Phonological respelling. (P) Using the most basic kind of respelling the clerk-recorder takes into account the sound of the name in his native language and dialect (accent). The spelling has the effect of neutralizing the differences in pronunciation due to the idiolect of the informant. Figure 62 illustrates how the name spelling differences at the orthographic level may characterize the pronunciation and the way pronunciation might diversify the spellings that occur among the records of populations living in different localities at different times.
The example in figure 63 illustrates the relationship between phonological respelling and rewrite rules which may be used to characterize such respellings in a precise way. This example was chosen because the pronunciation does not change between these two spellings. Although different accents pronounce the unaccented “y” in two different ways, that is described at the dialect level. The rewrite rules are written to associate the two spellings of the same name directly, insofar as the variants are perceived as pronounced the same. The rule states that a specific string, s2, is to be inserted in place of the string s1 wherever it is found. The context free rules are indiscriminate about which strings satisfy the structure of s1 beyond the fact that it contains the character to be replaced. The context sensitive rules are probably more appropriate for this particular sound. This kind of rule allows the immediate surroundings of the specific string s1 to be given as a condition on the rule, so that s2 replaces it only in the situations specified after the slash mark. The underscore marks the relative position of s1 in the structure given. In the example given, the string s1 must immediately follow a consonant and precede the end of the string in which it is found, signified with a pound sign (#). If desired, this particular rule may be even more tightly restricted morphologically by specifying that the suffix must be the diminutive ending.
Caution must be practiced in building rules that reflect linguistic phenomena that are not too general. If it be desired, the power of rewrite rules can be utilized to make possible the equivalence of the encoding of the spelling of “Smith” and the encoding of “Jones.” The rules suggested in figure 64 change the spellings of each to a more and more general form “ZNZ.”
