11. An apparatus according to claim 10 wherein said skelton means includes vocalic distinction means for selectively providing a four-way vocalic distinction in the skelton of a short word and selectively providing only a two-way vocalic distinction in the skeleton of a long word.
10. An apparatus for generating a digital signal representative of a word skelton, said apparatus comprising A. input means for accepting a digital signal representative of a designated word in conventional graphic representation, B. skeleton means for generating from said designated word a linguistically salient word skelton, said skeleton means comprising (i) means for omitting from the linguistically salient word skeleton produced thereby a selected alpha set, if any, of the designated word which lacks isomorphy with a phonetic representation of that selected set, and (ii) means for replacing with a different linguistic symbol another selected alpha set, if any, of the designated word which lacks isomorphy with a phonetic representation of that other selected set, C. output means for producing an output digital signal representative of said linguistically salient word skeleton.