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MMCNICHOLS -at- delphi -dot- com wrote:
: Although no one who managed to graduate from boot camp could fail to
: remember the "alpha, bravo, etc." mantra, I have no idea whether anybody calls
: it the "International Phonetic Alphabet" or not. I rather doubt they do,
: since it is not "international," but rather American. Neither is there such a
: thing as an "International Phonetic Alphabet" for linguistic
: transcription/study. There is, however, the International Phonetics
: Association (IPA) Alphabet, first set out in 1888 and revised in 1989. The
: IPA Alphabet reflects "phones," or sounds, and is put to a variety of uses by
: linguists, speech pathologists, language teachers, phoneticians, and other
: strange beings. Generally speaking, most people encounter the IPA symbols
: used to represent "phonemes," or meaningfully different sounds, in their own
: language (about 40 in English). If you want more information on the IPA
: Alphabet, consult an introductory linguistics or phonetics textbook, and then
: you, too, can amaze your cocktail party friends with a learned discussion of
: the glottal stop or of nonredundancy in Akan consonants. Personally, I'd
: rather tell sea stories and sniff pheromes.
The "alpha, bravo" phonetic alphabet is the NATO standard agreed to in a
STANAG dating from the 1960's, and before then the US military used a
different system: "able, baker".
Interestingly, not all of NATO useds it internally, because in Turkish
and Greek they make no sense.
JDB
