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This term is used in phonetics to describe how
we write down the sounds of a language, which may differ significantly
from the orthography of that language. Orthographies may or may not
be close to a phonetic rendering of the sounds; Chinese and Japanese
are not at all phonetic, except for the kana of Japanese; French is
not at all phonetic etc. but no language is actually written as it is
spoken; there are always differences. Even a language like Spanish,
which is often said to have a ``phonetic" writing system, has
differences that are not represented in writing, and English is a very
rough system, with many problems in its writing. Phonetic
transcription is faithful to what is heard by the transcriber,
rather than what ``should" be written or whatever.
Harold Schiffman
Fri Jan 17 09:48:04 EST 1997