Re: /k/ in i.t.a.

On Thursday, November 11, 2004, at 07:58 , Ray Brown wrote:
[snip]
>> On Wednesday, November 10, 2004, at 09:40 , Jean-François Colson wrote:
> [snip]
>
>>> Of course. And which spelling is used when /k/ is spelt |qu|?
>>
>> I have forgotten - probably qu-ligature.
>
> That was a guess based on the fact that this was supposed to an "initial
> teaching alphabet" to aid in the transition to standard orthography. But
> on further investigation I discover that ITA did _not_ include the letters
> |q| and |x|. This seems to me to be at odds with the aim of an initial
> teaching alphabet.
>
> Whether |qu| was respelled as |kw| or as |cw| I am not certain, but I
> think it was the latter.
I did some checking while the Conlang list was locked - I was wrong. ITA
does not use the Old English |cw|; it re-spells modern English |qu| as |kw|
.

I cannot see how |kw| is a transition to the standard |qu|. It looks to me
like a survival from an early 'yet another spelling reform' scheme. As I
wrote:
> Its designer was James Pitman (1901 - 1985) who was a champion of English
> spelling reform. I get the impression that he saw ITA as a "Trojan horse"
> which would introduce spelling reform after the failure of his earlier
> attempts to get the Brits to adopt reform.
I should perhaps have added that James Pitman was the grandson of Isaac
Pitman, the inventor of Pitman shorthand which is  (I think still*) the
most common form of shorthand in the UK (I personally prefer Gregg) and is
based on phonemic spelling.

* In recent years a system known as T-line has become very popular among
writers of shorthand in the UK.

I also discovered yesterday that the earliest known attempt at English
spelling reform was by a monk called Ormm (or Ormmin) in about 1200 CE.
But the vast majority of reform proposals seem to belong to the past three
centuries. I wonder how many there are. More than 1000?

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

Reply