Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet wasBenjamin Franklin's proposal for aspelling reform of theEnglish language. The alphabet was based on theLatin alphabet used in English, though witheng and several additional letters that Franklin newly invented.
Franklin modified the standard English alphabet by omitting the letters c, j, q, w, x, and y, and adding new letters to explicitly represent the open-mid backrounded[ɔ] andunrounded[ʌ] vowels, and the consonantssh[ʃ],ng[ŋ],dh[ð], andth[θ]. It was one of the earlier proposed spelling reforms to the English language. The alphabet consisted of 26 letters in the following order:[1]
| Letter | o |  | α | e | i | u | ɥ | h |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Letter name | o | ah | a | e | i | u | uh | huh |
| Pronunciation (IPA) | /oʊ/ | /ɔː/ and /ɒ/ | /æ/ | /ɛ/ (sometimes modern /eɪ/) | /ɪ/,/j/, and unstressed/i/ (sometimes modern /iː/) | /ʊ/,/uː/, and/w/ | /ʌ/ | /h/ |
| Letter | g | k |  | ŋ | n | r | t | d |
| Letter name | gi | ki | ish | ing | en | r | ti | di |
| Pronunciation (IPA) | /ɡ/ | /k/ | /ʃ/ | /ŋ/ | /n/ | /r/ | /t/ | /d/ |
| Letter | l | ſ | s(at the end of a word) | z |  |  | f | v |
| Letter name | el | es | ez | eth | edh | ef | ev | |
| Pronunciation (IPA) | /l/ | /s/ (and sometimes word-final/z/) | /z/ | /θ/ | /ð/ | /f/ | /v/ | |
| Letter | b | p | m | |||||
| Letter name | bi | pi | em | |||||
| Pronunciation (IPA) | /b/ | /p/ | /m/ | |||||
Other English phonemes are represented as follows:
u (as inhus forhouse). (as ined forage).eer fortheir).ɥi (as indistrɥi fordestroy).r (as infrget forforget). (as intit forcheat). (as inmezɥr formeasure).
Franklin's proposed alphabet included seven letters to represent vowels. This set consisted of two new letters, in addition to five letters from the existing English alphabet:α, e, i, o, u. The first new letter was formed as a ligature of the letterso andα – – and used to represent a sound that is roughly[ɔ] as transcribed in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The second new vowel letter,ɥ, was used to represent[ʌ] or[ə].
Franklin proposed the use of doubled letters to represent what he called long vowels, represented by modern phonemes in IPA thus: long/ɔː/ versus short/ɒ/ (or, in his notation, versus), long/eɪ/ versus short/ɛ/ (ee versuse), and long/iː/ for short/ɪ/ (ii versusi). In his examples of writing in the proposed alphabet, Franklin contrasts long and short uses of his lettere, with the words "mend" and "remain" which, respectively, he spelledmend andremeen. In this system,ee is used to represent the/eɪ/ sound in "late" and "pale". Likewise,ii is used to represent the/iː/ sound in "degrees", "pleased", and "serene". Sometimes Franklin's correspondences written in the new alphabet represent a long vowel not using a double letter but instead using a letter with acircumflex, ◌̂,[2] as when he represents the/eɪ/ sound in "great" and "compared" withê instead ofee. Franklin's long-short vowel distinctions appear not perfectly identical to the same distinctions in 21st-century English; for example, the only word shown to use is the wordall, but not other words that in modern notation would use/ɔː/. This discrepancy may reflect Franklin's own inconsistencies, but, even more likely, it reflects legitimate differences in the English phonology of his particular time and place.[citation needed]
Franklin does not make a distinction between the modern/uː/ and/ʊ/phonemes (in words likegoose versusfoot), which likely reveals another difference between 18th-century English pronunciation versus modern pronunciation.
Franklin's proposed alphabet included nineteen letters to represent consonants. This set consisted of four new letters, in addition to fifteen letters from the existing English alphabet:b, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s (including thelongs,ʃ, typical of his era) t, v, z. New letters were proposed to replace the Englishdigraphsng (=ŋ);sh (=);voicedth (=), andvoicelessth (=). New consonant digraphs based on these new letters were used to represent thezh sound ofmeasure (= z) and theaffricate sounds ofch incherry (=t) andj injack (=d).
The most influential of Franklin's six new characters appears to have been the letter "eng",ŋ, forng. It was later incorporated into the IPA.Alexander Gill the Elder used this letter in 1619.[3]
