Next, the vowels are simplified in the same way, and quite easily, even though they are the bigger mess in English spelling. We choose carefully how we say the short vowel alphabet. It will soon be clear how and why we picked the basic alphabetic vowels:
- Say the Vowels a e i o u (in a new way)
- a in pot (American, father Brit)
- e in pet
- i in pit
- u in put
- o in po(re)
This simple 5 letter vowel alphabet can be easily memorized. Teachers will invent songs and rhymes for these but for now just use these key words: “a as in pot” etc. It’s helpful to stretch out the pronunciation of ‘pore’ when you say “o in pore” because only the first vowel shape is of interest. In many dialects this is the only way to get at the sound we want. Now again it might seem we subtracted too much as we simplify, because reading science for decades has grappled with the impossible level of complexity in the reading of English vowels, while we have here just 5 humble elements. CRESS has been engineered so that all that complexity disappears due to the same simple phonetic instructions in three addec characters ‘^<>’: tongue upward, backward, and forward. Let’s go through the multiplying effect both in spelling and phonetic awareness: a in pot (American, father Brit)
- Make a very long ‘a’ sound as you say ‘pot’. Now do it again while pushing your tongue far forward until it makes a sound you recognize. What do you get? Yes, the noticeably different ‘a’ sound in ‘pat’. We now have a symbol for that ‘a<‘. An a adjusted with tongue well forward is the ‘a ‘ sound in ‘pat, sat,rat’.
- Make a very long ‘a’ sound as you say ‘pot’. Now do it again while slowly raising your tongue upward until it makes a sound you recognize. What do you get? Yes, the noticeably different ‘uh’ sound in ‘butt’. We now have a symbol for that ‘a^’. An a adjusted with tongue upward is the ‘uh’ sound in ‘but, nut, about’.
e in pet
Make a very long ‘e’ sound as you say ‘pet’. Now do it again while gliding your tongue upward until it makes a sound you recognize. What do you get? Yes, the noticeably different ‘e’ sound in ‘late’. We now have a symbol for that ‘e^’. An a adjusted with tongue glided upward is the ‘ay’ sound in ‘late, hay,sleigh,main’.
i in pit
Make a very long ‘i’ sound as you say ‘pit’. Now do it again while gliding your tongue upward until it makes a sound you recognize. What do you get? Yes, the noticeably different ‘ee’ sound in ‘feet’. We now have a symbol for that ‘i^’. An a adjusted with tongue glided upward is the ‘ee’ sound in ‘feet, Pete, seat’.
u in put
Make a very long ‘u’ sound as you say ‘put’. Now do it again while gliding your tongue upward until it makes a sound you recognize. What do you get? Yes, the noticeably different ‘u’ sound in ‘rude’. We now have a symbol for that ‘u^’. An u adjusted with tongue glided upward is the ‘u’ sound in ‘rude, boot, who, two’.
o in po(re)
Make a very long ‘o’ sound as you say ‘por’. Now do it again while gliding your tongue upward until it makes a sound you recognize. What do you get? Yes, the noticeably different ‘o’ sound in ‘boat’. We now have a symbol for that ‘o^’. An o adjusted with tongue glided upward is the ‘o’ sound in ‘boat, note, snow, go’.
That’s it, the simplest system for fixing the spelling and reading mess. We have reduced the alphabet from 26 to 22 letters. This includes 17 consonants and 5 vowels. But the CRESS arrow effect adds 5 more consonant pronunciations for a total of 22 consonant phonemes. Arrows support 6 additional vowel pronunciations to the basic five for a total of 11 phonemes. This covers the needs of CRESS simply and efficiently with minimal learning. English is reduced to perfect phonetic spelling while incorporating phonetic awareness that is fundamental to writing and the alphabetic principle that English has disastrously wandered so far from. Many dimensions of engineering, efficiency, and value are incorporated. leaving some possible small refnements for some dialects. An upshot of this approach is that the learning process can involve many fun activities for reading students in the early grades. Physical exercises can complement Notes for advanced readers: This gives us the 33 English phonemes we need. If you look it up, you might see English can be analyzed with 24 consonant phonemes and 20 vowel phonemes. We opt for useful simplicity wherethe ones apparently missing in CRESS are quite generally be handled as combinations: /oi/ /ai/ /au/ /a^r/ /ts>/ /dz>/ in a quite acceptable scientific way. Similarly, variants of /a^/ are conditioned by stress so not fundamental. The current presentation does fail to discuss dialects such as British where ‘thought’ and ‘father’ vowels contrast, but we note that CRESS symbol /o/ can apply to the vowel in ‘thought’ where there is no following /r/.
