Since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, and Passy.

The idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Passy. In 1888, the alphabet was revised to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all future revisions. For example, the sound (the sh in shoe) was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ ch⟩ in French. Their original alphabet was based on a spelling reform for English known as the Romic alphabet, but to make it usable for other languages the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language.

In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, l'Association phonétique internationale). Main article: History of the International Phonetic Alphabet Most of these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics (not counting composites), and four extra-lexical prosodic marks in the IPA. Occasionally, letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. Slashes are used to signal phonemic transcription therefore, /t/ is more abstract than either or and might refer to either, depending on the context and language. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter:, or with a letter plus diacritics:, depending on how precise one wishes to be. Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types: letters and diacritics. To represent additional qualities of speech-such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate-an extended set of symbols may be used. The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The International Phonetic Alphabet ( IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. The official chart of the IPA, revised in 2020

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