from the teach-it-wrong-then-teach-it-again dept.
Here's an interesting story someone dropped in IRC:
The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell (and yes, I tweaked the sub title to fit into SN's tiny title limit):
The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation. Barely documented, rarely acknowledged, and quietly abandoned – but never quite forgotten by those it touched.
Why was it only implemented in certain schools – or even, in some cases, only certain classes in those schools? How did it appear to disappear without record or reckoning? Are there others like my mum, still aggrieved by ITA? And what happens to a generation taught to read and write using a system that no longer exists?
[...] Unlike Spanish or Welsh, where letters have consistent sound values, English is a patchwork of linguistic inheritances. Its roughly 44 phonemes – the distinct sounds that make up speech – can each be spelt multiple ways. The long "i" sound alone, as in "eye", has more than 20 possible spellings. And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of "through", "though" and "thought".
It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand – identified as the single greatest obstacle for young readers. In a 1953 parliamentary debate, he argued that it is our "illogical and ridiculous spelling" which is the "chief handicap" that leads many children to stumble with reading, with lasting consequences for their education. His proposed solution, launched six years later, was radical: to completely reimagine the alphabet.
The result was ITA: 44 characters, each representing a distinct sound, designed to bypass the chaos of traditional English and teach children to read, and fast. Among the host of strange new letters were a backwards "z", an "n" with a "g" inside, a backwards "t" conjoined with an "h", a bloated "w" with an "o" in the middle. Sentences in ITA were all written in lower case.
[...] The issue isn't simply whether or not ITA worked – the problem is that no one really knows. For all its scale and ambition, the experiment was never followed by a national longitudinal study. No one tracked whether the children who learned to read with ITA went on to excel, or struggle, as they moved through the education system. There was no formal inquiry into why the scheme was eventually dropped, and no comprehensive lessons-learned document to account for its legacy.
The article has a few stories of ITA students who went on to have poor spelling and bad grades in school from teachers who didn't seem to know about ITA.
Related Stories
Truthout has an editorial entitled, Regulating AI Isn't Enough. Let's Dismantle the Logic That Put It in Schools. Pushing for AI in schools is part of a larger extractive and dehumanizing trend, as opposed to liberating minds.
Funny — until it wasn't. Because behind the gaffe was something far more disturbing: The person leading federal education policy wants to replace the emotional and intellectual process of teaching and learning with a mechanical process of content delivery, data extraction, and surveillance masquerading as education.
[...] Philosopher Raphaël Millière explains that what these systems are doing is not thinking or understanding, but using what he calls "algorithmic mimicry": sophisticated pattern-matching that mimics human outputs without possessing human cognition. He writes that large pre-trained models like ChatGPT or DALL-E 2 are more like "stochastic chameleons" — not merely parroting back memorized phrases, but blending into the style, tone, and logic of a given prompt with uncanny fluidity. That adaptability is impressive — and can be dangerous — precisely because it can so easily be mistaken for understanding.
So-called AI can be useful in certain contexts. But what we're calling AI in schools today doesn't think, doesn't reason, doesn't understand. It guesses. It copies. It manipulates syntax and patterns based on probability, not meaning. It doesn't teach — it prompts. It doesn't mentor — it manages.
In short, it mimics intelligence. But mimicry is not wisdom. It is not care. It is not pedagogy.
Previously:
(2025) 1960s Schools Experiment That Created a New Alphabet and Left Thousands of Children Unable to Spell
(2024) Schools Under Siege: From Nation-States To Ransomware Gangs
(2024) Some Teachers Are Now Using ChatGPT to Grade Papers
(2023) Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?
(2023) Amid ChatGPT Outcry, Some Teachers are Inviting AI to Class
(2023) Seattle Public Schools Bans ChatGPT; District 'Requires Original Thought and Work From Students'
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday July 14 2025, @12:04AM (31 children)
When i was in school learning acres and yards and feet and tons, all of a sudden we had it all dropped and told to learn metric. It did not go well for me.
Now, i'm stuck using half metric, half 'regular' (Imperial?) measurements, and don't know any of them well.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @12:13AM (28 children)
In the US they blamed electronic calculators for derailing the move to metric... It always had resistance, but calculators dramatically undermined the advantages.
