Thanks, you beat me to it with that poem :-) There have been attempts for a phonemic "respelling" of English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respe

Thanks, you beat me to it with that poem :-) There have been attempts for a phonemic "respelling" of English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_E... However, apart from edge cases such as a writer wanting to convey the pronunciation of a word the audience might not be familiar with (e.g., ar-kuhn-saw for Arkansas or rice-lip for Ruislip ;-) ), other than for dictionaries, they are of little practical relevance. Personally, I sincerely dislike the predominant use of these phonemic spelling variants in lieu of the IPA in many dictionaries these days. In an understandable - and laudable - attempt to make their content more accessible to users who are not familiar with the IPA they, however, often got rid of the corresponding IPA representations entirely, which in turn makes the content far less accessible to users who are familiar with such representations. That's a classic example of "knowledge encoded in the world" (phonemic representations) vs "knowledge encoded in the head" (IPA) (from the "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman).