My ASCII Spelling Project is an attempt to phonemically respell English in a way that looks good and uses only letters found in ASCII (most of the letters you can type on a standard English keyboard).
These are the lax / short vowels. If your language distinguishes long / short or tense / lax pairs, use these spellings exclusively for the short / lax versions. If it doesn't, you can use these spellings for all vowels.
| a | e | i | o | u |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [a~æ] | [ə] | [ɪ~i] | [ɒ~ɔ~o] | [ʊ~u] |
You can also combine these with y and w to make diphthongs. A special case is made for the diphthongs [ej~ɛj] and [ew~ɛw], where they are written ey and ew.
If you're an English speaker, you probably notice one lax vowel missing, the [ʌ~ɐ] STRUT vowel. It is here that I admit that I kind of lied about this spelling being fully phonemic, I allowed myself to cheat and use digraphs (in this instance, eo. I made sure this won't create problems; read on to see how I handle this. Anyway, here are some more lax vowels.
| eh | eo | eu | iu | ue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [ɛ~e] | [ʌ~ɐ] | [œ] | [ɨ] | [ʏ~y] |
Next are the tense / long vowels. Use these only if your language distinguishes long / short or tense / lax pairs.
| aa | ae | ee | ie | oa | oh | oe | ou | uu |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [a(ː)~ɑ(ː)] | [æ(ː)~ɛ(ː)] | [e(ː)] | [i(ː)] | [ɔ(ː)] | [o(ː)] | [ø(ː)] | [u(ː)] | [y(ː)] |
| b | ch | d | dh | dj | dz | f |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [b] | [ç] | [d] | [ð] | [dʒ] | [dz] | [f] |
| g | gh | h | k | kh | l | ly |
| [ɡ] | [ɣ] | [h] | [k] | [x] | [l] | [ʎ] |
| m | n | ng | ny | p | r | rr |
| [m] | [n] | [ŋ] | [ɲ] | [p] | whatever rhotic | [r] |
| s | sh | t | tch | th | ts | v |
| [s] | [ʃ] | [t] | [tʃ] | [θ] | [ts] | [v] |
| w | y | z | zh | |||
| [w] | [j] | [z] | [ʒ] |
You might notice that some of these choices are inconsistent with eachother. Like, "Why dj and zh? Why not dj and j, or j and zh?" This is because I prioritize the idea that you're unlikely to mistake any given spelling as being pronounced a different way. Orthographically speaking, a lone letter j sucks for this purpose given it has so many different pronunciations (English [dʒ], Spanish [x], French [ʒ], Polish [j]).
With so many digraphs, it's reasonable to be wondering how I would handle a word like pothead, where the t and h are pronounced separately. In case you missed it, it's in the title (pot'hehd).
If your language doesn't have the sound that a certain digraph makes, the usage of the apostrophe is optional (blok'hehd and blokhehd are both valid).