The word "phonetic" is not spelled phonetically.

Zerlyna@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 193 points –
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I don't even know what "spelled phonetically" is supposed to mean in English. As far as I'm concerned that language is just a jumble of vowels that all sound the same but generate long arguments about how to pronounce things "correctly".

This is why the IPA is useful.

Kind of. The IPA doesn't show weak forms so non-native speakers can be confused by them if they only ever learned the dictionary way of pronouncing a word.

Ah that's interesting, I didn't know that.

Still, the IPA is really helpful when trying to discuss pronunciation with someone who has a very different accent to ourselves.

As a New Zealander I find some US phonetic spellings baffling.

Phonetically means the way it sounds which would be “fonetik”

This is not correct. English is simply not phonetic and therefore it's impossible to spell any English word phonetically.

funneddic (US)
funnettic (UK)

That's transposing it how we sound to them, though!

If the above were pronounced in a baseline kiwi accent the U would just get deeper. The vowel shift goes the other way if I'm to recreate their pronunciation using my own accent:

Fehr ned ik (US)

Foe net eck (UK)

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