Talk:Spelling alphabet

2007-02-9 Automated pywikipediabot message
--CopyToWiktionaryBot 08:17, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Alternatives in german spelling alphabet
The official word for z is Zacharias. The Nazis had changed some letters to remove jewish names. From their version Zeppelin and Siegfried (instead of Samuel) are often used even nowadays. But these are not included in the official spelling alphabet


 * I have fixed it, so the German alphabet is now in conformity with the official spelling alphabet as normed in DIN 5009. Anastasios Hatzis (talk) 18:19, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Alternatives in Swedish spelling alphabet
What is listed here is the spelling alphabet of the Swedish Military. There is also a civilian version, that differs substantially. (Or at least there used to be. It was always included in the telephone directory, up until the late 1990's.) Also, this list has 'Fredrik' for 'F', whereas most lists I've ever seen use 'Filip'. Popup (talk) 12:49, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

In fact there's a page on the Swedish_Armed_Forces'_phonetic_alphabet that specifies 'Filip'. Popup (talk) 09:21, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually the Swedish military uses the NATO version as of 2006 (which is also mentioned in that article), and I would like to have that noted in this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.233.234.79 (talk) 22:55, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Fictional versions
Would a section on fictional versions of the spelling alphabet be appropriate? For instance in one episode of The Simpsons where the licence plate "EXCON" is read out by the Springfield police elite as "Eggplant-Xerxes-Crybaby-Overbite-Narwhal". Ianhilluk (talk) 13:54, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
 * No. Or to put it another way, NO! I'm curious - what conceivable use would this be to anyone?  Encyclopedias should be about real things, not throw-away items decorating one episode of a televison series. Maybe on a Simpsonsopedia...but not here. No "popular culture references", no "triva section", etc. etc. - we have a hard enough time documenting facts. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:02, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Examples
While I can see the attraction of making links in the table of examples, the logical outcome is that every word in the table would end up as a link. In a case of 'all or nothing' I would rather see 'nothing', but the way it is at the moment seems a bit of a mess. The-Dixie-Flatline (talk) 18:21, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Other alphabets?
I'm curious to know about spelling alphabets in Cyrillic (for example). I presume that they exist. Zetetic Apparatchik (talk) 18:24, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * And what about Indian languages? Or is the English list used then? Wiki-uk (talk) 09:06, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
 * There is a link on the page to the Russian one, I don't know about others thoun Anzeana (talk) 18:59, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

The language columns are wrong
The column titled "German (DIN 5009)" has the Dutch spelling words beneath it. The column titled "Dutch" seems to be German, however I doubt the word "Tore" is used in German. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.204.133.16 (talk) 08:13, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
 * In addition, the one attributed to "British Forces 1952" (and thus obviously accepted from its "source" without questioning or researching) was used by all the military forces of the United States throughout World War II. Ditto the "LAPD" (and its linked article). APCO would be the more appropriate title.--Reedmalloy (talk) 17:12, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Spanish for/by Catalonia?
The Spanish spelling alphabet seems to have written by/for Spaniards, or specifically Catalonians (Barcelona?, Gerona?, Tarragona?, Llobregat?) I doubt the average Latin American knows how to spell "Gerona" or "Llobregat".) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.87.19.206 (talk) 19:04, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

There is an error in the Dutch spelling alphabet. I corrected it. Somebody got angry with me.
In this page, it says in Dutch spelling alphabet is T for 'Theodor'. That is nonsense. There is no Dutch name 'Theodor'. In Dutch spelling alphabet, T is for 'Theodoor'. This name is with double O in Dutch. Seriously. I am Dutch. Anyway, here is a link to the Dutch wikipedia page for that name if you don't believe me: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodorus

Somebody just told me that I committed vandalism, but I really only corrected a spelling error, and I will correct it again. I am not sure if I managed to contact the guy who contacted me as there was no reply button. I normally don't discuss on Wikipedia, I hardly do anything more than correcting spelling errors...

Erik Smit 80.79.32.43 (talk) 15:10, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Absent sourcing for the change, it does appear to be vandalism. If it's not, I do apologize. I don't know Dutch, so I remain skeptical; your being Dutch, I'm afraid, isn't enough to justify changing it, & a WP page isn't, either.  TREKphiler   any time you're ready, Uhura  19:59, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Spelling alphabet. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added tag to http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/oth/02/01/S02010000144002PDFE.PDF)
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121204210900/http://www.dr-belair.com/dic/Defence/Sea-Forces/Sea-flags/ICOSbook.pdf to http://www.dr-belair.com/dic/Defence/Sea-Forces/Sea-flags/ICOSbook.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160117170418/http://memim.com/nato-phonetic-alphabet.html to http://memim.com/nato-phonetic-alphabet.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 10:38, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

ARRL alphabet doubts
I found a historical document from 1959 that includes 203 spelling alphabets in its appendix. In updating the article, I found a good history of the ARRL alphabet that doesn't agree with the ~1936 ARRL column in this article. The present list seems unlikely, given that "The Evolution and Rationale of the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) Word-Spelling Alphabet, July 1959" states that up until 1946 the ARRL alphabet had geographic names, which the FCC banned that year, and prior to that the ARRL used the Western Union alphabet. This list is suspiciously similar to the 1927-1937 Navy Department alphabet. Can someone with good access to ARRL historical documents research this further? Peter K. Sheerin 00:52, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Source unclear
The source for the "1969-present Phonetic" column at is unclear (and needs citing). —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 17:51, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I've also removed the source for the "1951 IATA code words" column in that table because it does not mention IATA. Also note that the title of the article spells "alpha" but internally, it (correctly) says "Alfa (Alpha - the "ph" sound is not recognised internationally)". We've also explained this elsewhere in the article, which supports changing the table to "Alfa".

Also, the table at has a column "1951 IATA Phonetic", which presumably is supposed to reference the same source, and in which I've also changed the spelling to "Alfa" for the same reason. The sources for the ICAO also show "Alfa", so I've changed the spelling in that column as well. —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 19:13, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I confirmed spelling of "Alpha" in the "APCO Project 14 (1974)" column of the table at. —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 19:23, 27 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that! Can I ask your help in tracing the alpha vs. alfa in the 1951 IATA reference? I'm almost certainly the editor who added that column, and I take particular care to match this spelling issue accurately to the source, and don't think I would have done it wrong. But alas, since I didn't cite my own addition... I will try to get to this over the weekend if you're unable to track down the source by then. PetesGuide, K6WEB (talk) 19:33, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I did spend quite a while on that before deciding to remove the source and change the spelling, without finding anything useful, though there is a lot to sort through. One of the things that convinced me was the repeated mention in various places of the problem with languages other than English not pronouncing "ph" as "f", and a primary purpose of the standardization of the codes being to normalize international usage. The IATA, IIRC, has been more closed about their pubs (i.e. charging for them) in the past, which may explain why I had trouble finding the primary source at least. IIRC, ICAO/NATO received input from them at some point, so archives at those sites might yield something. —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 15:19, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Actually, you added it here as Alfa. It must have been changed since then. —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 15:28, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

number systems
at one point, i heard a numbers disambguation system - i remember (or am creating a memory) with words like "fourflusher" for 4; "seventh heaven" for 7; "eightball" for 8, and so forth. i would appreciate any expansion that would also be as culture-free as possible. Brucefhyman (talk) 20:56, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

ICAO
As I recall, on air control radio there is no 'th', so it would be tree, not three. 134.247.251.245 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:52, 24 February 2020 (UTC)