As for this study, I strongly expect that early results did not live up to expectations, so rather than publish the findings for scientific advancement, they buried the results to save face.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @02:16AM (21 children)
There's been a lot of things over the history of the US that derailed it. At the end of the day, there's no good reason for converting. One system for science and medicine as well as normal every day living just isn't ideal. Metric measures are not human-scale measures and the amount of brainwashing that it's taken people to buy into the notion that the metric system is in any way more logical, just laughable. Definining the meter to be 1/ 10 000 000 of the way from the equator to the North Pole specifically through a spot in Paris is completely arbitrary and has left the system with a rather inconvenient length. Making it 1/ 20 000 000 or 1/30 000 000 would have led to a much more reasonable length. There's a reason why the US uses yards for such a short list of things, mostly related to sports, it's nearly always too long or too short of be very helpful.
It's also worth nothing that if the US does convert, we'd be like the 3rd largest country to ever convert and by far the most developed. The result is that the cost and inconvenience would be higher with a much smaller amount of potential upside from moving any further than we already have. We already base all of our units on the same standards that the metric system does.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @03:34AM (6 children)
Imperial measurements reflect real life things.
A foot is the same length my left foot.
A yard is the same length as my front yard, where my left foot is.
A stone is the same weight as the stone in my front yard next to my left foot.
A pint is the same size as my little brother, who is trying to lift the stone next to my left foot.
A slug is the same as the acceleration that my little brother is going to feel if he drops that stone on my left foot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @04:52AM (1 child)
Why your "left" foot - isn't your right foot the same length?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @05:18AM
The left and right foots were the same length, but they weren't a foot long. This was very inconvenient.
So I drove a 6" nail 4 137/412" into my left big toe so that that foot is now exactly 12" long.
And my front yard wasn't exactly 3 of them so I shifted the fence 14' and 3 1457/1680" toward the house and now my front yard is exactly 3 (left) feet long.
And the stone in the front yard wasn't exactly 14 pounds (luckily it was more than that) so I removed 4 stone 6 pound and 5 129943/210987 ounces and it now weighs exactly 14 pounds.
And my little brother will always be pint size.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @05:10AM (3 children)
Nonsense. I see this sort of thing used as justification for metric measures, and it just makes the people using metric measures look like complete idiots. It doesn't much matter what the names we use are, a foot is a useful length. A yard is a much less useful length, but coincidentally, pretty close to the length of a meter, so perhaps think about that for a moment.
Or worse, celsius, we arbitrarily put the two ends at a couple of the dumbest points imagineable and because of the fetish for base 10, we only get 100C to go between water freezing and boiling, but only under specific conditions.
Whether you care to admit it or not, the human scale measures are a lot better for humans going about living our lives. Metric is great for science and medicine, but demonstrably worse for most other things.
(Score: 2) by Undefined on Tuesday July 15 2025, @05:56PM (1 child)
Scale.......0º............25º.....50º.....75º.....100º
Celsius.....Cold..........Warm....Dead....Dead....Dead
Farenheit...Really Cold...Cold....Meh.....Warm....Really Hot
Kelvin......Dead..........Dead....Dead....Dead....Dead
Rankine.....Dead..........Dead....Dead....Dead....Dead
Réaumur.....Cold..........Warm....Dead....Dead....Dead
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday July 16 2025, @09:27PM
And with blood dripping from his hand, G'Kar said to Vir; "Kelvin...Kelvin...Kelvin...Kelvin...Kelvin..."
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @06:46PM
Both systems have their uses. Centigrade, or better, Kelvin, is far better for science because it makes the math much easier. But a metric degree is too large a measurement for humans, and a tenth of a degree is too small.
We in the US had metric money before there was a metric system. It works better for money, too.
With distances it's immaterial. A yard of a meter are pretty close. 60 mph is 100 kph.
For cooking, imperial is far superior, because it's based on fractions rather than decimals. A decimal recipe would be a horror to concoct; how many ml in an egg? As to that, a late friend once told me his grandmother always used eggshells for measuring her baking; no two eggs are the same size. No pints or liters for her!
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 14 2025, @04:41AM (4 children)
What is human-scale? Does a pro basketball player fall outside because his foot is way longer than the average human?
And what's with the obsession of "measure units need to be anthropomorphic"? What, furlong–firkin–fortnight no good?
Speaking of size, both China and India use metric. As it is Taiwan, so far, the sole provider of the most advanced chips that US is just a user for, and the Taiwanese are doing it with a technology solely available from the metric-only Europe (EU population: 450.4M)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @05:19AM (3 children)
China had a population of about 600m when they converted and India was about 450m. They were also both back in the stone age compared with where the is US, or really even they are now.
