Pronunciation respelling for English
non-IPA notation used to convey the pronunciation of English words (lookig like "lew-TEE-shee-əm")
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do 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 in the IPA, could be respelled är′kən-sô′ or AR-kən-saw in a phonemic system, and arken-saw in a non-phonemic system.
Development and use
Pronunciation respelling systems for English have been developed primarily for use in dictionaries. They are used there because it is not possible to predict with certainty the sound of a written English word from its spelling or the spelling of a spoken English word from its sound.
The public source identifies “Pronunciation respelling for English” as non-IPA notation used to convey the pronunciation of English words (lookig like "lew-TEE-shee-əm"). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pronunciation, respelling and English.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pronunciation respelling for English” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.