Question: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system for transcribing

Question

Question: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system for transcribing human speech. The IPA has one very important design feature that makes it useful for doing scientific work on language, and also makes it very different from a typical writing system. What is it?

(1) Each human speech sound is represented by exactly one symbol in the IPA.

(2) The IPA can also be used to transcribe animal noises, like bird calls.

(3) Some very rare speech sounds are intentionally not represented in the IPA, as a way of saving space.

(4) There is no handwritten/cursive version of the IPA.

Explanation / Answer

Ans) International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was first developed in 1886 to represent oral parts of speech , further it got extended for additional qualities of speech like lipsing , and other sounds made during speech by using cleft lips and palates. It is used by many as a pronounciation guide. It requires lot of training to understand this as it is not a single language work. It is used for writing down the sounds of any known HUMAN language. IPA is used to transcribe language which means to represent pronunciation. Transcribing depends on how a word is said; two different dialects will get transcribed in different ways for the same word.

The most important feature of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is that it is a one to one system. hence, what makes it different from a typical writing system is (1) Each human speech sound is represented by exactly one symbol in IPA. Also every IPA character represents exactly one sound that makes it useful for doing scientific work. This feature of one to one is therefore helpful in maintaining definite results of transcribing one sound and not creating confusions. Extensions of IPA are doing wonders but the main feature remains the mot important which helps it scientifically for doing further progress in researches.

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