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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

That requires that each sound is replaced with a letter.

There are more sounds than letters AFAIK. http://w3.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS05/efs/materials/PhonSymb...

You're only interested in phonemes ("The smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning" - [1]), not sounds. For example, the "th" in "thin" and "this" or "i" in "see" and "sit" and "happy" etc., even though they are different sounds, they are the same phonemes - substituting one for the other will not change the meaning of the word, it will just make other people think you have a strange accent.

Also, you can combine letters - e.g. keep "naive" the same, but write "fayv" instead of "faiv" for "five" to indicate a diphthong. And keep "ship" the same, but write "shiip" for "sheep" to indicate a long "i" sound.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

Sorry but I don't think you're right about [ð] (this) and [θ] (thin) being a phoneme. For one, most native English speakers hear a difference if you ask them, and it does seem possible to find a minimal pair, that is, two words that mean different things in English but differ only in those two sounds. (e.g. thigh vs. thy)

A better example of a phoneme in English is the aspirated and non-aspirated [p] sound (transcribed as [pʰ] for aspirated). It's just the difference between holding in a bunch of air and pushing it out, and most English people can't hear a difference.

Edit: I may have been confused, were you just pointing these out as being all different phonemes?

You're right, there might be minimal pairs, but for most words the exact pronunciation doesn't matter - like there is a minimal pair for [i] and [i:] (ship/sheep, beach/bitch), but (1) not everyone can pronounce it, so often you must be able to infer the meaning from the context, and (2) for most words it doesn't matter (see, thin, happy, ...)

Det iz vaj ju invent nju leters, lajk č for sendvič, or š for ader šit.

Weird, I've never seen people use j for that sound. They go for y (like y in yast or yet).

Slavic languages use it that way. For example polish "jest" starts with the same sound as yeast.

Not only that, but in Serbo-Croatian, in latin script, "nj" is a digraph for the ɲ phoneme. (A very small number of words, mostly of Latin origin, can cause ambivalence because they have "n" and "j" juxtaposed but are meant to properly be pronounced separately, e.g. "konjugacija" /con-yu-gatsiya/ (conjugation)). In fact, correct transcription of "new" would really be "nju" (but only in Serbian, there is no transcription of foreign words in Croatian), so you have "Njujork" for "New York".

German uses it that way too (ja, Jürgen, etc.).

What languages have you looked at? It's very common in northern Europe.

He has used a dipthong in the middle of meyk.

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