Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> This is a casual query (so far). Is this alphabet known to
> most of you? It is a modified and extended latin alphabet
> that contains some new glyphs that remind one sometimes of
> the IPA (which I essentially don't know; sorry).
>
> It is intended to teach youngsters to read, by helping them
> with the less-self-evident(?) phonetic spellings in English.
> Most of it is standard, however.
>
> It seems, unfortunately, to have disappeared from sight.
> I have several children's books that use it.

It was, fortunately, abandoned, presumably because the unfortunate kids
who were "taught" with it never managed to learn to spell English, and
there was no reason to suppose the learned to read English any faster or
more efficiently than others.

The propaganda of its supporters (mostly one John Downing) never
addressed the question of writing, only reading; perhaps they assumed
that the "lower classes" would never actually need to write anything.

Or perhaps they had data and chose to suppress it.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...