‘It does away with all the inconsistencies in the spelling of English.’
Grace Marie Raynor is an inventor, but she didn’t start that way. Pain and disappointment in a country school in Idaho sent her on a search for a better way to read and spell. She now thinks she has the answer. Raynor lives in a small two-room apartment behind a house in Newhall.
I wanted to get a hundred on my spelling so badly. And I went home one day in the first grade and I told my Dad: “I got my spelling words, how do you learn to spell?” He said: “There ain’t no way in hell to learn how to spell, you just learn it, that’s all.” I thought: “Oh my God, how can you learn to do something if you don’t know how? But you must.”
I grew up an illiterate, not totally illiterate but functionally illiterate. I hated school. I told myself when I got out of high school that I’d never go back to school because I was a failure at it.
My brother was the one who got me to go to college. He was my big brother. I always did what my big brother told me to do. I already had kids, divorces and had worked in the lumber mills before I started to college. I was so afraid of failing that I flunked out of the remedial reading class. I was so nervous the words were just blurred.
So I said: “Now what am I going to do?” Then I met a friend. He loved to go out and drink with the boys, but he didn’t want to get up and go to the lectures the next day. He was a superb reader. So I made a deal with him. I said: “You read the books and I’ll go to the lectures and we’ll get together and study.” Since I couldn’t read, I could remember almost verbatim everything everybody told me. Well, that’s how I got through college.
When I started teaching I reflected on how miserable I was when I was a first-grade student. When I’d bring this one student to the reading table he would break out in perspiration and his voice would waver because he was so nervous. He couldn’t understand how to read. He was looking for logic and there was no logic in it. He acquired such a horrible inferiority complex in the first grade that this little child was literally sick. I just empathized with those little kids so much my heart broke. And I didn’t know what to do to help them. So I decided, well, I’m going to find out.
It took me 25 years working on this.
I have invented a numerical typewriter and a revised 29-letter alphabet which makes English an absolutely pure language phonetically. It does away with all the inconsistencies in the spelling of English. When you see the words written in this language you just pronounce them in exactly the way they sound.
One version of the typewriter has 10 keys just like a touch-tone telephone. This is the missing link with computers. All 29 letters can be made with 0 through 9. Another version has all 29 letters on a standard-style keyboard.
This is a language designed so that illiterates will have a method they can use to read and spell. If they want to progress later on and learn standard English, they can. But we won’t have any illiterates because those who can’t learn standard English can at least rely on this alphanumeric English. They can read and spell it, so they won’t be handicapped.
What I really want to do is license the right to use this process to computer people, to toy manufacturers and to anyone who uses languages. If I had access to a television program, I could eliminate illiteracy in this country in two years.
The satisfaction I get out of it is that I see a light at the end of the illiteracy tunnel. I see that there’s hope for people who are now illiterate and whose minds and lives are being wasted because of the handicap of illiteracy. And, if I can do something to help eliminate that handicap, I’ll sacrifice. I’ll live under a bridge in a cardboard box and pick through garbage cans. That’s how devoted I am.
