Benjamin Franklin’s Phonetic Alphabet (1768)
United States ‘founding father’ Benjamin Franklin, a keen writer and inventor, not only wanted political independence from Great Britain — he wanted alphabetic independence as well.
In 1768, Franklin developed a replacement alphabet to, as he believed, better represent the sounds of the English language. His new alphabet removed six letters — C, J, Q, W, X, and Y — which he felt were redundant or confusing. He then added six more letters of his own creation, which represented certain vowel sounds as well as some two-letter combination sounds like ‘th’ and ‘ng.’
Franklin’s new alphabet was finally published in 1789, in a piece he titled ‘A Reformed Mode of Spelling’ — which he was only able to do after specially commissioning a typesetter to forge metal type of the new characters he had created.
Although Franklin eventually abandoned the idea, several of his proposed changes were, a century later, included in the International Phonetic Alphabet that was developed in France and Britain in the 19th century in an attempt to use a single set of characters to represent the sounds of any possible language.
