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.L. Ivanov, V. Yule, [http://members.lycos.co.uk/rre/RPA-Paper-2007.html Roman Phonetic Alphabet for English] , Contrastive Linguistics, XXXII, 2007, 2, pp. 50-64.] The system has certain similarities to the systems of the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation [Eugene Ehrlich, Raymond Hand Jr., "NBC Handbook of Pronunciation", HarperCollins Publishers, London, 1984.] , the Carnegie Mellon version of Arpabet alphabet [ [http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict "The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary"] , Carnegie Mellon University, Version 0.6] , and the World Book Dictionary [ [http://www.worldbook.com/wb/dict "The World Book Dictionary"] , World Book Inc., Chicago, 2002] .

By way of illustration, the following reference text by V. Yule [V. Yule, [http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/ssurplu.htm Spelling without surplus letters] ] is given in traditional spelling and in Roman Phonetic Alphabet transcription (non-rhotic version):

: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. ]

ee also

* Phonetic transcription
* Pronunciation respelling for English
* List of phonetics topics
* Basic Roman spelling of English

Notes