The English Phonetic Alphabet, OR, Pig Sty Avenue meets Professor Higgins

Studying this is keeping me out of circulation lately. Here are some of the fruits of my labours, largely pointless without an accompanying MP3 - luckily I've got audio at home... (And that's another angle for the podcast, which is well into the planning stage now).

Really, my lack of knowledge of phonetics - for an English teacher - has been a scandal. I'm hoping to put that right over the next few weeks. I had a big-light-bulb-going-"ping!"-over-the-head moment with this last night: the English phonetic alphabet is very limited indeed. It's a very strict version of Received Pronunciation - the way people spoke on the BBC until the Second World War. To accurately represent the way most of us speak, you need the full IPA. But I'll learn the "English" one first.

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