You can also find online a more thorough (and somewhat more serious) essay by Mark Twain on this subject, 'A Simplified Alphabet,' which was written in 1899.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.īai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez 'c', 'y' and 'x' - bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez - tu riplais 'ch', 'sh', and 'th' rispektivli.įainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. Year 2 might reform 'w' spelling, so that 'which' and 'one' would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish 'y' replasing it with 'i' and iear 4 might fiks the 'g/j' anomali wonse and for all.

The only kase in which 'c' would be retained would be the 'ch' formation, which will be dealt with later. Yilz, in a letter he wrote to the journal The Economist.įor example, in Year 1 that useless letter 'c' would be dropped to be replased either by 'k' or 's', and likewise 'x' would no longer be part of the alphabet.

It has also (and probably more accurately) been attributed to one M.J. The name NATO phonetic alphabet became widespread because it was NATO Allies who had spearheaded the final revision and because the signals used to facilitate the naval communications and tactics of the US and NATO have become global.Īpart from the traditional military usage, the NATO phonetic is often used in the retail industry, where customer or site details are spoken by telephone (to authorize a credit agreement or confirm stock codes), by IT professionals to communicate long codes or by airlines to communicate passenger name records internally.Ī spelling alphabet is also often called a ‘phonetic alphabet’, but this is not related to the usage of the same phrase in phonetics, which is used to indicate the sounds of human speech, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.Although many people have attributed the 'Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling' to Mark Twain, most Twain scholars doubt that this attribution is accurate. Telephone spelling alphabets were developed to improve communication since World War I, but the first non-military internationally recognized spelling alphabet was adopted by the CCIR (predecessor of the ITU) in 1927.ĭuring World War II, many nations used their own versions of a spelling alphabet, but the International Air Transport Association (IATA), recognizing the need for a single universal alphabet, presented a draft alphabet to the ICAO during 1947 that had sounds common to English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.ĭuring 1948-1949, Jean-Paul Vinay, a professor of linguistics at the Université de Montréal, collaborated with the ICAO on the development of a new spelling alphabet, with minimum requirements for the words to have a similar spelling in at least English, French, and Spanish, as well as be live words in each of these three languages.Įventually, the NATO alphabet became effective in 1956 and, a few years later, turned into the established universal phonetic alphabet for all military, civilian and amateur radio communications. Actually, as of 2002, the IMO’s GMDSS procedures permit the use of the ICAO numeral pronunciation. Practice tip: Say the word butter (with American pronunciation) and think of the sound you make in the middle (tt).In American English, this sound is a tap. In practice, these are used rarely, as they frequently result in confusion between speakers of different languages. To make the famous trilled rr (which is no longer considered a 'letter' in the Spanish alphabet), the key is practice. The IMO defines different pronunciation of numerals than does the ICAO: However, each agency chooses one of two different sets of numeric code words. These distortions have been called spelling pronunciations (8) and may in- cidentally be helpful in teaching spell. Note that “Alpha” is written as “Alfa” and “Juliet” is written as “Juliett”, which are the spellings still in use in the international version of the alphabet, to avoid possible critical mispronunciations by speakers of other languages.Īfter ICAO developed the phonetic, this was adopted by many other international and national organizations, including the IMO. The 26 code words in the spelling alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet in alphabetical order as follows: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. The alphabet is used to spell parts of a message containing letters and numbers to avoid confusion, because many letters sound similar, such as «n» and «m» or «f» and «s». The NATO Phonetic Alphabet substitutes a code word acrophonically for each letter of the English alphabet, so that letters and numbers would have distinct names that would be most easily understood by those who exchange voice messages, regardless of language/ pronunciation differences or the quality of the communication channel.

English alphabet for spelling