The rules

Pronunciation — Sound↔Spelling Mapping, Respelling Key, Stress

Fixes §1 Spelling & Orthography and §2 Pronunciation. Companion to orthography.

The project’s core promise is that how a word is written should tell you how it is said. Because orthography keeps spelling light and legible (it does not phonetically rewrite every word), that promise is delivered here by a respelling key: a simple layer that, for any word, gives an unambiguous reading. Pronunciation is documented two ways for two audiences — a symbol-free learner respelling and IPA for precision.

Reference accent. The key is anchored to rhotic General American: a written r is always pronounced, so it is the most phonetically transparent model and the one most learners are already trained on. Every IPA form and respelling below follows it — no r is silent, and the vowel inventory is the GA one.

Rule P1 — Every word carries a respelling

Rule. Each word’s pronunciation is given in a learner respelling using only ordinary letters, hyphens between syllables, and CAPITALS for the stressed syllable. No special symbols.

Problem it solves. Standard spelling does not predict sound (see §1, §2); the respelling does, with zero training.

Examples.

Divergence & trade-off. Adds a layer rather than changing the word. The base spelling stays recognizable (principle 3); predictability lives in the key.

Rule P2 — The respelling alphabet (one symbol per sound)

Rule. The respelling uses a fixed, one-sound-per-spelling set. Each English phoneme has exactly one respelling, so the key itself is fully regular.

Consonants (mostly as written): b d f g h j k l m n p r s t v w y z, plus digraphs ch sh zh th(thin) dh(this) ng.

Vowels (simple and diphthong):

R-colored vowels. Because the reference accent is rhotic, a vowel before r is written as vowel + r — no extra symbols, and no separate “centring diphthongs” to learn:

Problem it solves. The ~20-vowel inventory written with five letters, the missing short/long contrasts (book/moon, sit/seat), and the schwa that is never written as itself (see §2). Here each sound has one and only one spelling — including uu for the FOOT vowel /ʊ/, distinct from oo for the GOOSE vowel /u/.

Note on /ɑ/. General American merges the LOT and PALM vowels into a single /ɑ/, so both take one spelling, o (hot → HOT, father → FO-dher). This keeps the frequent LOT words reading naturally at the mild cost of a few PALM words looking odd in the key — the trade we accept to hold “one sound, one spelling.”

Note on y. y spells the vowel /aɪ/ when it is a syllable’s vowel (my → MY, night → NYT) and the consonant glide /j/ when it leads into another vowel (yes → YES, computer → kom-PYOO-ter). The two never compete — a glide cannot be a syllable’s vowel — so position tells them apart, exactly as it does in English my vs yes.

Parsing a respelling. A respelling is read by longest match against this grapheme inventory: scan left to right and, at each position, take the longest sequence that matches a defined consonant, digraph, vowel, or r-colored vowel spelling before falling back to a shorter one (so th is read as the single digraph /θ/, not t + h). Hyphens are inserted only where the longest-match reading would otherwise misparse a boundary — the same job they already do for syllable and digraph boundaries (see P3’s mishap → MIS-hap example) — never as decoration.

Divergence & trade-off. This alphabet governs the respelling, not the base orthography — so the page still reads as English while the key stays perfectly phonetic.

Rule P3 — th is split in the key

Rule. The two th sounds are written distinctly in the respelling: th for voiceless /θ/ (thin → THIN) and dh for voiced /ð/ (this → DHIS).

Examples.

The last pair (breath/breathe) is a minimal pair: only the th/dh split tells them apart in the key.

Problem it solves. One digraph spelling two unpredictable sounds (see §2).

Reading the digraph. The syllable hyphens keep dh from being misread as d + h (and likewise guard s-h, n-g boundaries): a digraph never straddles a hyphen, so mishap is MIS-hap, not “mi-shap.” The hyphen is the key’s disambiguation mechanism.

Divergence & trade-off. Base spelling keeps th; only the key disambiguates. No new letters in running text. Settled against the LFC. Jenkins’ Lingua Franca Core rates /θ/–/ð/ non-core and safely substitutable (with /t d/, /s z/, /f v/) without harming spoken intelligibility (see PRIOR-ART §C), and World English agrees on that axis — a speaker may substitute and still be understood. The split is kept deliberately because it lives on the reading-aid axis: the th/dh key marks minimal pairs like breath/breathe for the reader, which the LFC’s spoken finding does not touch.