Human scale means scaled appropriate to humans. It's also completely relevant because defining the measurements to be ones that are appropriate for humans, reduce situations where you have stupid measures like meters and Celsius that are both of a very odd size as well as being inconvenient for most uses. There's a reason why the yard is barely used, it's an awkward length to use when you've got other viable options. Because it's human scale, the units are appropriately sized for the things that people do. Rather than being shoehorned in to a very weird set of beliefs about how measuring systems should work.
It amazes me how Americans are somehow the stupid ones, even though it's most other people who seem to struggle to separate the names of the units with what they are. Foot is just the name of the measure that is 1/3 of a yard and 12 inches. It happens to also often be a typical adult's foot length, but it's just a name based on how the original came about and it's specifically defined to be exactly 0.3048 meters in length and has been since 1959.
Really, what all this amounts to is coming up with excuses as to why metric is better. But, if it were really that good, then it wouldn't take all those convoluted examples that aim to create scenarios where metric is better. It's almost always something that nobody would ever actually do, or something that computers can handle without any real issue in the rare case where we do it.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 14 2025, @05:59AM (2 children)
Oh, you don't say [wikipedia.org].
Decimal subunits are so much easier than the customary 5/16" bolt sizes.
Otherwise, the length of the unit itself is an arbitrary choice from a range that the human abilities are able to measure and brain to comprehend - not gonna use parsex.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @04:16PM (1 child)
Sigh, way to completely ignore the point in order to try to make yourself seem smart. This post is a really good example of why the US is probably never going to switch. It's a bunch of ignorance that misses the point, and I'm not surprised, you have to go ignorant and miss the point, because there just isn't any really good reason to switch over. I recently saw an example that you can divide 603mm evenly into 3rds, yes you can do that, but 603mm is a kind of an arbitrary measurement. You can do the same thing with 1/16ths provided it's some multiple of 3/16.
The historical origins of the word are completely meaningless here. Because that's not how the foot is defined. And since we both know you'd still object to using it with a different name, perhaps knock it off with the idiotic argument. A foot is exactly 12 * 2.54cm. Or more precisely the equivalent decimal portion of a meter since the meter is the SI base unit. But, it comes out the same way.
As far as bolt sizes go, you have an extremely limited point there that is easy enough to solve by just not reducing the fractions. This isn't math class, there's no reason why 3/8" can't be 6/16th inches. Switching to metric isn't exactly an upgrade. You get nonsense like M5 and M3 which completely strip that information out and you're just sort of supposed to memorize it. Which is fine if you're just mating nuts and bolts, but if you're needing to drill a whole for the bolt to go through, you've got to memorize the measure. Whereas with that 5/16th" bolt, you know that it goes through a 5/16th" hole with whatever extra bit you need in terms of tolerance. So, probably not a smart thing to point out.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 14 2025, @11:26PM
Wait, what? How come this boils to "memorize the measure"?
You don't have metric drill bits to drill whole holes for metric bolts to pass through?
An M5 bolt is a bolt with the nominal diameter of 5mm.
An M3 bolt is a bolt with the nominal diameter of 3mm.
Funny how just 2 letters give all the information one needs w/o having to memorize anything but a simple rule. One can even get a step further: M10x1.5 indicates a 10mm diameter bolt with a 1.5mm thread pitch
Indeed, your post provide the highlighted examples in support. Not very logical, but hey, decisions aren't required to be so.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday July 14 2025, @06:07AM (1 child)
The two different measuring systems are really not a problem at all and the USA stealth converted a long time ago. An inch is legally defined as 2.54cm. Liters for beverages are common here. Even countries that are nominally metric still use their local units in some contexts. The UK still talks of stones for weight, pints for beer, etc. and I think Canada may have some hybrid stuff going on too. As long as you're not filling a rocket with gallons of fuel and sending in to a 300km orbit, you're fine. In those kinds of applications it's important to be consistent; but there's no harm for those rocket scientists to get their weather reports in Fahrenheit when they're off work.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @06:48PM
As long as you're not filling a rocket with gallons of fuel and sending in to a 300km orbit...
...or building the Hubble telescope
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @08:58AM
Bollocks.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @01:28PM (5 children)
>At the end of the day, there's no good reason for converting.
