You get something like: dʒ so what “dee-three?” No, it’s “juh” or: ɔː Well I know that’s not “sea-colon” or “frowny face” or I wouldn’t be making this thread. So what is it? Apparently it’s “or” … so I was ironically right the first time by pure coincidence. Who comes up with these things, or what base language are they using?
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This called the [international phonetic alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet). Different languages use different spelling conventions, for example the letter ‘j’ represents completely different sounds in English, Spanish and German. (The Spanish ‘j’ is similar to the English ‘h’ and the German ‘j’ is similar to the English ‘y’.)
Linguists in the late 1800s wanted to be able to talk about pronunciation in any language unambiguously, so they made the IPA. It’s based on the Latin alphabet, but it’s intended to be able to represent every sound in every language, so it adds a lot of new characters to represent those sounds.
This is the IPA International Phonetic Alphabet.
It is a way to write down how things are pronounced.
If you just write things down in normal Latin letters like is normally down for English, you get the problem that sometimes letters mean different sounds and the same sounds can be written with different letters.
Each letter in the IPA stands for exactly one sound. Since there are more sounds that humans make than there are letters in alphabets they had to get creative and added a bunch of other characters to mean things.
The range of sounds you can make with your mouth is vast. Think of all the different sounds you can make that are somewhere between “hat” and “hot”, for example. You can also say things at different speeds, volumes, and pitches. You can throw in various clicking and spitting sounds.
Any given language only uses a restricted set of these sounds. For example, the click sounds used in Xhosa are not used at all in English (or at least, any variety of English I’m aware of). And within that set, some sounds are regarded as having the same meaning. For example, in English, some people might say “hat” with a slightly longer “a” sound or at a different pitch, but we don’t think of these as being different.
Typically, a given language’s writing system will only be able to reflect those sounds that are used and distinguished from each other in that language. For example, the English writing system does not have symbols for click sounds. They also tend to use the same symbol to represent multiple different sounds (e.g. think about the different ways “g” can be pronounced) and often don’t capture variations between dialects. When discussing how sounds are used across different languages, something like the English writing system is pretty useless. For example, if I tell you that in my made-up language, there is a word that is pronounced like “gurg”, different people will interpret that in very different ways. The IPA uses unique symbols to represent different sounds and captures a wide array of different sounds used in different languages.
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