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When one is trying to spell out a word to someone over a noisy phone line, it's convenient to resort to something like the NATO phonetic alphabet: “The name's Martha — M as in mike, A as in alfa, R as in Romeo, T as in tango, H as in hotel, A as in alfa.”
But that's no fun. It would be much more entertaining to find, for each letter of the alphabet, a word that starts with that letter, but that doesn't sound like it starts with that letter. In other words, an anacrophonic word. So A is for aural, B is for bdellatomy, C is for ctenoid, D is for djinn…
I've found good candidate words for every letter other than F, R, and S; for those three, I've had to resort to other kinds of confusion. I've collected my results here, in what I'm calling the Nearly Anacrophonic Phonetic Alphabet. Please take a look, and try to think of improvements. The basic rule is that only words that appear in the OED (not marked as archaic or foreign) count, and the pronunciation should be the primary one from the OED. (I'll admit that I stretched this rule a couple of times.)
“The name's Grant — G as in gneiss, R as in rath, A as in aural, N as in ngomo, T as in Tlingit.”
— Everett
I like the way you think.
Try listening to “Crazy ABC†by Barenaked Ladies on their album Snacktime.
I also have a partial alphabet. I call it my Perverse Phonetic Alphabet. It is similar, only using more familiar words, also heavy on the silent initial letters, especially when they are homophones (e.g. G as in Gnu). I use this alphabet for those people I particularly like or those I particularly dislike.
My entry for S is S as in Sea.
I also use D as in W, W as in Why, U as in Urn, E as in Ewe and Eye, Y as in You and Yew, and A as in Aisle.
Thanks! I hadn't heard of "Crazy ABC" until after I was finished, but I linked to it — and a few other phonetic alphebets — on the "NAPA design" page on my site.
Your examples are nice, and are in the spirit of Jamie Blustein's alphabet. I especially like D for double-u!
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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