[quote=“rian”]Iron lady
I thought you were smarter or more rounded than to make a statement like that. I may be wrong but, apart from academics and some English students or teachers, the universal phonetic language is useless.[/quote]It’s not universal phonetic language, it’s International Phonetic Alphabet. It has around 200 symbols IIRC and is “intended as a notational standard for the phonetic representation of all languages” (from the wiki link below). Info here;
www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html
(check out the charts).
More info here;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio … c_Alphabet
What you are probably confusing this with is one of the phonemic charts which are used to describe the phonemes of English alone and which are subsets of the IPA, such as the one developed by Adrian Underhill;
developingteachers.com/phonology/sounds.htm
This latter one is often called IPA itself, but it should be clear that it is not the whole IPA but just a subset, and that in addition it does not provide for broad transcription of the phonetic subtleties of regional accents but only for narrow transcription of the phonemes of English over a wide geographical area.
Further discussion of this topic on both pages of this thread;
[Should the use of K.K. be restricted?
(despite the heading of “K.K.” we go on to discuss the IPA, the Underhill chart, other such charts and regional phonemic differences).