The Mars Climate Orbiter would disagree, if it could.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @04:20PM (4 children)
That happened once. How many times has Elon blown up rockets? Care to guess what unit of measure he's using?
Plus, I said good reason, sloppiness and mistakes can apply to any measuring system you'd care to use.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @05:12PM (2 children)
>That happened once.
Over Mars. It's a daily occurrence on Earth, probably every minute of every day if you could track them all - 8 billion people, some of them get careless.
Metric makes it harder to make mistakes than Imperial / English / what have you units. Using both at the same time is, of course, even more problem prone.
With computers and due care you can make calculations work properly in any combinations of units systems imaginable. The Mars Orbiter had access to perfectly capable computers, and were operating at what's supposed to be the highest standards of care we can demonstrate...
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by aafcac on Tuesday July 15 2025, @03:20AM (1 child)
It doesn't though. You'd choose a proper measurement for what you're doing and use that. And if for some reason that's not good enough, even cheap calculators these days can handle the conversions. It's not different between the two systems. But, unlike with metric measures, the base units you're working with when dealing with US customary measures are probably closer to a size appropriate to the task. You're not being stuck with an order of magnitude between measurements and then arbitrarily splitting it up just to be in base 10.
The fact that I got modded down over pointing out that Elon regularly has missiles blowing up even though he's almost certainly doing all of that mess with metric measures just goes to show just how ignorant the pro-metric camp really is. I do think that it was an odd decisions to choose to use US customary measures in the middle of what was probably a metric project, but it's not inherently wrong to do.
And that's sort of the thing,t here's this assumption people make that only yokels use US customary measures, but somehow it's also too complicated for other people. Which is rather inconsistent, it can't simultaneously be stupid Americans and too complicated of a system.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 15 2025, @01:19PM
Woodworking is a pet peeve of mine for "traditional English" units, complete with traditional fractions on all the tooling. I happen to do a fair amount of 30 degree angle joins and back and forth between calculated decimal values for those lengths and fractions to set the tooling with is just a time consuming PITA.
If you want to get "idealistic" about it, let's switch to base 12 while we're at it. I would much rather have my digits evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 than 2 and 5. Clocks already have that figured out with base 60 for minutes and seconds, but the Babylonians were really on to something good with base 12. Counting on your fingers is for mental toddlers.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @06:50PM
sloppiness and mistakes can apply to any measuring system you'd care to use
There is an old joke about programmers building a house: measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, and cut with a chain saw.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by weirsbaski on Monday July 14 2025, @10:01AM (3 children)
Personally, I blame highway speed-limits for (intentionally?) souring people on metric. On 55 mph roads, converting to km/h then rounding down so as to not exceed the federal limit, the speed limit would've reduced to 85 km/h or about 52.8 mph. Nobody was going to agree to that, and spiking kilometers on the road bled over to spiking metric in other contexts.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @03:59PM (2 children)
Speed limits were one of many factors... the whole thing turned into an identity issue as well, with anti-metric forces painting it as a "ferigner thing, dem You-row-peeins tellin' us how to run our bidness" with the pro-metric forces rolling their eyes and shaking their heads in disbelief that such ignorance could possibly be listened to by educated leaders of big companies.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday July 14 2025, @09:00PM (1 child)
Yup, kind of like, "Ferigner thing, dem You-row-peeins flyin' their jets over and sprayin' us with chemical con-trailies..."
You can't fix stupid...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @10:13PM
>You can't fix stupid...
Let's hope the US can fix stupid by midterms, there is real long term damage being done daily - nothing that can't heal, but it's a shame to watch a lifetime of slow building progress face continued jackhammer assaults.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @06:33PM
As for this study, I strongly expect that early results did not live up to expectations, so rather than publish the findings for scientific advancement, they buried the results to save face.
Almost certainly the case. I worked with social scientists; psychologists, sociologists, and statisticians, all of whom held Master's and PhDs. We were trying to cure poverty in Illinois. We failed miserably.
One of their projects was called "Project Chance," designed to get people off of AFDC (repealed in 1996, the US no longer has welfare) and into the workforce. We sent 30,000 surveys to clients (Ryan forbade using the word '"client") of the study to get their reaction.
I was the guy who kept the database and coded the open ended responses. It was quite amusing. Universally hated and vilified, I doubt no scientific study or survey ever had anywhere near the amount of vulgar language, in multiple languages no less.
