What is the International Phonetic Alphabet? How does it help to learn a language?

[1] International Phonetic Alphabet, whose original meaning is "International Phonetic Alphabet" or IPA for short, was formulated by the International Phonetic Association.

1888, initiated by British H~ West, completed by French P~ Passy and British D~ Jones, was published in Phonetic Teachers (the predecessor of the International Phonetic Association, Journal of Phonetic Teachers Association), which is the first international phonetic symbol in history. After many revisions, the current revision scheme is 1979.

Early linguists set up their own phonetic notation methods for their own research needs, which brought inconvenience to communication. After the publication of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the principle of one symbol and one sound was strictly stipulated. In languages that use pinyin schemes, the same letter usually has several pronunciations in different words. In addition, the same sound has different spellings in different languages. In the arrangement of the international phonetic alphabet, the abscissa and ordinate of consonants are roughly determined according to the pronunciation position and pronunciation method, and the position of vowels is determined according to the tongue position, which is convenient for analysis and mastery.

The letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet are based on Latin letters, but people's voices are very different, and the limited Latin letters are far from enough, so they are supplemented by changing fonts and borrowing letters from other languages. In order to take care of habits, most symbols are based on the principle of still reading the original sounds of Latin or other languages. At present, there are 72 consonants and 23 vowels in the phonetic symbols on the traffic table, which is generally enough to mark pronunciation.

This international phonetic symbol was created by scholars in Britain and France, and is mainly used to mark Indo-European languages, African languages and some minority languages. After its publication, it became more popular in European linguistics. Most Americans still use their own symbols to learn the language of American Indians. Some sounds in Chinese dialects cannot be listed in this table. There are only eight tone symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet List, which are flat tone, rising tone, falling tone and two concave-convex tones, which is not enough to study and describe tonal language. Zhao Yuanren put forward a tone symbol of pentatonic scale, called "tone letter", which was published in Phonetics Teacher 1930. It is applicable to all tonal language and has been adopted by most international scholars.