Editing Initial Teaching Alphabet (section)

==Details==
The ITA originally had 43 symbols, which was expanded to 44, then 45. Each symbol predominantly represented a single English sound (including [[affricate]]s and [[diphthong]]s), but there were complications due to the desire to avoid making the ITA needlessly different from standard English spelling (which would make the transition from the ITA to standard spelling more difficult), and in order to neutrally represent several English pronunciations or dialects. In particular, there was no separate ITA symbol for the English unstressed [[schwa]] sound {{IPA|[ə]}}, and schwa was written with the same letters used to write full vowel sounds. There were also several different ways of writing unstressed {{IPA|[ɪ]}}/{{IPA|[i]}} and consonants palatalized to {{IPA|[tʃ]}}, {{IPA|[dʒ]}}, {{IPA|[ʃ]}}, {{IPA|[ʒ]}} by suffixes. Consonants written by double letters or "ck", "tch" etc. sequences in standard spelling were written with multiple symbols in the ITA.

The ITA symbol set includes joined letters ([[typographical ligature]]s) to replace the two-letter [[digraph (orthography)|digraphs]] "wh", "sh", and "ch" of conventional writing, and also ligatures for most of the [[long vowel]]s. There are two distinct ligatures for the [[voice (phonetics)|voiced]] and [[unvoiced]] "th" sounds in English, and a special merged letter for "ng" resembling [[eng (letter)|ŋ]] with a loop. There is a variant of the "r" to end syllables, which is silent in [[non-rhotic accents]] like [[Received Pronunciation]] but not in rhotic accents like [[General American]] and [[Scots English]] (this was the 44th symbol added to the ITA).

There are two English sounds which each have more than one ITA letter whose main function is to write them. So whether the sound {{IPA|[k]}} is written with the letters "c" or "k" in ITA depends on the way the sound is written in standard English spelling, as also whether the sound {{IPA|[z]}} is written with the ordinary "z" letter or with a special backwards "z" letter (which replaces the "s" of standard spelling where it represents a voiced sound, and which visually resembles an angular form of the letter "s"). The backwards "z" occurs prominently in many plural forms of nouns and third-person singular present forms of verbs (including ''is'').

Each of the ITA letters has a name, the pronunciation of which includes the sound that the character stands for. For example, the name of the backwards "z" letter is "zess".

A special [[typeface]] was created for the ITA, whose characters were all [[lower case]] (its letter forms were based on [[Didone (typography)|Didone types]] such as [[Computer Modern|Monotype Modern]] and [[Century Schoolbook]]). Where capital letters are used in standard spelling, the ITA simply used larger versions of the same lower-case characters. The following chart shows the letters of the 44-character version of the ITA, with the main pronunciation of each letter indicated by symbols of the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]] beneath:

[[File:Initial Teaching Alphabet ITA chart.svg|frame|center|Basic ITA chart]]

Note that "d" is made more distinctively different from "b" than is usual in standard typefaces.

Later a 45th symbol was added to accommodate accent variation, a form of [[diaphoneme|diaphonemic]] writing. In the original set, a "hook a" or "two-storey a" (a) was used for the vowel in "cat" ([[lexical set]] {{Smallcaps|trap}}), and a "round a" or "one-storey a" (ɑ) for the sound in "father" (lexical set {{Smallcaps|palm}}). But lexical set {{Smallcaps|bath}} (words such as "rather", "dance", and "half") patterns with {{Smallcaps|palm}} in some accents including Received Pronunciation, but with {{Smallcaps|trap}} in others including General American. So a new character, the "half-hook a", was devised, to avoid the necessity of producing separate instructional materials for speakers of different accents.

[[File:ITA-Half-hook-a.svg|thumb|right|The half-hook a, not shown in the diagram above.]]

A series of international ITA conferences were held, the fourth being in Montreal in 1967.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Block |first1=J.R. |title=i.t.a As a Language Arts Medium |date=1967 |publisher=i.t.a. Foundation |url=https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED047903.pdf}}</ref>