What is the International Phonetic Alphabet?

block letter

International phonetic symbols (English: international? Phonetic symbol? Alphabet (IPA), also known as International Phonetic Alphabet in the early days, is a standardized phonetic notation method based on Latin alphabet and designed by the International Phonetics Society. Users of international phonetic symbols include linguists, speech therapists, foreign language teachers, singers, lexicographers and translators.

According to the design of International Phonetic Alphabet, it can only distinguish the following opposing components of oral quality: phoneme, intonation and the separation of words and syllables. There is another widely used international phonetic symbol expansion system to express the sound quality such as interdental sound (or disyllabic sound) and the sound produced by cleft lip and palate. ?

The International Phonetic Alphabet follows the strict standard of "one sound, one symbol" and was originally used to mark western languages, African languages and so on. After years of development, with the efforts of China linguist Zhao Yuanren and others, the International Phonetic Alphabet has gradually improved and can be used to annotate Chinese and other oriental languages.

References:

Baidu encyclopedia-international phonetic symbol