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pho•net•ic



Pronunciation: (fu-net'ik, fō-), [key]
—adj.
1. Also,pho•net'i•cal.of or pertaining to speech sounds, their production, or their transcription in written symbols.
2. corresponding to pronunciation: phonetic transcription.
3. agreeing with pronunciation: phonetic spelling.
4. concerning or involving the discrimination of nondistinctive elements of a language. In English, certain phonological features, as length and aspiration, are phonetic but not phonemic.

—n.
(in Chinese writing) a written element that represents a sound and is used in combination with a radical to form a character.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.

phonetphonetic alphabet
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