Saturday, January 31, 2015

The Evil (Non-)Phonetic Alphabet

I am a big fan of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet when reading character strings to people, especially over the phone or radio. It was designed for optimal intelligibility, and is a standard that most people are at least vaguely familiar with from movies and television.  Plus you get to sound like a secret agent or military scout calling for air support.  When I was talking with my dad the other day, though, he mentioned hearing someone on the radio say, jokingly, "'C' as in 'Chanukah'."  This got me thinking about what an optimally bad / confusing / ambiguous phonetic alphabet would look like.

This is a work in progress, but here's what I've go so far:

Aisle
Bdellium
Czar
Djibouti
Euphrates
Fjord
Gnome
Herb
Isle
Jalapeno
Knee
Lladro
Mnemonic
Ngabu
Ouija Board
Pneumonia
Qatar
Rwanda
Sphygmomanometer
Tsunami
Uvula
Vraisemblance
Wrinkle
Xylophone
Ypsilanti
Zlotys

Have any suggestions for even better (worse) words to convey letters?  Comment below!

6 comments:

Joshua Bretz said...

I'm a big fan of words that sound like other letters:

A as in "are"
E as in "eye"
C as in "cue"
S as in "see"
W as in "why"
Y as in "you"

Penelope Sanchez said...

L is one of my favorite letters. L practically rolls off the tongue. Alas, L's distinctive pronunciation -- except for those of the Japanese persuasion -- makes it difficult to find words that begin with a silent L.

The best I can do is feign a Spanish accent and pronounce Llama as "Yama."

Deal with it gringos, because the same thing is slated for the letter J! A number of obfuscations will be included just in case that's more popular.

Mariz
Great data for Leviton Manufacturing

Unknown said...

Finally! I'm that much closer to achieving my dreams of seeing a complete Pseudo-Phonetic Alphabet put to use. I especially love the idea of using words for letters that sound like other letters. I would like to make four recommendations to the specifications. "K as in knight" and "N as in night", and "C as in Czar" and "T as in Tsar". So if you're looking to be more efficient when you're spelling things out by leaving out the "as in" part, you end up with:

knee: knight, night, eye, eye
tack: Tsar, are, Czar, knight

Is it too late to join a committee to propose an ISO standard on this? If one has already been established, I'd love to become a supporting member.

Unknown said...

M as in Mancy

NotNATO said...

M as in Motel, H as in Hulu, O as in Oxtrot. I thought these are funny because they sound like other words in the NATO alphabet: Hotel, Zulu, Foxtrot

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