Pronouncing Orthography

Parity with English orthography

The principal objective of Leigh's phonetic orthography was to enable children to correctly convert written words to speech regardless of whether the child was pre-acquainted with a particular word or not. In contrast, standard English orthography's myriad rules and exceptions made this difficult.^[2]

Leigh wanted to avoid prejudice similar to that encountered against the English Phonotypic Alphabet by making his new orthography familiar to standard English orthography, so the Latin alphabet and spelling conventions were fully retained.^{[3]: § II} Leigh balanced phonetic precision with grapheme regularity by making silent letters in words faint, so that the original forms of words were roughly maintained.^{[3]: § III} Leigh also subtly embellished letters with multiple modified forms, so children were explicitly aware of the possible sounds made by the "common letters", while maintaining harmony with English orthography.^{[3]: § IV}

Leigh utilised the pronouncing dictionaries of John Walker and Benjamin Humphrey Smart, two of the leading orthoepists of the time, to ensure his orthography resulted in correct pronunciation.^{[3]: § VII}

Reading versus writing

Leigh separated learning to read from learning to write; he described his position in his report to the Boston school committee (one of the cities which trialled Leigh's methods):

As to script, I stated my own conviction that it has no proper connection with learning to read and my desire to know from the writing master whether the habits formed by such writing of such words on the slate by so young learners will not have a bad influence upon their future handwriting and whether they will not acquire the art better at a later period and by exercises designed specially for the acquisition of good habits and skill in penmanship.^[4]

In a letter to Leigh, Lewis Soldan, a St. Louis educator, suggested children should learn to read using his orthography and then transition to standard English orthography, where they would learn to write.^[5]

Categories of correspondences

Leigh considered the sequence in which Pronouncing Orthography could be taught when he segmented letter sounds into four utterance categories:

• I – Letter sounds most commonly uttered
• II – Letter sounds which occur once in every two hundred utterances
• III – Letter sounds which occur once in every thousand utterances
• IV – Letter sounds which occur once in every four thousand utterances

He suggested avoiding teaching category IV sounds using Pronouncing Orthography and instead waiting until the child has transitioned to conventional orthography, whilst the other categories are taught in sequence.^[6]