FO-Net-ik Al-FAH-Bet

[Harold Snyder <ENSNYDER -at- ECUVM1 -dot- BITNET>]

This thread is about to run its course, so I'd like to put in my dime and
play for as long as I can. Actually, here's a few observations:

1) The impression one may get from reading the posts is that the IPA (in
   its pre-Saudi form) came into being around WW II.

If my memory serves me correctly (and they say the memory is the second thing
to go when you get on the far side of 40 [or should that be 50?], but I can't
remember what the first thing to go was [but I think I enjoyed it]), the
first animals (a dog or a monkey; it could have been both) in space (via the
Ruskie's sputnik) were launched in the very late 50s or very early 60s (well
before Alan Shepard's suborbital flight in 1961) were called Abe; and Baker
(after the WW II/Korean War version of the IPA, which really wasn't
international because we were the only folks with an opportunity to use it.

During Vietnam, I can remember using the Alpha, Bravo...Zula phonetics to
identify everything from identifying aircraft to encoding/decoding (and
authenticating) military messages (both up and down the chain-of-command),
and the Marine Corps' finest continued to use that phonetic alphabet into
the early 1980s (to communicate in English when participating in NATO
operations).

2) "Water" versus "whiskey"

Most likely, the reason why "water" replaced "whiskey" during the 100 hours
war was because the host nation (Saudi, Kuwait, etc.) condemned the use of
whiskey (and other intoxicants) and they did not want to appear to condone
its use (the U.S. military accommodates as many folks as they can).

3) "Cue-bek" versus "Kay bek"

It was my experience that most Americans pronounced the capital of Canadian
province Quebec "Cue bek" (although I did know some sailors from Boston who
struggled to say it like our Southern folk did), and the reasoning behind it
was that Quebec was one of those unique words that its second letter "u"
demanded the preceding letter to be "Q," which is what the phoenetic
alphabet is all about -- not confusing initial letters.

4) Symbols versus phonetics

The letters of the alphabet are symbols; the way we phonetically pronounce
those letters is was NATO calls its IPS.

Well, I've gotten my quarter's worth, so

Semper fi,


Hal
(formerly Filebox Charlie)

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