Respelling key v1

One fixed way to write each sound of General American English, so a respelling reads the same for every person and every bot. The stressed syllable is in capitals: luh-MISS-uh.

Vowels

Vowels before r

Consonants

Rules

1. Syllables are joined by hyphens. Words are separated by one space.
2. The syllable with primary stress is written in capitals. Secondary stress is not marked.
3. A one-syllable word is in capitals when it is the whole term, lowercase when it sits beside a stressed word.
4. Letters q and x are never used, and c appears only in ch. Every sound has one spelling, chosen by its position as set out in the table.
5. A short vowel (a, e, i, o, u, uu) never ends a stressed syllable: the next consonant moves into it (luh-MISS-uh, LET-ur).
6. Short e, i and u at the end of an unstressed syllable are written eh, ih and uh (zuh-SOSS-ih-tih-nib).
7. A short vowel followed by r and a vowel doubles the r (MERR-ee). ʊ before r is written oor.
8. s at the end of a word, or at the end of a syllable before a vowel, is written ss so it cannot be read as z.
9. g before e, i or y is written gh so it cannot be read as j.
10. Input IPA is cleaned first: slashes and brackets, length marks, ties, aspiration and the glottal stop are dropped; ɹ, ɚ, ɝ, ɾ, ɫ, ɐ, ᵻ, əʊ are mapped to the key; an optional r in parentheses is kept (the basis is rhotic), other optional sounds in parentheses are left out; only the first of several variants is used.
11. The canonical respelling is for people and for the term page. Engine respellings (what a given TTS engine needs, such as Lamisa) are stored separately per engine and version and are not held to this key.

The key as JSON