Initial Teaching Alphabet

It was not intended to be a strictly phonetic transcription of English sounds, or a spelling reform for English as such, but instead a practical simplified writing system which could be used to teach English-speaking children to read more easily than can be done with traditional orthography.

Each symbol predominantly represented a single English sound (including affricates and diphthongs), but there were complications due to the desire to avoid making the I.T.A.

to standard spelling more difficult), and in order to neutrally represent several English pronunciations or dialects.

There were also several different ways of writing unstressed [ɪ]/[i] and consonants palatalized to [tʃ], [dʒ], [ʃ], [ʒ] by suffixes.

symbol set includes joined letters (typographical ligatures) to replace the two-letter digraphs "wh", "sh", and "ch" of conventional writing, and also ligatures for most of the long vowels.

There are two distinct ligatures for the voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds in English, and a special merged letter for "ng" resembling ŋ with a loop.

A special typeface was created for the I.T.A., whose characters were all lower case (its letter forms were based on Didone types such as Monotype Modern and Century Schoolbook).

Later a 45th symbol was added to accommodate accent variation, a form of diaphonemic writing.

So a new character, the "half-hook a", was devised, to avoid the necessity of producing separate instructional materials for speakers of different accents.