Definition

General Principles

The revised spelling for a word is obtained by first breaking down the word into its constituent morphemes and then spelling out each one of these using the phonemic spelling rules described in this document, and finally joining back together the revised spellings of each individual morpheme.

Contractions are written out in full in the revised spelling system instead of with an apostrophe.

I've tried to stick to the principle as much as possible that each sound is associated with either a single letter or a pair of letters and that each letter (or digraph) represents a single sound.

Consonants

Single Letter Consonants

When n is immediately followed by g, k, q or x within the same morpheme (under current spelling) then an alternative pronunciation is triggered for the n. This pronunciation change occurs consistently and therefore there is no need to use a separate letter to explicitly denote /ŋ/ once the reader understands this rule.

/s/ is written as se when occurs at the end of a word but isn't functioning as a plural marker and it's written as s everywhere else.

Multiple Letter Consonants

The ability to express every English word phonemically doesn't require c, j, q or x. In revised spellings the c character is only used when it's part of the familiar ch digraph. The letter j has been included for convenience.

Vowels

The revised spellings preserve the r's necessary in order to reconstruct a rhotic pronunciation. This decision was made because there are more native speakers of rhotic varieties of English than non-rhotic varieties. This does mean however that speakers of non-rhotic varieties may still become confused as to whether certain words do or do not contain an r

The the United States and United Kingdom are the most populous English speaking nations in a first language capacity. Accordingly, decisions on how to respond to pronunciation variations that occur due to accent differences have been made based upon the need to reconstruct in parallel from the revised spellings both some kind of popular British pronunciation and something not too far away from General American pronunciation. However, I see no reason (other than class discrimination) for favouring Received Pronunciation in cases where other regions of the UK are both better aligned with the North American pronunciations and the Received Pronunciation of a word is the more modern innovation, historically speaking.

The Six Short Vowels

Short Vowels + r

Lone Long Vowels

Long Vowel + r and Centering Diphthong + r

Unrounded Closing Diphthongs (Y-Type)

Rounded Closing Diphthongs (W-Type)

Combinations of Adjacent Vowels

Yod Dropping

The letter y is not written before oo in the following cases, where only a small minority of accents such as Welsh English (and a few US accents) preserve a distinct sound, which I've chosen not to reflect in the revised spelling because its inclusion would confuse the majority. Most accents simply have an /uː/ ("oo") sound in this position.

My omission of any symbol to represent the correspondingly rarely used /ɪʊ̯/ vowel causes some pairs of words such as yew and you to become homographs in their revised spellings. Despite their unique pronunciations in Welsh English both are spelled yoo under the revised spelling rules. Yod dropping only occurs when the /j/ sound and the consonant before it both occur within the same syllable. For a contrary example, consider the word volume, which has a revised spelling of volyoom, despite many other words lacking a y after an l.

Under the revised spelling rules the following consonants are followed by a y prior to the succeeding vowel in some words. This is prescribed either because the traditional pronunciations with a /j/ sound remain commonplace in Britain (and in some cases in the US also), or because Brits and Americans disagree on how to simplify the traditional pronunciation, whether by yod dropping or by yod coalescence.