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On the other hand, the IPA (being designed to represent sounds from any language in the world) is not as intuitive for those chiefly familiar with English orthography, for whom this respelling system is likely to be easier for English words and names. So, while the IPA is the required form of representing pronunciation, respelling remains optional.
Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages. Sometimes a well-known namesake with the same spelling has a markedly different pronunciation. These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs , which are written differently but pronounced the same).
So readers looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary may find, on seeing the pronunciation respelling, that the word is in fact already known to them orally. By the same token, those who hear an unfamiliar spoken word may see several possible matches in a dictionary and must rely on the pronunciation respellings to find the correct match. [4]
The database is distributed as a plain text file with one entry to a line in the format "WORD <pronunciation>" with a two-space separator between the parts. If multiple pronunciations are available for a word, variants are identified using numbered versions (e.g. WORD(1)).
Pronunciation spellings may be used informally to indicate the pronunciation of foreign words or those whose spelling is irregular or insufficient for the reader to deduce the pronunciation. In such cases, typeface, punctuation or letter case may also be used, e.g., to indicate stress or syllabication of the word. For example:
Normally, pronunciation is given only for the subject of the article in its lead section. For non-English words and names, use the pronunciation key for the appropriate language. If a common English rendering of the non-English name exists (Venice, Nikita Khrushchev), its pronunciation, if necessary, should be indicated before the non-English one.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Hebrew on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Hebrew in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
A single letter may even fill multiple pronunciation-marking roles simultaneously. For example, in the word ace, e marks not only the change of a from /æ/ to /eɪ/, but also of c from /k/ to /s/. In the word vague, e marks the long a sound, but u keeps the g hard rather than soft.