User:Apcbg/Roman Phonetic Alphabet for English

The Roman Phonetic Alphabet for English is a system based on the Extended Basic Roman spelling of English, augmented with two pairs of stress marks in order to disambiguate homographs and ensure a one-to-one phoneme-grapheme correspondence. The system has certain similarities to the systems of the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, the Carnegie Mellon version of Arpabet alphabet , and the World Book Dictionary.

Primary stress is indicated by the mark ‹’›, or ‹”› in the case of or. Secondary stress is shown by ‹,› and ‹„› respectively. Stress marks are placed before the syllables concerned.

By way of illustration, the following reference text by V. Yule is given in traditional spelling and in Roman Phonetic Alphabet transcription (shown is the non-rhotic version; in the rhotic one, relevant words like ‘daughter’, ‘heart’, ‘pictures’ etc. are transcribed \’dootar\, \’haart\, \’pikcharz\ etc.):


 * Once upon a time, the beautiful daughter of a great magician wanted more pearls to put among her treasures. “Look through the centre of the moon when it is blue,” said her royal mother in answer to her question.  “You might find your heart’s desire.”  The fair princess laughed, because she doubted these words.  Instead, she used her imagination, and moved into the photography business, and took pictures of the moon in colour.  “I perceive most certainly that it is almost wholly white,” she thought.  She also found that she could make enough money in eight months to buy herself two lovely huge new jewels too.


 * ”Wans a’pon a taym, dha ’byutiful ’doota av ”a greyt ma’jishan ’wontid moo ”paalz tu put a”mang ”haa ’trezhaz. “Luk thru dha ’senta av dha muun hwen it iz bluu,” sed ”haa ’royal ’madha in ’ansa tu ”haa ’kweschan. “Yu mayt faynd yoo ’haats di’zaya.” Dha fea ’prinses ’laaft, bi’koz shi ’dautid dhiyz ”waadz. Insted, shi yuzd ”haa i,maji’neyshan, and muuvd intu dha fo’tografi biznis, and tuk ’pikchaz av dha muun in ”kala. “Ay paa’siyv moust ”saatanli ’dhat it iz olmoust houli wayt,” shi thoot. Shi olsou faund ’dhat shi kud meyk i”naf ”mani in eyt ”manths tu bay haa’self tuu ”lavli hyuj nyu ’juualz tuu.