The result was that Project Chance was an abysmal, universally hated failure, and poor people do NOT trust their government any farther than they can throw the Capitol building, and fear it greatly. No personal information was collected, and the survey's cover letter conveyed this. Nevertheless, more than a third of the responses had the document number torn off, obviously believing it was an identifier.
A report was written, filed, and never seen again.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 16 2025, @07:38PM
They may also have realized based on terrible results that they had an ethics problem to bury.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 14 2025, @03:04AM
(Score: 2) by Lester on Wednesday July 16 2025, @03:37AM
Well, you weren't lucky. You went through a transition.
ITA is different. It is as if they had taught you in a British school the Japanese XV century measure system.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Gaaark on Monday July 14 2025, @12:17AM (11 children)
The ITA examples are easy to read, but learning ITA and then having to learn the 'real' alphabet would be horrible: it would have been better if they had really wanted ITA , then just teach it and nothing else... don't then try to transfer them to the proper alphabet.
Go whole hog or none at all.... that's why Spanglish (can't think of the real name of the 'Universal' language that never caught on)... they both failed BECAUSE they never caught on...like Betamax.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @01:14AM (6 children)
Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @01:35AM (5 children)
Esperanto - the universal language of language nerds, like my father in law. It is, indeed, easy to learn, but rather useless in the real world.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @02:18AM (4 children)
Essentially, arguably the biggest benefit in learning it is to speed up the acquisition of the next language after it. The language has been around since the 19th century, and the spread has largely stalled out.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday July 14 2025, @10:28AM (3 children)
Esperanto was designed by Zamenhof, who was actually a medical doctor and ophthalmologist [wikipedia.org], with no formal qualifications in linguistics, and is far too Eurocentric [wikipedia.org] to be considered as a 'universal' (Pan-terran) language.
Some of my late relatives learned it in school under German occupation in the Second World War as the schoolteacher could no longer teach them English, and did not want to teach them German.
It could well be the most well known constructed language [wikipedia.org], but it is one of many.
The most common second language in the world is English, by a wide margin - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers [wikipedia.org]
There are 990 million speakers of Mandarin Chinese as a first language, and 194 million speakers of Mandarin Chinese as a second language, totalling 1,184 million speakers
There are 390 million speakers of English as a first language, and 1,138 million speakers of English as a second language, totalling 1,528 million speakers
The language that follows English as a second language with the most speakers is Arabic, with 335 million speakers.
Estimates vary, but the total number of speakers of Esperanto is probably no more than 2 million.
So, for many practical purposes, English is the international auxiliary language. That does not mean you can use English everywhere, as there are regional lingua francas [wikipedia.org] such as Malay, Swahili, and Hausa.
Esperanto is an 'interesting oddity'.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @11:28AM (2 children)
Worth noting: the most common 2nd language in the USSR was Russian.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday July 14 2025, @11:41AM (1 child)
Yes, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was conceived as a union of independent states with common ideals, and quite possibly different languages. Much as the USA could have had different languages on a state-by-state basis: e.g. Louisiana being French-speaking, and other states having a significant German speaking population. As it is, there are a lot of people in the USA who have Spanish as their first language. I was surprised on a visit to the USA many, many years ago to have no common language with the office cleaners in the place I was visiting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_Soviet_Union [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @01:25PM
It's really about influence - and behind the iron curtain there was one source of influence.
In Western Europe, English is the leading 2nd language until you get close to an international border, then the influence of English is no longer dominant and it's the neighboring country's language that takes first 2nd...
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @01:17AM (1 child)
BTW, Betamax was better, but was more expensive, and proprietary, which made people worry that it could go away and they'd be stuck with orphaned tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday July 14 2025, @02:50AM
And Betamax exacted a royalty on prerecorded videotapes, which VHS did not.
So it was an easier decision to put a new movie out on VHS than on Betamax.
So movies would appear first on VHS, and om Betamax later, and only if the
VHS sales were good.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @02:48AM
My younger sister learned to read and write using ITA, this was in USA public schools, c.1970. As advertised, the initial learning went very quickly. A couple of years later, she certainly had trouble migrating to standard English and still is a slow reader (but she is literate).
Even all these years later, sometimes an ITA special character creeps into her printing (on paper). Maybe she should start a class action suit, along with her classmates...for limiting her life choices!
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @07:09PM
They did something similar here in Springfield when my middle aged children were kindergartners. They had a thing called "invented spelling" that was as brain dead ultra stupid as the British stupidity. Just because someone has a doctorate doesn't mean he or she can't be a blithering idiot. Two of the most idiotic people I knew were PhDs. One reinfected our computers with Michaelangelo over and over, needed the hardware people called out because she stuck a floppy into a tape drive, and many other stupidities. I could have had the other one fired if I had been a heartless bastard like he was.
The smartest guy I knew, though, had a doctorate and two Master's. I learned a lot from him.
The way to learn to read English has been tried and true for a VERY long time. Start out easy, Fun with Dick and Jane or The Little Engine that Could, with carefully selected, tiny consonant and verb constructs. Then work your way up to bigger words and different combinations to make the phenoms.
I'll bet the British wonder what the hell the H and the R are for, as they seem as incapable of pronouncing those letters as I am the Spanish RR or most westerners are with Asian words that start with NG. When I was in Thailand, their language had no ST or V sounds, so instead of "Steve" I was "Teeb". In Missouri, "window" has an R and "chimney" has an L (pronounced there as "chimbly").
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Monday July 14 2025, @01:07AM (10 children)
I wonder if a phonetic script system more distant from the latin alphabet would be easier to drop for latin and maybe even have some of the benefits that are said to come with bilingual education. The alphabet literally comes from logography for "cow house" and the variations on it introduced by "reform pedagogues" mostly look like the most dyslexic spelling these people (who might be driven more by vague neo-left inclusion ideas than linguistic competence) can imagine.
Whereas the Korean script system, Hangul, was conceived by the greatest of all Korean kings over the course of many years with the aid of his smartest advisors. It builds on the actual shape of the voice organs, and as a result, the numbers seem to indicate that Korean children achieve literacy earlier and with a higher percentage among them than their international peers. Then then go on to achieve top notch education levels. Wiki quotes a saying: "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days." It'd be up for debate whether that is due to the intense learning pressure in Korea, or really because Hangul is so easy to pick up. However, to teach phonetic writing, it seems to me that drawings of tongue and lip positions for syllables should be more appropriate for phonetic writing than variations on diagrams of cows, houses, and the like.
So it might be worth a try to see if Hangul or a modified version thereof could lead to faster literacy pickup, without negative overlaying effects on latin spelling picked up later on. English, btw. is particularly nasty, because spelling and voicing effectively needs to be memorized for every word. (cf. what the "bearded bear's bare ear heard in earnest"...)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @01:39AM (4 children)
44 phonemes each with one character seems... a move in the wrong direction, to me.
My first thought is: RISC processing... have seven to ten "letters" in the alphabet and use two per phoneme. No more confusing l and I for 1, O for 0, and just know that every sound is two characters, and maybe even have conjoined script for each phoneme, like they were doing with the ng and wo...
The retraining generations would be awfully expensive, both in changing all the signage and in the political backlash. The gains had better be good, but then, that pre-supposes that the government wants school to actually make academic progress...
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday July 14 2025, @02:08AM
If you separate vowels and consonants and combine them in syllables, you'd get a crossover between Katakana and Hangul. Probably something resembling one of the shorthand systems, too. King Sejong might have been influenced by the Chinese characters and, trying to create something similar,, ended up with the consonant-vowel-consonant stack. I'd guess (without any deeper research) that the Kana way of "consonant-(vowel)" might be even easier to handle.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @02:21AM (2 children)
Part of the issue is that English has something along the lines of 12 000 unique syllables that are produced with just 26 letters. Even if you add back the letters that English has lost, you're going to have a massive problem in terms of representing all of it in some sort of predictable way. And, even if you can do it initially, there's no guarantee that with so many native speakers over such a large number of locations that that will last long. From what I understand, even Hangul for Korean isn't a perfect match at this point. It's very close, but not quite.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Monday July 14 2025, @07:49AM (1 child)
Another part of the problem is that there are hundreds of different ways of pronouncing English - even just within London.
The underlying problem is "What the hell do you think you are trying to encode anyway?"
followed rapidly by - "does the person you are speaking to/writing for expect to decode that or something else?"
With the important question "do you both even agree what a language is?"
I am frequently considered "the easiest person to understand" in almost every workplace I have been to.
But my accent varies according to the workplace - I do not speak the same English in the Chinese food wholesaler
that I use in the British Library or anywhere in Sheffield, Cambridge or Bristol.
