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Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by monknomo on Friday October 03, 2025 @01:23PM (#45465338)
Which accent should the phonetic representation be based on?

Thick lousiana accent? Southeast london accent? Boston southie accent? Mid-atlantic?

No matter what you choose, it won't be phonetic for someone

Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by tracker1 on Friday October 03, 2025 @03:09PM (#45466602)
The west-coast US/Canadian accent most likely as it's most prominent in popular media, and likely the largest English speaking accent group.

But good luck getting the UK or India to adopt it.

Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by zarzavat on Friday October 03, 2025 @04:15PM (#45467293)
Yu hav too bee bluddy kidding mee if yu fink aim gonna yuz som yanky spellin skeem.
Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by tracker1 on Friday October 03, 2025 @04:25PM (#45467398)
Yu du waht yu havf tu du m8.
Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by dh2022 on Friday October 03, 2025 @05:40PM (#45468120)
All these license plate numbers now finally make sense!!!
Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by sorrythanks on Friday October 03, 2025 @02:38PM (#45466243)
type in your own accent, it works when we talk
Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by thfuran on Friday October 03, 2025 @03:22PM (#45466748)
It sometimes work when we talk.
Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by efitz on Friday October 03, 2025 @04:23PM (#45467369)
I believe that there is a lowest common denominator for accented English, and it sounds like “sung” English - which sounds like non-regional American English if the singer is singing and doesn’t naturally have a very pronounced accent. This is partially due to cultural effects but partially due to the mechanics of speaking with an accent.

By “lowest common denominator“, I mean omitting affectations like non-rotic R (Boston) and dropped g (urban) and exaggerated length of selected vowels (US southeast) and constant syllable length and other kinds of things. There are lots of videos on YouTube about how accents work.

But mainly phonetics is about eliminating silent letters, using the most unambiguous letter when there is a choice (eg K or S instead of C), etc.

Anyway I’m rambling but you probably get my point.

Re:The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall o... by thefringthing on Saturday October 04, 2025 @12:28PM (#45474514)
Kingsley Read went with something like an artificially rhotic midcentury RP when designing the Shavian alphabet. It works reasonably well for me, a Standard Canadian English speaker, except that distinguishing all the open vowels (father/bought/bot) can be a struggle,