User:Guy Macon/Alfa or Alpha? Juliett or Juliet?

Spelling errors?

The Wikipedia page NATO phonetic alphabet purposely contains two apparent spelling errors: Alfa instead of the English Alpha, and Juliett instead of the English Juliet.

Do not attempt to correct these apparent spelling errors. The official International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) documentation and the official North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) documentation use ⟨Alfa⟩ and ⟨Juliett⟩.

In the official version of the alphabet, the non-English spellings Alfa and Juliett are used. Alfa is spelled with an f because the English and French spelling alpha would not be pronounced properly by native speakers of some other languages (in particular Spanish) who may not know that ph should be pronounced as f.  Juliett is spelled with a tt for French speakers, because they may otherwise treat a single final t as silent. Some published versions incorrectly list "Alpha" and "Juliet" – presumably because of the use of spell checker software – but those spellings are never correct and should be changed back to "Alfa" and "Juliett" wherever such mistakes are found.

The scientists who developed the phonetic alphabet did extensive tests with real people who spoke many different languages and with various kinds and intensities of radio interference, carefully choosing words that are unlikely to be confused with each other and which are pronounced the same no matter who says them.

They aren't the words you think they are

Alfa/Alpha and Juliett/Juliet are only apparent spelling errors, because they are not the same word. See Polysemy. For example, the words Hotel (a place to rent a room) and Hotel (the letter "H" in the NATO phonetic alphabet) are Homonyms: different words that happen to be spelled the same in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, and Icelandic. In Welsh the NATO phonetic letter for "H" is still Hotel even though the place to rent a room is spelled Gwesty. In Chinese the NATO phonetic letter for "H" is still Hotel even though the place to rent a room is called 酒店 (jiǔdiàn in Pinyin). Likewise, in English the first letter of the Greek alphabet is Alpha and the Shakespeare character is Juliet while the letter "A" in the NATO phonetic alphabet is Alfa and the letter "J" is Juliett. Not the same word. Nor is it the same word as the Etruscan Alfa. Just as Wikipedia doesn't "correct" Hotel in the NATO phonetic alphabet to Gwesty or 酒店, we likewise don't "correct" Alfa in the NATO phonetic alphabet to Alpha or "correct" Juliett to Juliet.

So why do people keep trying to "correct" the spelling?

Published lists of the NATO phonetic alphabet words started getting Alfa and Juliett wrong right around the time that spellcheckers became widely used, and many non-NATO sources either contain these errors or incorrectly claim that either Alfa or Alpha is acceptable. I have looked and looked and could not find a single example of anyone prior to the introduction of spell checkers saying that the NATO alphabet contains Alpha or Juliet.

But why does "Foxtrot" still get a single final t?

In the case of Juliett, a single final t can be taken as silent by French speakers because they have the word juillet meaning the month of July, where the final t is silent; whereas the French word for the Shakespeare character is Juliette, where the t is pronounced as it is in English. However, in the case of Foxtrot, the French word for the ballroom dance is fox-trot, where the single final t is pronounced like a t, the same way it is in English. Thus, there is no similar reason to spell Foxtrot (the NATO phonetic letter for F) with a final tt.

Why does the English Wiktionary list "Alfa" as a word?

wikt:Alfa lists "Alfa", but Wiktionary also lists wikt:cheezburger and wikt:l33t. Wiktionary lists many words that are either non-English or purposely misspelled, including cheezburger, l33t, and alfa. The headers on the Wictionary page normally tell you the language: for wikt:Alpha the headers are English, French, Interlingua, and Latin, but for wikt:Alfa the headers are Translingual, Etruscan, and Icelandic. "Translingual" means "Having the same meaning in many languages".