The International Phonetic Alphabet

By Geoffrey Pullum. In a Lingua Franca post a few weeks ago, I needed to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent the different pronunciations of the English word garage. I didn’t explain much about the IPA; I took it for granted. We do with chemistry formulas using the element symbols in the periodic table, trusting that an educated public will understand CO₂ or H₂O (and maybe even NaCl or H₂SO₄). You get a certain amount of basic chemistry in high school or even earlier. However, my treating knowledge of phonetics similarly is not quite so justifiable. More...