[4] Traditional respelling systems for English use only the 26 ordinary letters of the Latin alphabet with diacritics, and are meant to be easy for native readers to understand.
Other works not included here, such as Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (unabridged, 2nd ed.
Many phoneticians preferred a qualitative system, which used different symbols to indicate vowel timbre and colour.
He served as pronunciation consultant for the influential Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which adopted this scheme in its ninth edition (1995).
Upton's reform is controversial: it reflects changing pronunciation, but critics say it represents a narrower regional accent, and abandons parallelism with American and Australian English.
In addition, the phonetician John C. Wells said that he could not understand why Upton had altered the presentation of price to prʌɪs.
[24] The change in the NURSE vowel was intended as a simplification as well as a reflection that nɜːs was not the only possible realisation in RP.
The in-progress 3rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary uses Upton's scheme for representing British pronunciations.
For American pronunciations it uses an IPA-based scheme devised by William Kretzschmar of the University of Georgia.
In countries where the local languages are written in non-Latin, phonemic orthographies, various other respelling systems have been used.
To reduce the potential distortions of bilingual phonemic transcription, some dictionaries add English letters to the local-script respellings to represent sounds not specified in the local script.
Also, the practicality of these systems for learning English locally may be offset by difficulties in communication with people used to different norms such as General American or Received Pronunciation.
For preliterate native speakers of a language, the pictures in these dictionaries both define the entry words and are the "keys" to their pronunciation.
[34][clarification needed] As the normal age of literacy acquisition varies among languages, so do the age-range designations of children's books.
Generally, age ranges for young children's books in English lag behind those of languages with phonemic orthographies by about a year.
Yule also raised the question of the types of impact respelling systems could have on children's literacy acquisition.
Anglophone press agencies, such as the Voice of America, periodically release lists of respelled given names of internationally relevant people, in order to help news TV and radio announcers and spokespersons to pronounce them as closely as possible to their original languages.