names - How to describe the practice of using "am-pluh-fi-key-shun" to indicate it's pronouncation?



For instance, if we use [,æmplɪfɪ'keɪʃən] [,æmpləfə'keʃən] to indicate how to read "amplification", the practice is called phonetic notation or phonetic transcription, and the symbol is called International Phonetic Alphabet.


My questions are


1) How shall I describe the following practice: "amplification is read as am-pluh-fi-key-shun" Is there a name for the kind of phonetic notation?


2) what's the difference between [IPA] and [this kind of phonetic notation (am-pluh-fi-key-shun for amplification)] in terms of the degree of formality and/or which one is more commonly used?


3)Is it unanimous to use, for intance, -uh- for [ə] in this kind of notation? Maybe other people would write it as am-pli-fi-ki-shion or anything else?



Answer



This kind of pronunciation help is called a pronunciation respelling. Unlike IPA, it’s not actually a transliteration as such, since it doesn’t use one system of writing to represent something from a different system of writing: it uses the same system of writing to (attempt to) resolve ambiguities within that system itself.


The advantage of a pronunciation respelling is that the system is immediately familiar to anyone familiar with the language, since it uses the language’s own orthography as basis. The disadvantage, especially in a language like English, is that it is less precise and more likely to be ambiguous than a true phonetic transliteration which, as oerkelens points out, is language-agnostic and based on the acoustic/enunciatory details of each individual sound.


Wikipedia has a very useful article on pronunciation respellings for English, which has a tabular overview of some of the standardised respelling systems that are or have been commonly used for English.


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