The unknown history of letters For as long as any letter could remember, Vowels and Consonants had been enemies. U without N? Q without U? Mpssh! you say. Yet once, long ago, P's and Q's minded their p's and q's, and though U and I deserved not one iota of respect. For their part, Vowels knew only that the dot on the youngest i was far moe important than the most capital W. And so they came to wage a fierce war to prove who were the better letters. But as S's outflank E's and O's surround H's, an enemy of all the alphabet appers on the horizon--one which neither Vowels or Consonants can conquer alone. In this hilarious look at the hidden life of letters, Priscilla and Whitney Turner reveal how sworn enemies become allies and discovered what you and I now take for granted: that the pen is mightier than the swrd.

The vowels and the consonants fight each other until they realize that if they work together they can create marvelous poems, plays, and memoirs.

A stroke of the pen and history is changed. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, determined to avoid war, signed the Munich Accord, ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. But the following spring, Hitler snatched the rest of that country, and England, after a fatal act of appeasement, was fighting a war for which it was not prepared. Now, in this thrilling alternate history, another scenario is played out: What if Chamberlain had not signed the accord? In this action-packed chronicle of the war that might have been, Harry Turtledove uses dozens of points of view to tell the story: from American marines serving in Japanese-occupied China and ragtag volunteers fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain to an American woman desperately trying to escape Nazi-occupied territory—and witnessing the war from within the belly of the beast. A tale of powerful leaders and ordinary people, at once brilliantly imaginative and hugely entertaining, Hitler’s War captures the beginning of a very different World War II—with a very different fate for our world today. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Harry Turtledove's The War that Came Early: West and East.

This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It's a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters ) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables.

On the island of Alphabeterra, there are no words. The consonants are separated from the vowels by the Forest of Empty Pages. It is so vast and imposing that the letters are afraid to explore it. One day a brave "s" named Stella and an intrepid "u" named Upton decide to make their way through the forest-one from the west, the other from the east. Their journeys lead them to a discovery that can only be described as Awesome. This lighthearted adventure blends humor with a bit of education, a lot of colorful imagery and a reminder of what one can gain with courage and friendship.

Accompanying CD contains ... "[all] the sounds described in this book."--Page 4 of cover.