Annotated English

This document presents _Annota " tėd Ėnglish^, a system of diacritical symbols which turns English pronunciation into a precise and unambiguous process. The annotations are defined and located in such a way that the original English text is not altered (not even a letter), thus allowing for a consistent reading and learning of the English language with and without annotations. The annotations are based on a set of general rules that makes the frequency of annotations not dramatically high (despite the chaotic orthography of English). This makes the reader easily associate annotations with exceptions, and makes it possible to shape, internalise and consolidate some rules for the English language which otherwise are weakened by the enormous amount of exceptions in English pronunciation. The advantages of this annotation system are manifold. Any existing text can be annotated without a significant increase in size. This means that we can get an annotated version of any document or book with the same number of pages and fontsize. Since no letter is affected, the text can be perfectly read by a person who does not know the annotation rules, since annotations can be simply ignored. The annotations are based on a set of rules which can be progressively learned and recognised, even in cases where the reader has no access or time to read the rules. This means that a reader can understand most of the annotations after reading a few pages of _Annota " tėd Ėnglish^, and can take advantage from that knowledge for any other annotated document she may read in the future. These features pave the way for multiple applications. _Annota " tėd Ėnglish^ can be used as a tool for teachers and parents when English-speaking children learn English orthography or simply when they start reading. Annotated textbooks, tales, dictionaries and any other material can make English orthography less painful. _Annota " tėd Ėnglish^ can also be very useful for students of English as a foreign language, since pronunciation is terribly troublesome for them, because they need to learn the meaning, the spelling and the pronunciation for each word they learn, and the pronunciation does not improve at all by reading. This is so because we can only see the spelling and infer the meaning, but books do not provide the correct pronunciation for each word. In fact, incorrect pronunciation (we are not referring here to a bad accent or intonation) persists in people who has lived in an English-speaking country for decades, because the true pronunciation is never shown (unless the IPA transcription is looked up in a dictionary), just heard in different contexts and situations. Finally, _Annota " tėd Ėnglish^ can also be very practical for any regular user (native or not) of the English language, very especially when facing new (especially technical) words and they have doubts about their pronunciation. In this document we introduce the rules for annotations and its symbols. This document is not intended for a general audience, and the explanations are focussed to precisely understand how the annotation system works. It is obvious that if the system has to be explained to a final user, a shorter and simpler manual should be issued for that. In any case, for learning _Annota " tėd Ėnglish^, the best thing is to take a look at the examples. There is a section in this document with some annotated texts. It is recommended to take a quick look at them before getting into details.