Ynifon is a phonemic notation for American English. Words are spelled as they are pronounced and pronounced as they are encoded. Spoken words are reduced to a string of sound signs. Ynifon has 40 of these. After learning them you can spell any word you can speak, or sound out any Ynifon spelling.

Ynifon means 'one-sound' and is part of the stated goal for this notation: one and only one sound per symbol. Ynifon could also be called unigraph because there are no digraphs (two letter symbols) and no alternate way of representing the same sound. One key per sound means that Ynifon can represent a variety of phonemic scripts.

Subtle sound variations have been merged and are represented with the same symbol. For example, 'u' represents both the stressed sound in UP (up) and the unstressed sound in AGO (ugO). A stress marker, as in U'GÓ, would distinguish these two sounds in Webster's notation at www.m-w.com (/&'gO/).


Ynifon is almost isomorphic with the Merriam Webster dictionary at www.m-w.com:

"another"	=	&'n&(th)&r	=	unuDc
"diacritic"	=	'dI&kritik	=	dIukritik

The differences are:

1. Ynifon doesn't show stress (ESL classes may want to add a stress marker).
2. Ynifon has no two letter symbols or digraphs such as (th) and (ng).
3. Ynifon is an ASCII-bet and has no diacritics, Webster uses ä and ü.
4. Ynifon uses u instead of & for the schwa and the sound in the word up.
5. Ynifon has a ligatured sound sign (c) for Webster's (&r).

Both Ynifon and the Webster dictionary key are typographically challenged. Ynifon, however, converts the mixed case keyboard entry code to an appealing upper case extended alphabet with 17 new or modified characters. The most frequent modification is the addition of an embedded macron.

This page uses a special font for displaying words in Ynifon. An installed font isn't required to view the contents of this web page, but one is required to use your computer for writing in Ynifon. Click here to download a Ynifon font.