Note that that vowels can be combined as they glide from one to the other when adjacent. There are three basic combinations ai, au, and oi as in: ‘buy’, ‘pow’ and ‘boy’:
- ‘buy’ = bai
- ‘pow’ = pau
- ‘boy’ = boi
Digraphs (two letters for one sound) are never used. This violates the phonemic principle: one symbol per sound
- ae, ea, ee, ei, eo, eu ie eu, oa, oe, oo ou,ua ue ui uo
- But, we duse two symbols when there are really two sounds: as in ai, au, and oi just above
A big part of early school is learning to say the alphabet. How smart do we do it? You can can watch our videos to see how much rank stupidity there is in how we say the alphabet. Here we will just show the super simple smart way to say the alphabet. First, it’s important to teach two pieces: vowels and consonants. That difference is just part of learning a bit about what it is to be a human being. It brings in a good piece of phonemic awareness in a simple logical way: understanding pronunciation of vowels and consonants.
Vowels
So let’s say the vowel alphabet first. We always taught that the letter U is said like the word YOU. You may have noticed that the pronunciation of YOU is not a smart guide to the letter U. When you say the word BUD, you don’t say BYOUD. This nonsense is present for all the vowel letters so let’s get started with the smart way to say the vowel alphabet AEIOU. There are just 5 very simple sounds on which all pronunciations are built
-
- SA as in sought or father
(Don’t worry if your dialect, Boston or many others is a little different, it all falls together nicely. And note CRESS flexibility will allow you your own conventions and convert automatically in later advanced versions!)
-
- SI as in sit.
- SE as in set.
- SU as in soot
- SO as in sore, what you say just before the R
All you have to say is SA SI SE SU SO using these pronunciations. You can even say SA SI SE SU SO as SOUGHT SIT SET SOOT SORE if you like. That’s it, the whole vowel alphabet leading to all sounds you say. We won’t spell them out here, but just give one example to show how simple it all is. Say the word sit with a very long vowel. Now say it long again but put your hand under your jaw and push the jaw up. You will hear the word seat from sit, and see simply why we write that vowel as I plus up arrow ^. This shows you rais the tongue higher to get seat. All so simple and the same idea applies to all the arrows CRESS uses.
Consonants
The consonant alphabet is just as simple. First, we don’t need the letters C, J, Q or X, so the alphabet is already reduced from 26 to 21 letters including the vowels. Also, just like with vowels, we won’t need combinations such as TH, SH but can still represent each sound of English. (But note CRESS flexibility will allow you your own conventions and convert automatically in later advanced versions!) Here is the consonant alphabet, always illustrated with the A sound:
- Ba as in bog
- Da as in dog
- Fa as in fog
- Ga as in goggle
- Ha as in hog
- Ka as in cog
- La as in log
- Ma as in mop
- Na as in not
- Pa as in pot
- Ra as in rot
- Sa as in sought
- Ta as in taught
- Va as in vest
- Wa as in West
- Ya as in yes
- Za as in zest
You can just say BA DA FA GA HA KA LA MA NA PA RA SA TA VA WA YA ZA It’s just as simple as that. We won’t go over the use of arrows here, but just point out the simplicity. Say the first S sound in sit stretched out very long so you can hear the S by itself. Now repeat stretching it out again but consciously force your tongue forward until you can feel it between your upper and lower teeth. When you do this you will easily see the logic of writing the TH sound simply as an S with the arrow < pointing to the front. This is part of your English language and is so simple and builds in phonemic awareness automatically. It simplifies of course but also clarifies, because you will find that the first sound in the word the is not the same sound. You get that sound by pushing the tongue forward for Z rather than S, so we simply write Z< for that sound.