Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
An edition printed in the Unifon Alphabet
By Lewis Carroll
Foreword by Michael Everson.
First edition, 2014. Illustrations by John Tenniel. Cathair na Mart: Evertype. ISBN 978-1-178201-067-8 (paperback), price: €12.95, £10.95, $15.95. Click on the book cover on the right to order this book from Amazon.co.uk!
Or if you are in North America, order the book from Amazon.com!
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This edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland presents the text transcribed into the Unifon alphabet. Unifon was developed as an auxiliary phonetic alphabet designed to facilitate access to literacy to English-speaking children, by presenting to them a writing system that worked by sound. Tests showed that children were able to learn to read rather quickly using this system, and, having made that breakthrough, were able to transition to traditional English orthography relatively easily. Unifon was developed in the 1950s by Dr John R. Malone, an economist and newspaper equipment consultant who became interested in phonetic writing while consulting with the Bendix Corporation, which was interested in questions of aviation communication. That work was abandoned when the International Air Transport Association selected English as the language of international airline communications in 1957. But Malone’s interest in phonetic writing resurfaced when his young son complained about difficulties learning to read. From about 1960 to the 1980s, Margaret S. Ratz used Unifon to teach first-graders at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. A variety of teaching materials exist using Unifon. From the 1974 to his death in 1993 John M. Culkin, a specialist in media studies, also promoted Unifon. Unfortunately for your editor and typesetter, not all of the Unifon letters have yet been encoded in the Universal Character Set (Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646). To produce this book, I used the code positions of some accented Greek characters in the UCS range U+1F00..1FFF to represent the missing letters, in order to take advantage of their case-pairing properties and get the small-capital casing to work correctly. Perhaps one day Unifon usage will prove significant enough for the missing letters to be formally encoded. One of them, “Ἱ” U+A7AE latin capital letter small capital i, is as of this writing being standardized (due to its use in the Gabonese Kulango language as capital of “ɪ” U+026A latin letter small capital i). |
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