log agoer thaer livd a bliend man. hee livd whaer trees and flouers groo but the bliend man cood not see the trees or flouers.
This is not yclept Olde English but New English—the latest British prop for tots just learning to read. Britain is worried that 30% of its seven-year-olds still cannot read after two years of school; one-quarter of its 15-year-olds are semiliterate; and 5% cannot read at all. On the theory that one facet of the problem is the exception-ridden English alphabet, 1,000 first-graders in 24 schools next fall will tackle reading with a strictly phonetic alphabet. If successful, it may revolutionize ingish.
Invented by a seven-man committee, including Conservative M. P. Isaac James Pitman (grandson of shorthand’s Sir Isaac Pitman), the all-lower-case new alphabet is longer than the old one. While eliminating q and x, it retains all other conventional letters and adds 19 new sound symbols (e.g., ae in the first line of the sample above). In theory, this reduces some 2,000 letter sounds in the regular alphabet to a piano-sized 88. Using the new system, a few retarded readers have already been rapidly cured. But the obvious problem is what happens later, when children switch to the conventional alphabet. As Pitman himself muses: “will skill in the wun meedium bee transferabl too skill in the second, mor compleks wun?