 One goal of language learning, language teaching and linguistic research is to provide precise and explicit information about the sound system of any language. For this purpose, we need some sort of generalized notation. This unit discusses the necessity of such a notation of such an international alphabet that looks at possible design principles. We will first of all ask the question, couldn't we use the writing systems of the languages of the world and will then focus on particular systems of a phonetic notation? In looking at the writing systems around, the first question you might ask here, couldn't we take the alphabet of the language in focus in order to transcribe its sound system? Well, in looking at the writing systems of the languages of the world, we easily see that this is not a suitable option. There are, for example, languages that do not have a writing system at all. About 85% of the languages of the world do not have writing systems. How shall we describe the sound structure of such a language? Well, let's look at an example. Well, here's an example of a language, of a Nidra Kongo language spoken in Nigeria. The language is called Oko, and it hasn't got a writing system at all. Now, for academic purposes, the Roman alphabet is used in such cases. However, the pronunciation is often not clear. Now, let's look at one example here. When the woman saw the man, this is what I can read in applying the alphabetic system here. However, if we look at the phonetics, you see the quality of the vowels is completely different. So, an alphabetic notation for languages without a writing system is not really suitable at all. This becomes even more obvious if you look at the pronunciation of some cases and see how much you are influenced by your own language, by the language you speak and your own writing system. Let's look at my hometown, for example. My hometown here in Germany is Hannover. Now, the way I pronounce it is the German pronunciation. In English, you would say Hanover, and in Russian, people would say Ganover. Now, how can we reflect that by means of the orthographical system of German, English or Russian? Well, we can't. Nevertheless, we could argue since the remaining 15% of the languages that have a writing system constitute about 60% of the world's population, we might think that, well, we perhaps do not need an extra phonetic alphabet because their languages have writing systems. Yet, not all of these writing systems are phonographic. For example, in languages such as Chinese, the non-alphabetic orthography generally does not give any direct information about pronunciation. Well, let's look at an example here from Chinese, where you see this is the Chinese orthographic representation of the very big book. Let's listen to two variants. Now here, you see the first variant which is standard Chinese spoken in Shandong province and this is what it sounds like. Again. Let's now compare that with a Chinese dialect. Now here we have a dialect spoken in the Suzhou area and this is what it sounds like. Now, you can clearly see that the writing system which is the same in both cases doesn't help. This orthographical representation does not at all reflect the pronunciation of Chinese and its dialects. Okay, so this is then the next argument that even that languages, that many languages have a non-phonographic writing system. But then there are languages with the phonographic writing systems. But even there in languages such as Finnish or Italian, there may be sporadic mismatches between the sound of the spelling of words since there are almost always phonetic characteristics of, for example, continuous speech that are not reflected in the orthography. Let's look at Finnish where the correspondence between the orthography and phonetics is almost ideal. Here you see the welcoming message of one of our speakers of Finnish on the virtual linguistics campus contained in the language index. Let's listen first. And as you can see, the information in line one, the orthographical information is almost identical with the information in line three, the phonetic transcription. However, one thing is missing even in the orthographical notation, namely the information about stress. This situation is even worse in present-day English. Now, in present-day English you have problems. For example, if you look at particular character combinations, let's look at the character combination OW. Now, this combination can be represented in two ways. On the one hand, we may have something like this in RPO. On the other hand, we may have something like OW. Examples are show or low versus how and now. There's nothing in the orthography that tells us how to pronounce the character combination OW. In present-day English, this situation is especially difficult because the sound changes that affected the English language through its history are not reflected in the spelling. Let's listen to an example. Now, just listen to the following poem and look at the rhyming patterns at the end of each line. Well, in summary, if you look at such a text where you have words like tear and tear, where the orthography does not reflect spelling, there is no doubt, and I think you all agree, about the necessity of a phonetic notation. But what shall it look like? Well, many languages have phonographic systems, phonographic writing systems, but some of them seem to be too exotic to be applied to other languages. So let's wipe this off now and look at some phonographic systems. Here, for example, you see Georgian. Now, in Georgian, you have an alphabetic notation. This, in fact, means the big book, and it is pronounced Well, this is an alphabetic notation. Or here, you have an alphabet used in a Berber language, spoken in North Africa, And again, you have here the big book, and the pronunciation is I hope I got it right. I'm not a speaker of Tamasicht. So, since these are very exotic, we can assume that today the backbone of an international phonetic alphabet is probably the Roman alphabet, because most languages with a phonographic writing system use it anyway. However, in the past, in developing such a transcription system, there were alternatives. Let's look at them. Here are some examples of some notations that have been invented that are alphabetic in principle, but are not based on the Roman or any other existing alphabet. The first one here is from the 17th century. It's called the iconic notation by John Wilkins. Francis Ludwig, again, also in the 17th century, developed a system which was called the universal alphabet. Or look at Alexander Melville Bell's system of visible speech in the 19th century. And again, another one would be Henry Sweets' organic alphabet. Now these four systems are alphabetic systems. They use non-arbitrary symbols, so the symbols somehow resemble either orthographical characters or pronunciation issues. Completely arbitrary was Robinson's system developed in the 17th century. Now this gives a lateral view of the palette. Well, from the lines from A to B, for example, and the root of the tongue, which is C. And from the roots, several lines were drawn representing five different tongue configurations. In addition to these symbols or to these notations, we have something which Jesper's developed, which looks like a chemical formula. And they have been discussed as well. However, you see these transcription systems are relatively useless as compared with our alphabetic notations, which in fact go back to Henry Sweets. This is Henry Sweets, one of the founding members of the International Phonetic Association. And Henry Sweets suggested in his handbook of phonetics which was published late in the 19th century, two systems. The first system is called the broad-romic system. And the second one is called the narrow-romic system. Now as you can see, broad-romic was introduced to indicate only those distinctions of sound which actually correspond to the distinctions of meaning in language. So this is some of the predecessors of what today we would call a phonemic transcription, an early realization of the phonemic principle. And the narrow-romic was meant to be a more scientific notation aiming at indicating even slight differences in articulation. You see, if you look at the first party, he doesn't seem to feel, and here he doesn't seem to feel, and here in the second part you see simply more details, vowel length, more information about stress and connected speech aspects than in the broad-romic transcription. Both notations were applied to English and used letters that were merely those of the Roman alphabet. However, they were sometimes capitalized, but never written as capital letters and sometimes they were twisted around, they were turned or raised. Today, the principles used in phonetic transcriptions are defined by the International Phonetic Association, IPA, International Phonetic Association. These principles, their principles, which we will discuss elsewhere, can now be applied to the development of a general phonetic alphabet from which each language can pick the respective subset of symbols. For example, English, present-day English, the RP dialect, has 44 phonemes, 20 vowels and 24 consonants, and many more allophones. But how can we represent this sound system more adequately? Well, this question will be discussed in the unit, the phonetic transcription of present-day English.