Legomorphic NotationSound and Word Atlas

Credits

Credits and copyright

Legomorphic Notation stands on other people’s work. These are the writers it draws on, and the terms for using what’s here.

Spelling and words

  • Edward Carney, A Survey of English Spelling (Routledge, 1994). The backbone of the route, cited by page on every step.
  • Richard Venezky, “English Orthography: Its Graphical Structure and Its Relation to Sound,” Reading Research Quarterly 2 (1967), and The Structure of English Orthography (Mouton, 1970). Spelling as a system, including the letters that mark how other letters are read, such as a silent e: the job the vault, the nudge and the cone show. His later book is The American Way of Spelling (Guilford, 1999).
  • Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (Harper & Row, 1968). Their argument that English spelling keeps a word’s parts the same when their sounds change, as in sign and signature, is the premise word sums rest on.
  • Carol Chomsky, “Reading, Writing, and Phonology,” Harvard Educational Review 40, no. 2 (1970): 287–309 (doi). She carried that morphophonemic view of spelling into teaching learners to read and write.
  • Melvyn Ramsden, whose Real Spelling gave us word sums and word matrices, the basis of the grade 3 word sum cards. His book is Rescuing Spelling (Southgate Publishers).
  • Pete Bowers, who brought word sums and matrices into classrooms as structured word inquiry. His book is Teaching How the Written Word Works. With John R. Kirby and S. Hélène Deacon he wrote “The Effects of Morphological Instruction on Literacy Skills: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” Review of Educational Research 80, no. 2 (2010) (doi), and with Jeffrey Bowers, “Beyond Phonics: The Case for Teaching Children the Logic of the English Spelling System,” Educational Psychologist 52, no. 2 (2017): 124–141 (doi).
  • Sue Scibetta Hegland, Beneath the Surface of Words: What English Spelling Reveals and Why It Matters (Learning About Spelling).
  • E. W. Dolch, “A Basic Sight Vocabulary,” The Elementary School Journal 36, no. 6 (1936): 456–460. The Dolch cards and the Word lists page.
  • Edward Fry, whose first 100 Instant Words hold the three ELP words that aren’t Dolch’s: each, other and people.
  • Central Okanagan Public Schools, Early Literacy Profile (ELP) Assessment & Instructional Guide (2025), pp. 16–17, for the ELP word lists. The cards made from them aren’t an SD23 publication.

Reading and learning

  • Daniil Elkonin. Sound circles go back to his boxes, where a learner pushes a counter into a box for each sound.
  • Linnea Ehri, “Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning,” Scientific Studies of Reading 18, no. 1 (2014): 5–21 (doi). Her account of how readers bond a word’s spelling to its sounds and meaning is why it helps to mark which letters spell which sound.
  • Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), for the idea of feedback the first session is built on.
  • The studies behind marking by hand are cited on Using the operator cards, in the Session 1 handouts.

Sentences

  • Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman, 1985), for operator: their name for the first auxiliary, the word that carries the negative and moves to the front to make a question.
  • Zellig Harris, “Co-Occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic Structure,” Language 33, no. 3 (1957): 283–340, and Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Mouton, 1957), for kernel: their name for a language’s simplest sentences. The notation keeps the word for what’s built first, and grows the rest from it.

Type and hosting

Fraunces and Lexend, with Gentium Plus in the deck and handouts, all under the SIL Open Font License. The pages load them from Google Fonts. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages.

Copywrite

Learners come to language by copying it: the voices around them first, then letters and words, until the copies become something they can write for themselves. Every language user does the same, and so does anyone who builds on a language, whether in a lesson, a book or a notation like this.

Copyright guards a particular way of saying something. Copywrite is the older practice underneath it: taking what others have said and written, and writing it again in your own hand. This site is copywrite too, written in its own marks from what the people above worked out. The licence is meant to keep that open. Copy these cards, mark them, change them, and make them fit your learners.

Contact

Questions, corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Email Dante Wetherow

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