Phonemic orthography should not be confused with Phonemic transcription.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes.[1] Phonemic orthographies have the highest possible level of orthographic depth, as they have exact grapheme to phoneme correspondence.
For a systemic analysis of the phoneme/grapheme correspondence, Petr Sgall distinguishes two conditions, both of which are to be satisfied for a phonemic orthography:[2]
In the past, the term phonetic orthography was used to refer to various proposals of phonetic English-language spelling reforms,[3] e.g., by J.I.D. Hinds[4] [5] or Tobias Witmer.[6]
On the other hand, Morris Swadesh defined "phonetic orthography" or "phonetic alphabet" as a writing system to make a phonetic record using symbols for "selected characteristic points in the total range of possible speech sounds",[1] this is more commonly referred to as "phonetic transcription".
