An additional challenge was to accommodate letters that were not in English. The challenge in developing the alphabet was to meet the criteria I listed earlier and to use words that non-English speakers would be able to speak and understand and that that did not have wildly different pronunciations in different languages. This was adopted in the 1950s and is still standard today here are the letters: After WWII, American and Western European countries settled on what's known as the NATO phonetic alphabet (as I say, not a correct term). Over time it became obvious that it would be useful to standardize on a single such alphabet. During WWII, for example, the US military used a spelling alphabet that began with Able-Baker-Charlie, which might be familiar still to people who went through that conflict (or who love movies set in that time period). Spelling alphabets evolved independently in different branches of the military and in different countries. One of the early English phonetic alphabets ( from 1913) used these words: For example, you wouldn't want to use A=Able and T=Table or B=Bear and F=Fare (or Fair). It must also use words that are phonetically distinct from one another. Your alphabet must use simple, short words. Imagine for a moment that you've been assigned to come up with a phonetic alphabet for English. (As those of us of a certain age can remember, pre-digital radio was notoriously subject to static and interference.) Signaling individual letters had of course long been established in the navy, and so spelling alphabets evolved to have a distinct word for each letter. The idea was further developed with the spread of radio technology. This was an early version:Īck Beer C D E F G H I J K L Emma N O Pip Q R Esses Toc U Vic W X Y Z Initial attempts in the British Army in the 19th century simply assigned alternative names to letters that were frequently misheard. Since the military is very interested in communication, and because they often work under auditorially challenging conditions (such as, say, during battle), spelling alphabets have mostly come from the military. Even if you've never been in the military or gotten a radio license or studied flying, you've probably heard people use a spelling alphabet on TV or in a movie.Īs you can imagine, spelling alphabets were developed for precisely the reason I noted - spelling out loud is fraught, what with all the letters that sound similar (e.g., B, E, P, T, D) and the many vagaries of auditory communication. A spelling alphabet consists of words (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, etc.) that represent alphabetic characters. This might be one reason that I've developed an interest in the idea of so-called spelling alphabets (frequently referred to, incorrectly, as phonetic alphabets). Even spelling it out doesn't help - P-O-P-E - and I find myself exaggerating the aspiration on those plosives. "Hope?" This is particularly true over the telephone. My name - Pope - is surprisingly easy to mishear. Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, writes:
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