When we were in the design phase of our Alphabest Prints, our artist, Izzy, sent over a picture of the cutest E, that managed to look just like an elephant.

We loved it. Which is why it was so hard to exclude it from our print. But it wasn’t right.

E is for elephant – there’s no argument of that – so maybe it’s more correct to say it wasn’t right for us.

As discussed in a previous post, our Alphabest Prints use embedded picture mnemonics – all 26 letters of the alphabet have a key word embedded directly into the visualisation of the letter. So rather than the letter A being next to a picture of an apple, the letter A is made to look like an apple.

However, the other issue we were aware of is that while the English language is made up of 26 letters, it is also made up of 44 phonemes (sounds).

We don’t need to break down how each of these 44 sounds are represented by each of the 26 letter in the alphabet, as this isn’t set in stone – and for good reason, with issues such as your accent and dialect playing a role (try having a phoneme chat over some fish and chips with a New Zealander).

So while some say the letter A makes four sounds, others say it’s five and others still say it’s nine. For our purposes, it’s sufficient to simply acknowledge that A is for apple, but A is for angel too.

Perhaps a better example is the letter G, which is the first letter and phoneme in both giraffe and golf.

When it came to designing the letters for our Alphabest Prints, a cute giraffe would have been the more obvious and easy option to engage young minds – the tallest land animal in the world is easily recognisable for kids.

However, we had to ask ourselves, “what is the best sound to represent?”

And in the instance of the letter G, the hard G (for golf, grape, gold) is both more common than the soft G (giraffe, gem, genius) as well as being the only opportunity to represent this particular phoneme; the soft G sound is also able to be represented by, funnily enough, the hard J (jaw, jewel, juice).

So we went ‘golf’ as the embedded picture mnemonic for the letter g.

That was how we went about making choices for all 26 letters on our Alphabest Prints – we asked ourselves, “what is the most common use of this letter when making sounds?” Then we used that to guide how the letter should be represented.

U for unicorn, I for ice-cream and X for xylophone would have been easy wins, but in each instance, we went with the more common sound – umbrella, insect and box.

X has long been the trickiest representation for alphabet books and posters, with so many previous creators going with the Z sound – such as xylophone – or simply using X-ray. The reality of x is that it’s most commonly seen either in the middle or at the end of words, where it makes a “KS” sound – and, in fact, is the only letter to make those two sounds. So box it is.

As for our amazing E for elephant? While we ended up going with E for egg, and egg and elephant start with the same “eh” sound, where elephant is tricky is that the first syllable of elephant is “elle”.

And “elle” sounds exactly like the 12th letter of the alphabet – L.

L for elephant – we as adults know it’s incorrect but the logic for little minds is undeniable.

These are discussions we will have and lessons we will teach to our kids – and sooner rather than later. But while they are trying to wrap their heads around so many concepts, it’s best to keep things as simple as possible when they are just starting out.

L isn’t for elephant. But that can wait. Today, just enjoy your eggs!