BACKGROUND / EVOLUTION Of the Easy-to-read WORDS

1) It all started with CVC words.
Many reading programs for beginners focus first on three-letter, single-syllable words which have the form “Consonant-Vowel-Consonant” (CVC). Almost all of these words have a short vowel and most programs teach only those CVC words with a short vowel. The reason for teaching these words first is that it builds confidence. The students are never faced with ambiguities -- every letter in every word has only one sound. There are about 340 CVC words with a short vowel in the English language (ignoring proper nouns). Beginners can, at least, pronounce these words even if they have never seen a particular word before or do not have it in their verbal vocabulary.

2) But that has limitations: It’s not easy to create interesting sentences with 340 CVC words alone. About the best we can do is write sentences like, “Six big pigs can get gas”.

3) Adding ADDITIONAL short-vowel, single-syllable words helps BYPASS THOSE LIMITATIONS:
We added other single-syllable short-vowel words (stretch, clamp, match, and so on -- there are at least a thousand such words) we also added prefixes and suffixes with short vowels. This means we can expand the complexity of possible sentences, for instance, “Sixty bigger piglets living in filth did not mess with the rotten rats”.

4) Adding short-vowel, multi-syllable words helps more:
We then selected and added a couple of thousand multi-syllable words which contain only short vowels (words such as “terrific and “peripatetic”, we can then write much more interesting sentences which are complex grammatically, but easy-to-read.

5) Adding 46 digraphs and trigraphs, which we call letter combinations, greatly expands the versatility of our list of words:
These letter-combinations are treated (spelled and read) as though they are letters with specific speech-sounds. We wound up adding aer, ai, air, all, ally, ar, au, aw, ay, ch, ea, ear, ee, er, ice, ie, ine, ing, ink, ir, kn, le, oa, oe, oi, oo, ook, or, ou, ow, oy, qu, sh, sky, th, ue, ur, wh and wr.

We also show that “a”, “e”, “o”, “le”, “ly” and “y” have a special pronunciation when they are at the end of a word. We also show that “y” inside a word is pronounced uniquely. (see page 7)

That basically gave us an alphabet with 72 letters and an almost perfectly phonetic list of more than 9,660 regularly spelled words -- without changing the spelling of any of those words.

6) WE DO NOT INCLUDE CERTAIN WORDS WHICH CONTAIN AWKWARD SPELLING:
6.1) All words with soft “c” and soft “g’ are not included.
6.2) “ph” for /f/ is not included.
6.3) “ough”, “ight”, “eau” and the like are not included.

7) The following two easy-to-read sentences are examples of what can be written with the 9,000+ absolutely phonetic words:
(7.1) We now have a long list of interesting words which can be the feedstock for an endless number of interesting articles, essays and witty epigrams.
(7.2) I tried windsurfing, but I hurt my wrist on the first day -- so I quit.

The following two rules have to be observed.
1) All letters within a 2- or 3-letter-combination as shown on page #7 always abandon their individual pronunciations. The pronunciation of the combination is always used.
2) All 2-letter combinations within a 3-letter combination as shown above always abandon their individual pronunciations. The pronunciation of the 3-letter combination is always used. For instance, if the word is “ears” (an “ea” is in the “ear”) , it is pronounced ear/s -- not ee/r/s (as though it has two speech-sounds, not three).