science

Unifon

Unifon is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Unifon rather than just read about it. In short: Unifon is a defunct Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant.

Key takeaways

Unifon belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Unifon to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Unifon from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Unifon is a defunct Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant. It was developed into a teaching aid to help children acquire reading and writing skills. Like the pronunciation key in a dictionary, Unifon attempts to match each of the sounds of spoken English with a single symbol, though not all sounds are distinguished, for example, reduced vowels in other American dialects that do not occur in Chicago. The method was tested in Chicago, Indianapolis and elsewhere during the 1960s and 1970s, but no statistical analysis of the outcome was ever published in an academic journal. Interest by educators has been limited, and its last formal use (for the Tolowa language) was abandoned in 1996, but enthusiasts continued to publicize the scheme and advocate for its adoption as late as 2012.

Alphabet

The Unifon alphabet contains 40 glyphs, intended to represent the 40 "most important sounds" of the English language. Although the set of sounds has remained the same, several of the symbols were changed over the years, making modern Unifon somewhat different from Old Unifon. Of the 66 letters used in the various Unifon alphabets, 43 of the capitals can be unified with existing Unicode characters. Small letters are printed as small capitals. Fewer of them are available in Unicode as dedicated small-cap forms, but the usual Latin minuscules can be made small-cap in a Unifon font. Unifon is the same as English but with extra letters. Letters have corresponding IPA phonemes below them.

Other letters include:

Some fonts may have Unifon symbols in Private Use Areas.

History Under a contract with the Bendix Corporation, Malone created the alphabet as part of a larger project. When the International Air Transport Association selected English as the language of international airline communications in 1957, the market that Bendix had foreseen for Unifon ceased to exist, and his contract was terminated. According to Malone, Unifon surfaced again when his son, then in kindergarten, complained that he could still not read. Malone recovered the alphabet to teach his son. Beginning before 1960 and continuing into the 1980s, Margaret S. Ratz used Unifon to teach first-graders at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. By the summer of 1960, the ABC-TV affiliate station in Chicago produced a 90-minute program in which Ratz taught three children how to read, in "17 hours with cookies and milk," as Malone described it. In a presentation to parents and teachers, Ratz said, "Some have called Unifon 'training wheels for reading', and that's what it really is. Unifon will be used for a few weeks, or perhaps a few months, but during this time your child will discover there is a great similarity between Unifon and what he sees on TV screens, in comics or road signs, and on cereal boxes. Soon he finds with amusement that he can read the 'old people's alphabet' as easily as he can read and write in Unifon." During the following two years, Unifon gained national attention, with coverage from NBC's Today Show and CBS's On the Road with Charles Kuralt (in a segment called "The Day They Changed the Alphabet"). In 1981, Malone turned over the Unifon project to Dr. John M. Culkin, a media scholar who was a former Jesuit priest and Harvard School of Education graduate. Culkin wrote numerous articles about Unifon, including several in Science Digest. In 2000, the Unifon-related web site, www.unifon.org, was created by Pat Katzenmaier with much input from linguist Steve Bett. It has served since then as a central point for organization of Unifon-related efforts.

Unifon for Native American languages

In the 1970s and 1980s, a systematic attempt was made to adapt Unifon as a spelling system for several Native American languages. The chief driving force behind this effort was Tom Parsons of Humboldt State University, who developed spelling schemes for Hupa, Yurok, Tolowa, and Karok, which were then improved by native scholars. In spite of skepticism from linguists, years of work went into teaching the schemes, and numerous publications were written using them. In the end, however, once Parsons left the university, the impetus faded; other orthographies are now used for all of the languages, though people taught in Unifon may still write in it today.

Encoding

Character set support The special non-ASCII characters used in the Unifon alphabet have been assigned code points in one of the Private Use Areas by the ConScript Unicode Registry. Several fonts devoted to Unifon are offered at the official website.

Language tagging IETF language tags have registered unifon as a variant subtag identifying text as written in Unifon. It is limited to certain language tags: en, hup, kyh, tol, yur.

See also Blissymbols – Ideographic writing system English Phonotypic Alphabet – 19th century phonetic alphabet for the English language Initial Teaching Alphabet – Aid for teaching English reading

References

Sources

External links Unifon.org Unifon/IPA correspondence chart Unifon transliterator Michael Everson's "Preliminary proposal to encode "Unifon" characters in the UCS" (PDF).

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Unifon

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Unifon claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Unifon before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Unifon ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Unifon

In research: Unifon appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Unifon in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Unifon is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Auxiliary and educational artificial scripts, Bendix Corporation, English language in the United States, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Unifon outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Unifon in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Unifon means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Unifon out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Unifon in simple terms?

Unifon is a defunct Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant.

Why does Unifon matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Unifon?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Unifon.