How to Write Out Words that Sound Alike

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Well, good afternoon. I’m Lee Weber, and I live in Greenville, Pennsylvania, on a sunny and breezy day. Just a beautiful day to be alive.

Well, it sounds fantastic. Thanks for taking a little bit of it to call us. What’s on your mind?

I had a spelling teacher in junior high who was very, very clever with words. So I decided to challenge her one time, and I said, I have a sentence that I can say in the English language, but I don’t know how to spell it in English. And the sentence is, there are three words pronounced two in the English language. How do you spell two?

Believe it or not, I actually puzzled her. She wasn’t sure. And I’ve never found anyone who’s been able to provide an answer. So that’s my question to you.

It sounds like you were a burr under the saddle of your teacher. Did she give you an A, passing grade at least?

Well, she did give me extra credit for my question. There we go.

So Lee, linguists, long ago encountered this exact same problem. And they asked themselves the question, how can I write out the words in other languages that use different alphabets in my own alphabet? And so what they came up with more than 100 years ago, late 19th century, French and British linguists came up with the International Phonetic Alphabet, which allows you to more or less write almost any of the sounds spoken in almost any of the languages spoken by humans.

So phonetics is the key, huh?

Yeah. So if we wanted to write three twos, there are three twos in the English language. The twos, we would put a forward slash, a T, a lowercase u, and a Z, and then another forward slash. And that is the phonetic representation of all three of those twos, the plural form of twos.

But if I were reading that sentence, let’s say I was someone not overly familiar with the English language, I would say, what’s a twos?

Well, the context of your situation, if it’s simply a stumper, then you win. And there’s no easy way to do it without using a special alphabet like the IPA, as it’s known. But if we’re just looking at a general purpose document where you might be encountering the need to write something phonetically, then the IPA is a very standard way to do it.

But yeah, there’s always the, with puzzles and word games and trickery like that, there’s always the on the spot feeling about it, right? I’m not a prepared academic sitting here trying to scribble this out in a way that my fellow linguists can understand.

All of the IPA characters have names. So even though it looks like T-U-Z when you say twos, the U, for example, is called the closed back rounded vowel. Because the vowels are all described about how the mouth is formed and where the tongue is inside the mouth, which is really interesting.

So the IPA is sort of its own language in and of itself. No, it’s a phonetic rendering of any language. It’s not a language itself. But you have to learn what those symbols mean in order to interpret it.

And what’s strange in this country, Lee, most of the dictionaries in this country don’t use the IPA to show spelling next to words, which means Americans are less familiar with the international phonetic alphabet than, say, British people or Australians.

Well, that’s helpful, you know, after many, many years of puzzling. And I figured you could do it phonetically. It’s good that we have phonetics.

Yeah. Lee, thank you so much for your question. I think this is a really solid stumper, and you should continue to stump the younger generation with it. I think it will continue to have many years on it, much success with it, okay?

All right. It’s been great being with you guys.

Thank you, Lee. Take care now. Good time with you, Lee. Bye-bye.

Bye. Bye.

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