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THE NECESSITY OF PHONETIC REPRESENTATION

In all languages, the letters in the orthography do not always have a One-to-one Correspondence with the speech sounds in the Pronunciation of words. This fact is not of great importance to native speakers of a particular language, but in case of foreigners who don't learn pronunciation with phonetic symbols and rely only on their teachers, or their "guesses" on the orthography, wrong Pronunciation will go along with them during the entire study. For languages whose Orthography does not tell much about sounds, e.g. English, or whose many letters are silent, e.g French, phonetic transcription is crucial not only for learners but also for linguists. For example, in the word "scissors", the digraph "sc" stands for the double s ("ss") for [z , but the letter "r" is silent in British English. Another noteworthy example is the word "colonel", which is not pronounced, but .