The Spellability Question

spellable.mkdn

The Spellability Question

This morning, I tweeted:

Is there a word for those sounds that can be written with a given syllabary or alphabet? "bleck" is one for English. A pig noise isn't.

I got a lot of answers that were not to this question. Further explanation will not fit in 140 characters.

My question is not about non-words or words. It is about the representability of sounds in a given writing system. If you can read English, you can read the non-word "bleck" aloud and produce a sound. If someone else hears that sound, he or she can write it down using English orthography and will probably write "bleck" or "blek" or "buhlek" or something that will remain fairly true to the sound.

This works for words as well as non-words. If I say the word "finger" aloud, a second person who understands and can write English will be able to write the word "finger." If I pick a word that the listener does not know, he or she can still make a close approximation.

English spelling has, more or less, a list of rules for how letter groups are turned into sounds, and the reverse.

Some sounds cannot be represented by these rules. The sound of a pig squealing, or a car starting, or the sound of a Bronx cheer. I am specifically not interested in onomatopoeia, which several respondents brought up. Onomatopoeia is a convention for simulating those sounds, or something evocative of them, but absent the context of the shared knowledge of the original sound, the true sound could not be reproduced by a reader who read the onomatopoetic word.

Why Am I Interested?

My daughter is almost five. She is very interested in words and spelling. She likes to ask how to spell various words. Sometimes, she will ask how to spell a non-word, and there are two kinds of answer to that:

Q: How do you spell [zingo]?
A: Zingo isn't a word, but you could write that sound as z-i-n-g-o.

Or:

Q: How do you spell [bizarre sputtering sound]?
A: You can't.  It can't be represented within the way we use our alphabet in 
   English.

I would like a more succinct term for the second case, if one exists.

Transliteration ?
Phonetic spelling?

For instance, the first couple of words of most Jewish prayers in Hebrew tend to be transliterated as "Baruch atah adonai"

So anyone else who happens along. My discounted votes were onomatopoeia, phoneme, mora.

So what about pronunciation guides? e.g. Chasm /ˈkazəm/

None of these answers make any sense at all.

You can't spell [pig noise], because it's not a transliteration.

No. A transliteration must already be a written thing.

You can't spell [pig noise], because it's not a phonetic spelling.

No. A phonetic spelling would have to already be a written thing.

You can't spell [pig noise], because it's not a pronunciation guide.

This is obviously nonsense.

Can't you use transcription to create/invent your own onomatopoeia for the sound a pig makes without needing to start from a written word?

Alternatively if you know the sound is already represented in another language you could use transliteration to convert it. e.g. ブー (the Japanese onomatopeia for the sound a pig makes) into the English via transcription into BU* (which actually sounds like boo). In this case you would end up with an onomatopoeia that is in fact a foreign loan word that you could break down into phonemes and represent them using commonly accepted notation to act as a pronunciation guide ;-)

In short I really have no idea what you are looking for ;-D

• Yep Japanese pigs go "boo boo" and not oink oink, yet a pig has never written either ;-)

Yes, I could do that, but it has nothing at all to do with the question I am asking. I am asking how to answer my daughter's question in fewer words.

things that are wordlike are words, even if
they don't have any meaning (yet). That is, blerk is a word, while
"scratchy fingers on a blackboard" is not a word, it is a description of
a sound.

—Jesse Sheidlower

I also consulted with some other people; I will update if anything interesting comes along.

Maybe it is unspellable? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unspellable