Additional information
by Sonya Howard (Author)
The Clear Alphabet Dictionary is a tool to enable students of English to learn new phonetic Clear Alphabet, so that they can use it confidently as a means to read, write, and understand the sounds of English - and as a result to pronounce words and sentences better. It is a tool that enables teachers to explain the relationship between spelling and sounds at word level, and connected speech at sentence and text level.
In the first part you can learn the 48 sounds of English and their corresponding written IDs (identifiers). For example, the vowel sound in "cheese" and "meal" is always written as ee in the Clear Alphabet. The second part is more like a traditional dictionary, with a word list of over two thousand common words and phrases.
What is the Clear Alphabet?
The Clear Alphabet is a modern phonetic English alphabet which uses the normal Roman alphabet, rather than symbols, to show the sounds of English. Each of the 48 sounds of English has one ID (identifier) in the Clear Alphabet, which is always written the same.
This allows us to write the sounds of English, rather than the normal spelling, which is often very different from the sounds. It also allows us to write full sentences and whole texts which show connected speech in action - the process where words merge together as we speak. It enables us to represent speech in written form clearly, showing syllables, stressed syllables, features of connected speech, and other elements of speech such as schwa sounds, glottal stops, silent letters, and hidden sounds, which are usually missing from written texts.
The main difference is that the Clear Alphabet uses the Roman alphabet - the normal a-z that everybody already knows, rather than obscure symbols. This means that the Clear Alphabet can be transmitted via a normal keyboard - by computer, tablet, or phone - without a special font. While it is difficult (although not impossible) to create and share text in the IPA via digital means, it is much easier to do so with the Clear Alphabet.
While Clear Alphabet spelling takes some learning and getting used to, it is far easier and more intuitive to learn than the IPA because the letters are already familiar, and has the added bonus of showing the stressed syllables - the all-important sound spine - as well as normal punctuation marks.
The dictionary contains just over 2,000 common words and phrases, so it is not intended to be an exhaustive dictionary along the lines of a major English dictionary. Also, there are no definitions - just words in the Clear Alphabet and in normal spelling. However, the dictionary certainly contains enough terms for anyone to be able to understand and learn how the Clear Alphabet works and how it can be used to represent sounds in a word or sentence.
