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(IPA) Today the most common system for transcribing the sounds of a language, the IPA was first published in 1888 by the Association Phonétique Internationale, an organization of foreign language teachers founded by French phonetician Paul Passy. The practical purpose of this association was to create a standardized system of transcribing speech sounds independent of any language, but applicable to all languages. Rather than on the exact representation of the articulation of individual sounds, the emphasis was on furnishing pronounceable texts. A phonetic script for English designed in 1847 by Isaac Pitman and Henry Ellis served the creators of IPA as a model. IPA was last revised in 1989 ( table 7 ). It has been employed in many instances for first reducing a language to writing. However, functional orthographies usually do not adhere to IPA principles strictly, if only because orthographies can rely on the users’ knowledge of the language in question and hence incorporate other than phonetic (e.g. morphophonemic) information, ignoring contextually predictable phonetic variation. See also english phonotypic alphabet ; orthography ; transcription . Reading Albright 1958. Table 7 The international phonetic alphabet (revised to 1989) ... log in or subscribe to read full text