Rule P4 — Stress is always marked, never guessed

Rule. World English keeps each word’s native lexical stress and always marks it with CAPITALS in the respelling. The predictability comes from showing the stress on every word, not from moving it to a fixed position — so a learner never has to memorize or guess where the stress falls, but the word still sounds like English. The one regularization is that stress-based noun/verb pairs are eliminated: the two senses take the same stress and are distinguished by context. The merger is deterministic — the collapsed pair always takes the noun’s stress (the more frequent, phrase-initial form), so there is a single right answer to mark, never a coin-toss.

Problem it solves. Unpredictable, contrastive word stress — a leading cause of being misunderstood (see §2). Learners cannot derive stress placement from the written word; the respelling supplies it directly.

Examples. present (gift) and present (to give) → both PREZ-ent (the noun’s first-syllable stress); record (noun) and record (verb) → both REK-erd (again the noun’s). Words with no such pair keep their ordinary stress, always shown — and it is often not first:

The CAPITALS place the stress for you every time, so none of this has to be memorized.

Divergence & trade-off. Loses only the stress-based noun/verb cue (recovered from context and word order, per grammar). It does not regularize all stress to one syllable — doing so would make many words unrecognizable, breaking legibility (principle 3). The gain is that stress is never a guess: it is on the page for every word. Settled against the LFC. The Lingua Franca Core rates lexical word-stress non-core (only nuclear/contrastive stress is essential for spoken intelligibility; see PRIOR-ART §C). The marking is kept anyway, and not claimed to be load-bearing for intelligibility: it is a reading aid that shows how the word sounds in the reference accent, on the same writing-side axis as P3.

Rule P5 — Connected speech is optional, never required

Rule. Weak forms, elision, and assimilation (of → /əv/, next week → nex’ week) are permitted but never required. The full, respelled form is always correct.

Examples. Each has a careful form (always correct) and an optional fast form:

Problem it solves. Connected speech makes native audio hard to recognize (see §2). World English guarantees that the careful pronunciation a learner reads from the key is always acceptable speech.

Divergence & trade-off. Natural fast speech still exists; the difference is that it is never obligatory, so a learner is never penalized for speaking “as written.”

Rule P6 — Sentence rhythm is optional (syllable-timing is acceptable)

Rule. English is stress-timed — it compresses the syllables between stresses so stressed beats recur at roughly even intervals. World English does not require this: even-weight, syllable-timed speech — giving each syllable its full written value — is always intelligible and correct. Stress-timing and the vowel reduction that drives it are permitted but never required.

Example. Tell me the name of the street. A stress-timed speaker crushes the small words (t’ll me the NAME of the STREET); a syllable-timed speaker gives each word full weight (TELL — MEE — DHUH — NAYM — UV — DHUH — STREET). Both are correct — the even-weight reading is never wrong.

Problem it solves. Speakers of syllable-timed L1s (Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, Hindi) find English rhythm hard both to produce and to hear, and are told their natural rhythm sounds “wrong” (see PAIN-POINTS §1, stress-timing, Pike 1945). World English removes that penalty.

Divergence & trade-off. The same relief as P5, one level up: fast stress-timed rhythm still exists, it is simply never obligatory. A learner speaking each syllable evenly is always understood.

Rule P7 — Intonation carries only the question

Rule. Pitch is load-bearing only where no word already marks the meaning — and there is exactly one such place: the yes/no question. It has no question word (World English dropped do-support and inversion), so You like it and its question are segmentally identical, and rising intonation in speech — plus a leading ? in writing — is one of the primary markers that tells them apart, alongside the optional tag right? (grammar.md G6) as a segmental alternative a speaker may add instead of, or in addition to, the pitch rise. A wh-question is already marked by its wh-word (who, what, where…), so pitch there is redundant: it is permitted for naturalness but never required, and English wh-questions naturally fall like statements anyway. Everywhere else — statements, negation, emphasis, attitude — meaning rides on words and word order, so pitch changes nothing.

Example. You like it. (statement) vs ?You like it? (question). In speech the question rises at the end; in writing the leading ? says so. The leading ? is the written instruction to raise the pitch, so the two channels agree — a reader and a listener reach the same reading, one by the mark and one by the tune.

Problem it solves. English uses pitch for many jobs at once — questions, contrast, sarcasm, politeness — and learners from differently-intoned languages both mis-signal and mis-hear them (see PAIN-POINTS §1, intonation). World English load-bears pitch for only the yes/no question, so a learner has a single intonation contrast to master, not an open set — and in writing does not need even that, because the leading ? carries it.

