International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA):
* Purpose: To represent all the sounds of human speech in a precise and consistent manner. It's designed to be a universal system, not language-specific.
* Representation: Uses a set of unique symbols, each representing a single sound. These symbols are often based on Roman letters but can be modified with diacritics (marks added to change the sound) or have entirely different symbols.
* Specificity: Represents even subtle differences in pronunciation, like the difference between the "l" in "light" and "love" or the "t" in "top" and "stop".
* Consistency: Every symbol represents the same sound regardless of the language. This makes it ideal for linguists, phoneticians, and language learners.
Roman Alphabet (English):
* Purpose: To represent the written form of English words. It's a system specifically for English and its conventions.
* Representation: Uses 26 letters, some of which can be combined to create different sounds (e.g., "sh", "th").
* Ambiguity: Some letters represent multiple sounds (e.g., "c" in "cat" vs. "city"). A single sound might be spelled in multiple ways (e.g., "e" in "met", "get", "said").
* Inconsistency: A single letter can represent different sounds in different words. For example, "a" in "cat", "father", and "care" all have different pronunciations.
In Summary:
* IPA is a scientific system for representing sounds. It is universal and precise.
* The Roman alphabet is a spelling system for English. It is language-specific and can be ambiguous.
Here's an example:
* The word "cat" is spelled "cat" in both systems.
* However, the IPA transcription of "cat" is /kæt/ while the Roman alphabet represents it as "cat".
This highlights how the IPA is more precise, representing each sound individually, while the Roman alphabet relies on spelling conventions that can lead to ambiguity.