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The International Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet used by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds ( phones or phonemes) the human vocal apparatus can produce. It is intended as a notational standard for the phonetic representation of all languages. Most of its symbols are taken from the Roman alphabet or derived from it, some are taken from the Greek alphabet, and some are apparently unrelated to any standard alphabet.
It was originally developed by British and French phoneticians under the auspices of the International Phonetic Association, established in Paris in 1886 (both the organisation and the phonetic script are best known as IPA). The alphabet has undergone a number of revisions during its history, including some major ones codified by the IPA Kiel Convention ( 1989); the most recent revision was in 1993, updated again in 19961996 was a leap year starting on Monday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty''. Events January January 5 Hamas operative Yahya Ayyash is killed by an Israeli-planted booby-trapped cell phone Jan.
The sound-values of the consonants that are identical to those in the Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet also called the Roman alphabet is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and most of the languages of western and central Europe, and of those areas settled by Europeans. in most cases correspond to EnglishThe English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the mil usage. [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g], [m], [n], [f], [v], [s], [h], [z], [l], [w].
The vowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The word vo symbols that are identical to those in the Latin alphabet ([a], [e], [i], [o], [u]) correspond roughly to the vowels of SpanishThis article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain Spanish is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first langua or ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, most of whom live in Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan dialects and is somewhat intermediate between the languages of Southern Italy and the Gallo-Romance languages of the North.. [i] is like the vowel in meet, [u] like the vowel in food, etc.
Most of the other symbols that are shared with the Latin alphabet, like [j], [r], [c], and [y], correspond to sounds those letters represent in other languages. [j] has the sound value of English y in yoke (= German or Dutch j); whereas [y] has the Scandinavian or Old English value of the letter (= German y or ü or French u). The general principle is to use one symbol for one speech segment, avoiding letter combinations such as sh and th in English orthography.
Letters that have shapes that are modified Latin letters usually correspond to a similar sound. For example, all the retroflex consonantRetroflex consonants are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue curled up and back so the bottom of the tip touches the roof of the mouth. Retroflex consonants are common in the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages; and can also bes have the same symbol as the equivalent alveolar consonantAlveolars are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, the internal side of the upper gums (known as the alveoles of the upper teeth). The alveolar consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: Sees, except with a rightward pointing hook coming out of the bottom.
Diacritic marks can be combined with IPA signs to transcribe slightly modified phonetic values or secondary articulations. There are also special symbols for suprasegmental feature s such as stress and tone.
When characters from the IPA phonetic alphabet are embedding in another script they are isolated from from the rest of the text with either slashes ("/") or square brackets ("[" and "]"). Linguists use brackets when a narrow phonetic transcription is given, for example the English word "huge" would be