![]() Well, I must admit, of all the different alphabets this was the easiest for me to write as a native English speaker, and it would also have been pretty easy to decode the letters if I were given a passage without a chart. Well, 40 characters sounds about right even if not many people cared, so let's see how it fares with our favorite quotes. While that was pretty much it for English applications there was a serious attempt, spearheaded by Tom Parsons of Humboldt State University, to adapt Unifon for transcribing Native American Languages (perhaps as a tonic for the surface horrors of Americanist phonetic notation) but after years of work the idea died with Parsons's departure from the university. Through the '60s and '70s numerous tests were done to teach children the alphabet, which was often called a "training wheels" alphabet, and several articles were published in the '70s and '80s in publications like The New York Times and Science Digest. Malone shelved his idea until some time later when he found out his Kindergarten-aged son couldn't read, and he dusted off his 40 character invention. The Bendix Corporation had a man named John Malone under contract and he had created his own phonetic alphabet as part of a larger project, but once the IATA made its decision the Bendix people decided to terminate Malone as the project he was working on, including Unifon, had lost its market. In 1957 the International Air Transport Association chose English as the official lingua franca of the friendly skies. ![]() ![]() Unifon was borne out of a more specific project than most spelling reform projects, the magical realm of airplane communication.
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