Tarquin saith:
Everyone tries to invent their own phonetic system when they're in their teens. I did. But reinventing the wheel is generally a bad idea. if every dictionary & encyclopedia has its own system, then it is not transferable, and the reader has to relearn for each book they open. Let's stick to something that is universal: IPA / SAMPA.
I've seen IPA/SAMPA used in Wikipedia articles and didn't like it. The former uses too many non-ASCII characters to make it easy enough to use and the latter uses weird ASCII signs that make the word @n"rid@bl [unreadable] and l33t-like for those who don't know the system.
The system used in practically every school dictionary I've seen (except for Merriam-Webster's) is simple: prime mark after accented syllable (doubled for two accents in one word), flipped e for schwa, breve (curve) for short vowels, macron (line) for long vowels, diaresis or circumflex for vowels of far and fur, line across th for voiced and no line for unvoiced. This last one is the only thing not representable in Unicode; everything else is sĭm'pəl ēnəf' for us to use. (If those words came out garbled, either your mail client or mine doesn't support Unicode. That was 73 12D 6D 27 70 259 6C 20 113 6E 259 66 27 hex.)
Even better is the limited letters-only system used in textbooks that aren't dictionaries: complex words are repeated in identical-sounding imitations (I-mi-TAY-shuns). If this latter system is formalized (FAR-muh-liyzd) it may be simpler than SAMPA for those who don't have the time to learn it.
Geoffrey Thomas / jěf'rē t�'məs / JEF-ree TAH-muhs geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com
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