Phonological respelling.   With a third kind of respelling the clerk takes into account the sound of the name in his native language and dialect. This spelling has the effect of neutralizing the differences in pronunciation due to the idiolect of the speaker. Figure 9 (as well as figure 11) illustrates how the name spelling differences at the orthographic level may be expressed in terms of rules that hold the pronunciation constant.

Some of the relationships and algorithms proposed for calculating the distance between different spellings are listed in figure 11. The distances for which possible calculations might be tried are listed with labels corresponding to those placed on figures 7 – 9. We mentioned the importance of using relative frequency and length above. What is important is the magnitude of the change in these values that occurs in abbreviation or the differences between the spellings compared. At this point we can do little more than indicate the functions that must be taken into account and the rough magnitude of the resulting distances.

It would not be absolutely necessary to know the pronunciation to compose a rewrite rule, but it is also clear it is the pronunciation that does not change between these spellings. The example in figure 11 illustrates the relationship between phonological respelling and rewrite rules more precisely. The rewrite rules could be written to associate the two spellings of the same name directly, but actually have the effect of producing a representation of the phonetic dimension. (The hypocorism formative of this –y ending is illustrated more explicitly below.)