Society. Ellis's son Tristram James Ellis trained as an engineer, but later became a noted painter of the Middle East. Phonetic alphabets Ellis developed two phonetic alphabets, the English Phonotypic Alphabet (together with Isaac Pitman), which used many new letters, and the Palaeotype alphabet, which replaced many of these with turned letters (such as ⟨ə⟩, ⟨ɔ⟩), small caps (such as ⟨ɪ⟩), and italics. Two of his novel letters survived: ⟨ʃ⟩ and ⟨ʒ⟩ were passed on to Henry Sweet's Romic alphabet and from there to the International Phonetic Alphabet. Works (selected) 1845, The Alphabet of Nature 1848, A Plea for Phonetic Spelling: or, The Necessity of Orthographic Reform 1869, On Early English Pronunciation, London: N. Trübner / reissued by Greenwood Press: New York (1968). --do.-- On early English pronunciation : with especial reference to Shakspere and Chaucer, containing an investigation of the correspondence of writing with speech in England from the Anglosaxon period to the present day ... (text online at "archive.org") 1885, "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations", Journal of the Society of Arts 33, p. 485. (Link is to a HTML transcription (Accessed September 2008) 1890, English Dialects – Their Sounds and Homes Notes References M. K. C. MacMahon, Ellis , Alexander John (1814–1890), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 14 June 2006 External links 1814 births 1890 deaths Burials at Kensal Green Cemetery People from Hoxton People educated at Shrewsbury School Dialectologists English-language spelling reform advocates English philologists English music theorists Ethnomusicologists Fellows of the Royal Society International Phonetic Alphabet 19th-century musicologists