback against spelling reform.
The real reason for pushback against reforms is definitely the sheer amount of inconvenience and labor involved in the process of such a dramatic change -- the sheer inertia of the current system makes it super impractical. Think of the cost of reprinting books alone. But the issues with dialects absolutely exist and further complicate the issue.
I've got a linguistics background and have tried to design my own English spelling reform for fun in my free time, and even within clusters of similar dialects like American English, it is not really possible to create a writing system that doesn't choose a particular variety to privilege as the "right" one, at least not unless you allow for really granular regional variation in the writing system. Do you write "cot" and "caught" with the same vowel symbol or two different ones? Whichever one you choose, it'll be wrong for a huge fraction of American English speakers. Tons of choices like this add up to a real difficulty in constructing a system that's internally consistent and doesn't require speakers to memorize a bunch of distinctions that their dialect doesn't make but some others do.
And if we look in a larger worldwide context, I think you dramatically underestimate how much larger the differences between even just American and British spelling would need to be if reformed in a way that reflects the underlying phonetic differences -- there are a lot of big differences in the phonologies there that are currently obscured by our current incredibly similar spelling systems. Adoption of new spelling systems that better reflect the phonologies of these Englishes better would probably result in two writing systems that are barely mutually intelligible and need to be learned independently of one another. It would not be possible for someone who only learned to read "American" to pick up a book published in the UK and read it without major issue as it currently is. American and British phonology are simply too different for that to work. It's absolutely possible to make a system using the Latin alphabet that better phonetically represents an English dialect, but in doing so you have to pick one dialect and force everyone else to memorize a ton of stuff just like they have to with our current English spelling.
The other languages you're thinking of with one more consistent writing system are all doing this -- they pick one way of speaking as the one that gets turned into writing, and people whose native dialects differ from that standard have to memorize how to write in a dialect that isn't their own. Very often the written language becomes more and more divorced from the spoken language over time, and learning to use the written language properly becomes the purview of standardized education. In many places this eventually goes so far that the language people write is a completely different one from what they speak.
There are contexts in which it's vitally important to be able to accurately transcribe the actual sounds being made more clearly than one can do with standard English spelling. But those of us who need to do that already have tools like the IPA that are more than adequate for that purpose.
I am fully aware of everything you said. I think you’re falling pray to a false binary choice: either make it completely 100% phonetic, or keep the current atrocity. I think English spelling could be significantly improved without making it 100% phonetic and without making US/UK spelling mutually unintelligible. I mentioned other languages precisely because they did exactly this: standardize on one dialect, sometimes an artificial one, and still end up with a vastly more useful and sensible spelling than English, even for people who speak a different dialect.
The issue described in your first paragraph is the only real reason that makes sense, and of course I’m aware of it too. Despite, it still seems reasonable that small changes could be made without reprinting everything. It should be acceptable to just start writing epitomy instead of epitome and not have everyone decry you for illiteracy. I think this kind of snobbish superiority is the main reason why the spelling is so unbelievably outdated in the first place.
I think the problem is that an actual overhaul of the system that makes things better to any significant degree (and I do agree that it is definitely possible to have something better than the current system, even if it requires a lot of compromises), the changes would have to be more substantial than this. Very subtle changes to spelling can happen over time, but they're not going to fix the fundamental difficulty in learning to write English imo.
Some people created dictionaries and "standardized" spelling in English and that's why, IMO, it's "outdated" since in times before that you just spelled things the way you wanted. And you still can since no one is the officiator of English, not even American English or British English, or Indian English, etc.
Any standardized spelling is prone to the same snobbery, if "epitome" and epitomee and epitomy and epitomie and ypitomy are not all equally accepted you're right back in the same space.
As an English Literature teacher in Singapore, one of the hardest things for my students to grasp is poetic meter because of how they pronounce words. Singapore Standard English is reasonably close to RPesque 'norms' but very few Singaporeans speak Singapore Standard English.
To elaborate on the issue with English vowels, I highly recommend checking out this table showing the vowel correspondences between different English dialects -- this gives a good sample of how complex the vowel issue is even just between the relatively small sample of dialects that made it on the table.
I hate these charts because none of the symbols are meaningful to me at all without a bunch of referencing back and forth. I know there's nothing else to really be done about it, but they're part of a standard alphabet in a foreign language I can't pronounce.
I completely get how it would be frustrating without being able to read IPA, but my purpose in sharing the chart was not to look at the individual sounds those symbols are representing, but instead to pay attention to the differences in the boundaries between cells across dialects. Those dividing lines indicate where two vowels differ in a way that matters for the meaning of the word, and how often they don't line up is the part that's most relevant to this discussion.
If you ever want me to infodump about how to read IPA, feel free to ask because I love that shit, but for this example it should hopefully not be necessary.
Oh I got the intent, just my own annoyance at myself for not being able to read it.
And I'm always down for an info dump, idk if it'll stick in my brain though.
Thats funny. English is my second/third language and I`m able to read it without issues.
Yeah I was also confused whether it was supposed to be difficult to read. Non-native speaker aswell.
Not something I'd heard of before, I'm surprised that this actually got to the stage of being taught in what sounds like a fair number of schools.
It would be interesting to know if ITA was actually easier for kids to learn than regular English. It does seem easy enough to understand as someone who has already learnt traditional spelling (and like the phonetic spelling in Feersum Endjinn I expect it'd become even easier after reading a bit) but I'm thinking the main change to help new readers is going to be simplified vocabulary with the spelling taking second stage.
To me this is like the promotion of phonetic spelling in the Netherlands during the 60s. I really despise it in formal contexts. Not to mention it's pretty condescending.