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.
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