Phonetic spelling
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since February 2007. |
In writing, phonetic spelling is the use of writing system with a finite character set, where each character (or sometimes character sequence) has exactly one corresponding phoneme (sound). The usual writing system for English does not use phonetic spelling, as the same characters often represent different sounds; indeed, English has many pairs of homographs, words that are spelled identically but pronounced differently (such as lead [lɛd], as in lead paint, and lead [lid], as in lead astray). By contrast, Spanish uses phonetic spelling; a word's pronunciation is completely identified by its spelling (though the reverse is not always the case; indeed, Spanish, like English, has many pairs of homophones, words that are pronounced identically but spelled differently).
Phonetic spelling is not necessarily a trait that a writing system either has or lacks; it is possible for one writing system to be more phonetic than another, even if neither is perfectly phonetic. Even in writing systems that are very phonetic, there are often exceptions; for example, the Spanish word jeep is pronounced [dʒip], after the English word from which it derives, even though a native Spanish word spelled jeep would be pronounced [xeˈep].
