Initial Teaching Alphabet - Details

Details

The I.T.A. originally had 43 symbols, which was expanded to 44, then to 45. Each symbol predominantly represented a single English sound (including affricates and diphthongs), but there were complications due to the desire to avoid making the I.T.A. needlessly different from standard English spelling (which would make the transition from the I.T.A. to standard spelling more difficult), and in order to neutrally represent several English pronunciations or dialects. In particular, there was no separate I.T.A. symbol for the English unstressed schwa sound, and schwa was written with the same letters used to write full vowel sounds. There were also several different ways of writing unstressed / and consonants palatalized to, by suffixes. Consonants written by double letters or "ck", "tch" etc. sequences in standard spelling were written with multiple symbols in I.T.A.

The I.T.A. symbol set includes joined letters (typographical ligatures) to replace the two-letter digraphs "wh", "sh", and "ch" of conventional writing, and also ligatures for most of the long vowels. There are two distinct ligatures for the voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds in English, and a special merged letter for "ng". There is a variant of the "r" to end syllables, which is silent in non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation but not in rhotic accents like General American and Scots English (this was the 44th symbol added to the I.T.A.).

There are two English sounds which each have more than one I.T.A. letter whose main function is to write them. So whether the sound is written with the letters "c" or "k" in I.T.A. depends on the way the sound is written in standard English spelling, as also whether the sound is written with the ordinary "z" letter or with a special backwards "z" letter (which replaces the "s" of standard spelling where it represents a voiced sound, and which visually resembles an angular form of the letter "s"). The backwards "z" occurs prominently in many plural forms of nouns and third-person singular present forms of verbs (including is).

Each of the I.T.A. letters has a name, the pronunciation of which includes the sound that the character stands for. For example, the name of the backwards "z" letter is "zess".

A special typeface was created for the I.T.A., whose characters were all lower case. Where capital letters are used in standard spelling, the I.T.A. simply used larger versions of the same lower-case characters. The following chart shows the letters of the 44-character version of the I.T.A., with pronunciations indicated by symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet beneath each letter:

Note that "d" is made more distinctively different from "b" than is usual in standard typefaces (which is possible since in the I.T.A. there is no "q").

Later a 45th symbol was added to accommodate accent variation, a form of diaphonemic writing. In the original set, a "hook a" or "two-storey a" was used for the vowel in "cat" (lexical set TRAP), and a "round a" or "one-storey a" for the sound in "father" (lexical set PALM). But lexical set BATH (words such as "rather", "dance", and "half") patterns with PATH in some accents including Received Pronunciation but with TRAP in others including General American. So a new character, the "half-hook a", was devised to avoid the necessity of producing separate instructional materials for speakers of different accents.