á rə̀t ðis pə̀st tù əksplén má sistəm fə rátiŋ iŋgliʃ yùziŋ ə fənemik (ofən kōld fənetik) skript. dí igzakt fōm əv ðə sistəm həz dəveləpt ənd cénjd ə̀ve mʌltipəl yīz, bət it həz ōlwéz bín ə komprəmáz bətwín ðə simbəlz yùzd tə rát fənemik ingliʃ in ðí əfiʃəl intənaʃənəl fənetik alfəbet (/IPA/), ən ðə simbəlz yùzd kənvencnəlí in standəd ingliʃ speliŋ. má mʌðə tʌŋ iz nonrə̀tik britiʃ ingliʃ frəm ístən iŋglənd (kémbrijʃī), sə̀ ðə sistəm əz á yùz it wə̄ks best fə ðis dáəlekt əv ingliʃ
I wrote this post to explain my system for writing English using a phonemic (often called phonetic) script. The exact form of the system has developed and changed over multiple years, but it has always been a compromise between the symbols used to write phonemic English in the official International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and the symbols used conventionally in standard English spelling. My mother tongue is non-rhotic British English from eastern England (Cambridgeshire), so the system as I use it works best for this dialect of English.
I have two different sort orders:
pbmwfvθðtdnszʃʒcjrlykgŋhaāáàiīíuūùeēéoōóòʌəə̄ə̀
aāáàbcdðeēéfghiīíjklmnŋoōóòprsʃtθuūùvwyzʒəə̄ə̀ʌ
English spelling is known for being difficult and taking a long time to learn both for native speaker children and non-native adult learners. This is mostly because there is a many-to-many mapping between symbols (letters) and sounds (phomemes). In English, if you come across a new word you don’t reliably know how it should be pronounced. For example should the made-up word ‘tead’ be pronounced to rhyme with ‘mead’ or with ‘head’? In the other direction, if you hear a new word, you can’t necessarily tell how it is spelled. For example should the made-up word pronounced /dait/ (rhymes with ‘write’) be spelled ‘dite’, ‘dyte’, or ‘dight’?
If you grew up only speaking English, it’s not obvious that spelling doesn’t have to be so complicated. English spelling is actually uncommonly complex, and has inspired a long tradition of people trying to ‘fix’ the problem – it’s even got its own wikipedia page. Many languages have a much more straightforward mapping between letters and phonemes. Spanish and Polish are examples of languages with high degrees of correspondence between letters and phonemes. See here for a longer list of languages and more detail.
I use this system for almost all of my handwritten text (mostly to-do lists and journaling), and increasingly for my typed text. The reasons I like using this system:
Other reasons why you might like this system:
My main criteria for this spelling system were:
Here I’ll go through the phonemes of English group by group to slowly build up from more familiar to less familiar symbols.
p, t, k, b, d, g, a, i, u, e, o
five short vowels:
stop consonants:
ʌ, m, n, ŋ
short vowel: ʌ, as in:
nasals:
r, l, y, w
ə
The schwa: ə, this vowel is found all over English in unstressed syllables, it’s sortof a nothing placeholder vowel.
indefinite article:
syllabic nasals and liquids:
unstressed syllable nucleus:
ā, ī, ū, ē, ō, ə̄
These are the lengthened versions of the 5 ‘cardinal’ short vowels we encountered in Step 1, plus a lengthened version of the schwa vowel.
f, v, s, z, h
í, é, á, ó
there are four diphthongs ending with the /i/ sound, see the book English after RP for an explanation of why the long í vowel is included here
c, j
c is mostly ‘ch’ in Standard English spelling
j is mostly ‘j’ in Standard English spelling
affricates:
ù, ə̀, à, ò
there are four diphthongs ending with the /u/ sound, see the book English after RP for an explanation of why the long ù vowel is included here
θ, ð, ʃ, ʒ
θ and ð are mostly ‘th’ in Standard English spelling, but they’re actually two separate phonemes
ʃ is mostly ‘sh’ in Standard English spelling
ʒ has no particular consistent spelling
fricatives:
éə, áə, óə, ùə, àə, ə̀ə
I write the ‘triphthongs’ using the relevant diphthong symbol plus the schwa.
A single word can sometimes have multiple parts (morphemes), for example, the word ‘walked’ is made up of two morphemes, the ‘walk’ part which gives the core meaning, and the ‘-ed’ part which gives the past tense.
Sometimes a morpheme can have different pronunciations depending on the word to which it is attached. These different pronunciations are called ‘allomorphs’. In Standard English spelling, they are usually spelled the same way, but in my spelling system they’re written as they sound, and therefore have different spellings. This is how most languages with phonemic writing systems represent allomorphs.
Below, I’ve laid out some of the most common allomorphs in English.
1) The ‘-ed’ past tense morpheme has three allomorphs depending on the final sound of the word to which it is attached:
2) the ‘-s’ plural morpheme has three allomorphs:
3) the ‘-‘s’ genitive morpheme, follows exactly the same pattern as the plural morpheme
4) the definite article “the” has two allomorphs:
5) the indefinite article “a/an” has two allomorphs, which are actually already visible in Standard English spelling:
Coming soon.
Coming soon.
Writing the vowels is a bit harder than in standard English spelling. This is because there is an extremely poor mapping between vowel phonemes and the letters used to spell them: there are so many different options to represent a given vowel phoneme, often using digraphs, patterns split out into different parts of the word, patterns which combine with consonant letters, etc. There are also only five ‘vowel’ symbols in English spelling, while there are ~13 pure vowel phonemes and ~8 diphthongs.
I chose to write diphthongs using diacritics. I really like this featural aspect of my writing system: you can see whether a diphthong ends in /i/ or /u/ from the direction of the diacritic. Because I also used a macron diacritic for the long pure vowels, the feature of syllable nucleus weight is also visible from the presence of the diacritic. The table below lays this out more clearly.
| short | long | opening | closing |
|---|---|---|---|
| a had |
ā lard |
á buy |
à cow |
| o odd |
ō lore |
ó boy |
ò coal |
| e head |
ē lair |
é bay |
|
| i hid |
ī leer |
í bee |
|
| ə uhuh |
ə̄ lurk |
ə̀ cone |
|
| u hood |
ū lure |
ù coo |
|
| ʌ bud |
Geoffrey Alan Lindsey (2019). English after RP: standard British pronunciation today. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wikipedia. (2020). Phonemic orthography. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography
Wikipedia. (2020). English-language spelling reform. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform
Wikipedia. (2022). English orthography. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography