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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.
Mel McNichols
mmcnichols -at- delphi -dot- com
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig."
