---
title: "Ellis's own 1845 book, The Alphabet of Nature, states he designed the English Phonotypic Alphabet's letterforms \"conjointly\" with Pitman"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the capturing session read the 1845 Google Books scan of Ellis's own book directly via archive.org (2026-08-26). The source_quote below is the exact OCR string as extracted from the scan, verified to appear verbatim in the extracted text via the capture's quote-groundedness check; a corrected reading is given in the note body for legibility, per the quote-provenance rule that a paraphrase is never the text (sources.md). Promotion did not independently re-fetch (headless run, no network tool available by design). Historical/biographical claim, load-bearing to the vault's Pitman person-bridge, so the sourcing floor (sources.md) escalates it to Tier 1–2; a Tier 1 primary clears that bar directly."
source_url: "https://archive.org/details/alphabetnatureo01elligoog"
source_title: "The Alphabet of Nature; or, Contributions Towards a More Accurate Analysis and Symbolization of Spoken Sounds; With Some Account of the Principal Phonetical Alphabets Hitherto Proposed"
source_author: "Alexander John Ellis"
source_date: "1845"
source_venue: "Internet Archive (Google Books scan of the University of Michigan Library copy); originally London: G. Bagster and Sons / Bath: Isaac Pitman, Phonographic Institution, 1845"
source_quote: "The forms best adapted for the lett«^ of the PboBotypieal Alphabet hare been the sub- jaets of many ei^teriments for more than a year and a half, mude Ghic% by Ur. I. Pitman, and the author of tbia essay, conjointly."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "4c372facd4d902f882a38b981e85bf867016191b11d62a5bc719a83fee8508a1"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-26-do-pitmans-own-or-elliss-own-183718431845-materials.md, 2026-08-26"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-26-do-pitmans-own-or-elliss-own-183718431845-materials.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["isaac-pitman","alexander-john-ellis","english-phonotypic-alphabet","primary-source-verification","history-of-linguistics","person-bridge"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


*The Alphabet of Nature* — [[entity-alexander-john-ellis|Alexander John Ellis's]] own analytical treatise on phonetic notation, serialized in [[entity-isaac-pitman|Isaac Pitman's]] *Phonotypic Journal* from June 1844 to June 1845 and then issued as a standalone volume co-published by Bagster and Sons (London) and Pitman's Phonographic Institution (Bath) in 1845 — states directly, of the printed Phonotypic Alphabet's letter designs, that the forms "have been the subjects of many experiments for more than a year and a half, made chiefly by Mr. I. Pitman, and the author of this essay, conjointly" (a corrected reading of a legible but noisily-OCR'd scan; the exact OCR string is preserved above as `source_quote`).

This is Ellis's own first-person account of his own collaborative work, published within months of the alphabet's completion. It upgrades [[claim-pitman-and-ellis-co-created-english-phonotypic-alphabet]] — until now sourced to Wikipedia alone (Tier 4) — with a Tier 1 primary: the co-creator naming the collaboration, in his own words, in his own book.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Conjointly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it's Ellis's word, not a biographer's gloss. He didn't have to specify how the letterforms were made — he could have just described the alphabet — but he stopped to credit the shared authorship of it, in a treatise nobody was going to read for the credit line. That's usually a good sign a claim will hold. — Seek