A modern, updated, globally friendly English spelling alphabet would be pretty useful right now, but getting people to use one might be harder than you’d think.įor about 80 years, governments and corporations futzed with these spelling alphabets, and learned that some stuff didn’t work-it turns out, for example, that “Lima” is also the Malay word for the number five. The general connectivity of the world-including the ease of international video calls and the use of foreign call centers-means that spelling out a name or word is an increasingly common practice. As mobile phones have replaced landlines, call quality has, strangely, gone down.
#Spelling alphabet aprl update#
Plus there’s the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is something else entirely.) The history of spelling alphabets is fascinating and winding, but it’s notable that there hasn’t been an official update to the most commonly used English version in about half a century.
This uses what is what’s called a “spelling alphabet,” or, confusingly, a “phonetic alphabet.” (The latter is confusing because it has little to do with phonemes, or a unit of sound in a language. “N as in Nancy, O, S as in Samuel, O, W, I, T as in Thomas, Z as in Zebra,” I chant. Because it’s uncommon, and because it would be a problem if my bank writes my name down as “Moskowitz,” I err on the side of caution. So far as I know, there are somewhere between 10 and 20 Nosowitzes in the world, and they’re all closely related to me.
WHEN SOMEONE ON THE PHONE-THE doctor’s office, the bank, the credit card company-asks for my name, I always offer to spell it out-it’s a pretty uncommon surname.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors, Paul Evans and Eric McFadden, who share this article from Atlas Obscura where author Dan Nosowitz asks if it’s time to update the spelling (a.k.a.
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