Why “Phonetic” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
> but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words? Th…
by boomlinde · Sep 1, 2026
FYI, IP is a phonetic acronym for "I pee", meaning "I urinate" Two letters can have more than one meaning!
by inigyou · Aug 31, 2026
> Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet. I don't disagree with the latter point, but the form…
by saghm · Aug 31, 2026
I think they pronounce them non-phonetically, and I'm not really sure what's confusing about that. Pronunciation differing from spelling is literally what it means to say someth…
by saghm · Aug 31, 2026
Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet. The reason you think that "le" makes sense and the per…
by boomlinde · Aug 31, 2026
> Well I know what you mean, it's phonetic in the same way that a silent "ent" and "p" in "comptent" are "phonetic" in French No, that's not what I said at all. Stipulating that…
by thaumasiotes · Aug 31, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "phonetic" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "phonetic" over time.
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that mainly concerns the articulation, sound wave properties, and perception of speech sounds. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics. Linguists who specialize in studying these physical properties of vocalization are phoneticians. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone, an individual speech sound. This differs from the minimal linguistic unit of phonology, the phoneme. Phonemes are abstract, language-specific categorizations of phones and are defined as the smallest units that affect meaning. Read more on Wikipedia