Phonetic Reversal

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Phonetic reversal is the process of reversing the phonemes of a word or phrase. When the reversal is identical to the original, the word or phrase is called a phonetic palindrome. Phonetic reversal is not entirely identical to backmasking, which is specifically the reversal of recorded sound. This is because pronunciation in speech cause a reversed diphthong to sound different in either direction (e.g. long I [ä] becoming "yah" [ja]), or differently emphasize a consonant depending on where it lies in a word, hence creating an imperfect reversal. Backmasking involves not only the reversal of the order of phonemes, but the reversal of the phonemes themselves, which means that the reversed sound of a phrase may be hard to predict.