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Re:English has been my pain for 15 years by MSexton on Monday September 02, 2013 @11:33AM (#6315604)
When I took an acting class on accents, I learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa). It is surprisingly handy, although most Americans have no idea it exists, much less how to read it.
Re:English has been my pain for 15 years by nu23 on Monday September 02, 2013 @01:50PM (#6316221)
Interesting. This is a very detailed effort, with encyclopaedic ambitions across different languages. The question is if there is a lightweight version of this - someway of chosing a reasonably small set of phonemes which can represent, most English words accurately. The second part is to represent the phonemes by either using a small number of new letters and diacritics (which is what the IPA already does), or to map the phonemes directly to single letters or a string of two or three letters. With the second option, there would still be ambiguity in reading a spelling (where are the phoneme breaks?). But, the accent situation would improve and one can get used to the phoneme boundaries by looking it up for each new word.