And I do not understand a lot of American dialogue in movies or on YouTube (But I am fine with R. Crumb's comics ;-).
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 14 2025, @04:06PM
>The underlying problem is "What the hell do you think you are trying to encode anyway?"
I wonder if this was a sub-text issue with the ITA - to try to re-align more school children to speak "proper English" by having it more closely tied to the visual representations.
We'll never know, whatever they were trying to do apparently it didn't work out like they wanted. If this was a more modern save-face coverup, they would have fabricated and published some reasoning as to why they discontinued the study to hide the real reasons.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday July 14 2025, @01:42AM (2 children)
Hangul is perfect for Korean, since it is more a voice notation than a letter system. It is even possible to write other languages in Hangul, I knew some freaks with technical background who can write Czech in Hangul. This is similar what local national underground politically opposing Austria-Hungary Empire did in 19. century: academics were writing Czech in devanagari indic script (which is very easy) in personal correspondence and frustrated secret police was unable to decipher their letters.
On the other side, there is also Čekošiki, academically recognized writing system of Japanese using Czech diacritic letters. Czech diacritic alphabet itself was invented at the turn of 14-15. centuries by Jan Hus, then rector of Charles University. Using čekošiki helped greatly to teach pre-school and first grade schoolers in Czechoslovakia the Japanese language without necessity to introduce them to those confusing Japan kana writing systems.
Jú ken rajt Yngliš in Čekošiki tů.
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14 2025, @04:58AM (1 child)
Now, try Vietnamese.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday July 14 2025, @05:16AM
Hunminjeongeum has tone markers.
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday July 14 2025, @02:57AM
I've been told the same holds for the devanagari script used for Sanskrit, though I haven't seen the details myself. And that script is several thousand years old.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @07:16PM
There are two distinct English languages: written English and spoken English. Have someone read this to you: "Eye yam sofa king stew pud".
I fucking HATE social media, most people's utter incompetence at their own native language is a crying shame. The morons don't know to from too or there from their from they're.
Our educators should all hang their heads. I would if I were so incompetent. That's not why Trump wants to close the department of education, he said it himself: "I love ignorant voters!"
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Monday July 14 2025, @03:34AM (9 children)
I am able to read the ITA example in the yellow box, as I expect most can. You pick it up from context.
The missed opportunity is that there's already a phonetic system that's standard I think. You see it in dictionaries, and it's not too hard to learn. I remember pronouncing ancient Biblical names correctly in Christian school using that. Our Bibles had anything that wasn't regular English spelled out using that phonetic system. I wonder why they didn't use that.
They could have taught a phonetic system along with regular spelling and not damaged the kids. It's a little extra information, and as I said you only need to apply it to words that don't fit regular patterns. However, I think you lose something if you do that. English picked up words from other languages, and if we all just spelled phonetically we'd be missing out on the implied origin of something like tsunami (Japanese) or laissez-faire (French).
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 14 2025, @04:55AM (6 children)
Being born and growing as a chid in a country with phonetic spelling, I can tell you the concept of spelling-bee-s is non-sensical past the age of 8yo (and it's not a spelling-bee, it's just learning to read)
How much time and mental capacity the kids in English-language countries are wasting with this nonsense [idallen.com]?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday July 14 2025, @05:26AM (3 children)
The issue is that English has about 12,000 uniquely identifiable syllables and hundreds of thousands of words, across a bunch of different dialects and accents. While having dialects and accents isn't unique, the English speaking world has had a significant issue in terms of getting spelling reforms to stick. Webster had more success of it than really anybody else, and even he failed to make much of a dent. There's just hundreds of years of written language where spelling wasn't even remotely important with the written copies of Shakespeare's plays having the same word spelled in various ways within the same play.
There's also the issue that English is less a language and more a creole where multiple languages with different spelling systems were combined and centuries since there's been a bunch of words borrowed into the language to cover whatever needs the pre-existing language couldn't. Whereas Germans and Chinese create compounds from words they already had, English does a bunch of borrowing and there can be long periods of time when multiple spellings for the same word are accepted, or the same meaning can be expressed by multiple very simple words. Ketchup and catsup are both still accepted, and you get words like kitty corner and catty corner in active use.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 14 2025, @05:46AM (1 child)
I'm not denying that the problem is hard., nor that I have any suggestion on how to solve it.
