The Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA or i.t.a.) is a variant of the Latin alphabet developed by Sir James Pitman (the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of Pitman shorthand and co-inventor of the English Phonotypic Alphabet) in the early 1960s. It was not intended to be a strictly phonetic transcription of English sounds, or a spelling reform for English as such, but instead a practical simplified writing system which could be used to teach English-speaking children to read more easily than can be done with traditional orthography. After children had learned to read using ITA, they would then eventually move on to learn standard English spelling. Although it achieved a certain degree of popularity in the 1960s, it has fallen out of use since the 1970s.
History In 1959, the Conservative MP James Pitman initially promoted the ITA as a stepping stone to full literacy. The idea was that children would switch to the conventional alphabet after a few years. In the 1960s and 1970s, the ITA was used in some schools in England: "By 1966, 140 of the 158 UK education authorities taught ITA in at least one of their schools." Some other English-speaking countries used it too. It is not clear why it was taught only in some schools, or to some groups of children in particular schools. Since ITA was not formally introduced as an academic standard in the UK or anywhere else, it is not clear when it fell out of use, but it appears to have faded away by the end of the 1970s. Any advantage of the ITA in making it easier for children to learn to read English was often offset by some children not being able to effectively transfer their ITA-reading skills to reading standard English orthography, or being generally confused by having to deal with two alphabets in their early years of reading. Certain alternative methods (such as associating sounds with colours, so that for example when the letter "c" writes a [k] sound it would be coloured with the same colour as the letter "k", but when "c" writes an [s] sound it could be coloured like "s", as in Words in Colour and Colour Story Reading) were found to have some of the advantages of the ITA without most of the disadvantages. Although the ITA was not originally intended to dictate one particular approach to teaching reading, it was often identified with phonics methods, and after the 1960s, the pendulum of educational theory swung away from phonics. The ITA was very rarely used by the 1970s.
Details The ITA originally had 43 symbols, with two additional letters added later on (at different times). Each symbol predominantly represented a single English sound (including affricates and diphthongs), but there were complications due to the desire to avoid making the ITA needlessly different from standard English spelling (which would make the transition from the ITA to standard spelling more difficult), and in order to neutrally represent several English pronunciations or dialects. In particular, there was no separate ITA symbol for the English unstressed schwa sound [ə], and schwa was written with the same letters used to write full vowel sounds. There were also several different ways of writing unstressed [ɪ]/[i] and consonants palatalized to [tʃ], [dʒ], [ʃ], [ʒ] by yod coalescence. Consonants written with double letters or ⟨ck⟩, ⟨tch⟩, etc. sequences in standard spelling were written with multiple symbols in the ITA. The ITA symbol set includes joined letters (typographical ligatures) to replace the two-letter digraphs ⟨wh, sh, 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⟩ resembling ⟨ŋ⟩ with a loop. There is a variant of ⟨r⟩ used at the end of syllables, which indicates a written ⟨r⟩ that is silent in non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation, but pronounced in rhotic accents like General American and Scots English (this was the 44th symbol added to the ITA). There are two English sounds which each have more than one ITA letter whose main function is to write them. Whether the sound [k] is written with the letters ⟨c⟩ or ⟨k⟩ in ITA depends on which letter is used to write the sound for the particular word in typical English spelling. A similar case exists for the sound [z], which is written with the ordinary ⟨z⟩ when spelled with the same letter in typical writing, and with a special backwards ⟨z⟩ when ⟨s⟩ is used instead to write the sound. The backwards ⟨z⟩ occurs prominently in many plural forms of nouns and third-person singular present forms of verbs (including is). Each of the ITA letters has a name, the pronunciation of which includes the sound that the character stands for. For example, the name of the first letter ⟨b⟩ is bee. A special typeface was created for the ITA, whose characters were all lower case (its letter forms were based on Didone types such as Monotype Modern and Century Schoolbook). Where capital letters are used in standard spelling, the ITA simply used larger versions of the same lower-case characters. The following chart shows the letters of the 44-character version of the ITA, with the main pronunciation of each letter indicated by symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet beneath:
Note that ⟨d⟩ is made more distinctively different from ⟨b⟩ than is usual in standard typefaces. The 45th symbol was added to accommodate accent variation, a form of diaphonemic writing. In the original set, a "hook a" or "two-storey a" ⟨a⟩ was used for the vowel in cat (lexical set trap), and a "round a" or "one-storey a" ⟨ɑ⟩ for the sound in father (lexical set palm). However, the bath lexical set (words such as rather, dance, and half) patterns with palm in some accents (including Received Pronunciation), but with trap in others (including General American). Thus, a new character, the "half-hook a", was devised, to avoid the necessity of producing separate instructional materials for speakers of different accents.
A series of international ITA conferences were held, the fourth being in Montreal in 1967.
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