Divergence & trade-off. This is a deliberate reversal of a stricter earlier stance: World English does let the yes/no question ride on intonation, because questions are frequent and important enough to be worth it, and because the alternative — a coined question particle — adds a word the language would rather not have (so removing it keeps questions purely subtractive: they drop do-support and add nothing). The cost is real: speakers of flat- or differently-intoned L1s must produce and hear a rising question — the difficulty PAIN-POINTS §1 documents. It is mitigated in writing by the always-present leading ? and bounded in speech to one contrast. This diverges from Jenkins’ Lingua Franca Core, which rates grammatical intonation non-essential for intelligibility (see PRIOR-ART §C) — and the divergence is settled: accepted, not open. The yes/no question is frequent and important enough to load-bear one pitch contrast; the alternative (a coined particle) is a word the language would rather not add, so questions stay purely subtractive; and the cost is bounded — one contrast in speech, carried by the leading ? in writing. Attitudinal intonation stays non-load-bearing, aligned with the LFC.

Scope note — contrasts the respelling can’t remove

World English regularizes the mapping (which sound a spelling represents) and what is required of a speaker (P5–P6 make connected speech and rhythm optional; P7 requires pitch for the one yes/no-question contrast and nothing else). It does not erase the phonetic difficulty of individual sounds. Phonemic contrasts that carry meaning are kept — rice/lice (r vs l), think/sink (/θ/ vs /s/), ship/sheep (/ɪ/ vs /i/) — because collapsing them would lose information. What the key guarantees is that it always shows which sound is intended, so a reader is never ambiguous; producing r vs l, or /θ/, remains ordinary learner effort, not something a language redesign can subtract (see PAIN-POINTS §1, r/l and th).

Worked examples

The rule-by-rule examples above show each piece in isolation. Here the whole system runs together — first on a spread of words that exercise the full inventory, then on a complete sentence.

Word bank

Note the pairs the key keeps apart that the base spelling blurs: book BUUK /ʊ/ vs moon MOON /u/; thing THING /θ/ vs this DHIS /ð/. And multi-syllable words wear their stress openly — nothing to guess (kom-PYOO-ter, uh-BOWT).

A full sentence

This is a valid World English sentence — regular past gived (M1, silent-e stem adds -d) and no indefinite article before book (G2). The clause order is chosen deliberately to keep book away from child — a dropped article can leave two adjacent bare nouns momentarily ambiguous as a single compound (child book), so the object is moved to a final to-phrase instead of sitting next to the other noun:

The doctor gived book about birds to the young child.

Respelling: dhuh DOK-ter GIVD BUUK uh-BOWT BERDZ too dhuh YUNG CHYLD

IPA: /ðə ˈdɑktɚ ɡɪvd bʊk əˈbaʊt bɝdz tu ðə jʌŋ tʃaɪld/

The function word the sits unstressed and lowercase; the content words carry the CAPITAL-marked stress. Reading it exactly like this — each word at full value — is always correct (P5–P6). A fast speaker might blur the and link the words together, but that is optional, never required.

Cross-spec note

The respelling key and orthography move together. The ough words respelled in orthography O5 take the obvious key reading — thru → THROO, tho → DHOH, altho → awl-DHOH (the th in though/although is the voiced /ð/, so it is dh in the key, per P3); every word not respelled there (knight → NYT, thought-as-retained) is still fully covered by its entry here.

Homographs are the one residue. A handful of words are spelled the same but said two ways — lead (the metal, LED) vs lead (guide, LEED); singed (past of sing, SINGD) vs singed (past of singe, SINJD); seed (past of see, SEED) vs seed (the plant noun, SEED — spelled and said the same, so it is a true homograph and homophone pair disambiguated only by context, e.g. the plant seed vs he seed the plant). These keep two key entries each, and context selects which applies — the reader knows the pipe is lead is LED, not LEED. Note that standard English’s read (present, REED) / read (past, RED) pair does not survive as a homograph here: M1 spells the past of read as readed, so only REED ever attaches to the spelling read in valid World English text — readed is its own, unambiguous word. So the guarantee is precise: every word has a predictable pronunciation, and the only place a reader must consult context is this small, closed set of retained homographs — lead/lead, singed/singed, seed/seed — recorded here as known residue (it is the pronunciation mirror of the homographs orthography O4 keeps distinct in spelling, plus the new pairs M1’s regular verb morphology creates).

Summary table