Just pointlessly pointing out the unholiness of the state in which this... thing got to be.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday July 15 2025, @03:23AM
It's not a good situation, I don't think there's an argument to be had that it's a good situation. But, there really isn't a fix and shy of inventing a time machine to go back and help the British repel one invading army, that's probably what we're stuck with. Seriously, if the Brits could have ever repelled an invading army, we wouldn't be in this mess hundreds of years later. I'm just surprised they couldn't figure out how to get invaded by the Chinese or some random tribe of a dozen living in South America.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday July 14 2025, @05:57AM
English is less a language and more a creole where multiple languages
This. So much this! Making English a phonetic language would rob it of its history and its soul.
Children growing up with English do just fine. They simply accept the odd words. People who have the capacity to appreciate how it was built see history in words.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @07:25PM (1 child)
How much time and mental capacity the kids in English-language countries are wasting with this nonsense [idallen.com]?
If it was such a brain killing language, how did the English speaking world come out on top? Why were most of the 19th and 20th century inventions and scientific discoveries made by English and German speakers?
Learning Spanish was a breeze in 9th grade, mostly because of its alphabet. The hard part was remembering the words. I learned spoken Thai when I was in Thailand and can even pronounce words that start "Ng...", but their alphabet is completely foreign squiggles to me.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday July 16 2025, @09:25PM
Navy powered by the analphabet sailors, pumping riches into a class who could build universities, afford education and communicated their scientific discoveries in Latin 200 years before [wikipedia.org]?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday July 14 2025, @07:38AM (1 child)
IPA [wikipedia.org] and the likes spell differently for different English accents/dialects in ways that can't be redacted into a single standard even where there's mutual intelligibility. That is, you'd need at least two separate spelling conventions for General American and Received Pronunciation to cover this mess in a useful way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_correspondences_between_English_accents#Vowels [wikipedia.org]
What contemporary reform proposals like Traditional Spelling Revised [wikipedia.org] focus on is to do away with the irregularities across different accents without adding a lot of new graphemes or diacritics at the expense of having a few lexical exceptions for common words since previous proposals, even recent ones, were shot down over not looking English enough ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_reforms_of_English [wikipedia.org] ).
I'm guessing if anything has a chance at getting any traction, it will be TRS.
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(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @07:34PM
Indeed. This rank stupidity rears its ugly head every ten or twenty years when a new ignorant semiliterate generation comes along and demands answers to the questions they don't have enough information to ask properly. They want us who have been easily reading and writing for decades to learn a new system of spelling. Based on what? The Bronx? "Da cah! Da Cah ran ovah da dam dwag!" or maybe Texan?
But English is almost always spelled the same everywhere, the U in humorous honor notwithstanding. Those differences occurred before the transatlantic cable.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by weeds on Monday July 14 2025, @01:21PM (4 children)
Now won't let that stand in our way, we'll take a handful of anecdotal stories and draw a conclusion.
This is survivor bias. We will describe a bunch of cases where people learned to read with ITA and are bad spellers and blame it on ITA. Why didn't you take a sampling of bad sellers who learned the standard alphabet and see how many of them are bad spellers? I have had a great many coworkers throughout my career (and it's been a long career as you can tell from the fact that ITA was taught in the 60s) who not only were bad spellers, but could barely write a complete sentence. Not a one of them learned to read with ITA.
I, however, learned to read with ITA. I competed in spelling bees in grade school and did just fine - not a national speller, a good speller. I was more interested in math and science. Without giving away too many details about me or humblebragging, I went on to get a degree in a hard science.
Oh, and you know those pronunciation guides in the dictionary? I can read those.
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 2) by weeds on Monday July 14 2025, @01:26PM (2 children)
Well. I didn't say I could type. : )
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 16 2025, @07:37PM (1 child)
Your sig would sound like an invitation to a politician!
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by weeds on Friday July 18 2025, @02:58PM
Hmh, I made that sig a long time ago. Looking at the website, they don't seem to be active any more. I still think that the amount of money that can be spent on a campaign should be limited and fully disclosed. I suppose that's Off Topic. :)
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 15 2025, @04:00AM
It's a stupid idea. About as stupid as making British kids learn the Korean alphabet in order to make them do English better.
Even if the Korean alphabet has merit, it doesn't make doing such a thing any less stupid: https://medium.com/@minzikang/design-lessons-from-the-korean-alphabet-383191ee7d4d [medium.com]