Pronunciation respelling for English

rdf:langString Pronunciation respelling for English

rdf:langString K&K

rdf:langString July 2020

rdf:langString lower-roman

rdf:langString A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which does not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling: * "Phonemic" systems, as commonly found in American dictionaries, consistently use one symbol per English phoneme. These systems are conceptually equivalent to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) commonly used in bilingual dictionaries and scholarly writings but tend to use symbols based on English rather than Romance-language spelling conventions (e.g. ē for IPA /i/) and avoid non-alphabetic symbols (e.g. sh for IPA /ʃ/). * On the other hand, "non-phonemic" or "newspaper" systems, commonly used in newspapers and other non-technical writings, avoid diacritics and literally "respell" words making use of well-known English words and spelling conventions, even though the resulting system may not have a one-to-one mapping between symbols and sounds. As an example, one pronunciation of Arkansas, transcribed /ˈɑːrkənsɔː/ in the IPA, could be respelled är′kən-sô′ or AR-kən-saw in a phonemic system and ar-kuhn-saw in a non-phonemic system.