RobWords on youtube or Nebula has a 20 minute video on the NATO phonetic alphabet thats more engaging than most. Worth a watch if you have the time, but the tl;dr is there needed to be a concise, interintelligible code to transmit as much data as possible over unreliable connections and multiple languages.
It is because each word doesn’t sound like the other words so if it cuts out part of the word for interference or background noise you know ‘lta’ was delta and ‘vo’ was bravo and not some other words.
Experts and multilingual people were involved in choosing the words that could be pronounced clearly by people who spoke different languages, the words were each unique, and they have been consistent across many decades. The current list is the survivor of multiple attempts to do the same thing!
This annoys me unreasonably, because they use Quebec for ‘Q’, but the correct pronunciation of Quebec is KEH-bek. It’s as dumb as pronouncing Lyon as ‘LIE-un’ instead of ‘lee-OHN’.
I pronounce it with the ‘Keh’ sound when I use the phonetic alphabet, and I’ve heard others do so as well. The word doesn’t need to start with the sound of the letter, it just needs to be somewhat intelligible as that word, and not one of the other words in the phonetic alphabet.
For example, if Celine was spelling her name, she would use the phonetic ‘Charlie’, even though her name doesn’t start with the ‘Ch’ sound.
Apple and boy and Dennis are clear, too. I feel like some of the ones you mentioned are actually hard to grasp. Foxtrot is one of them.
RobWords on youtube or Nebula has a 20 minute video on the NATO phonetic alphabet thats more engaging than most. Worth a watch if you have the time, but the tl;dr is there needed to be a concise, interintelligible code to transmit as much data as possible over unreliable connections and multiple languages.
It is because each word doesn’t sound like the other words so if it cuts out part of the word for interference or background noise you know ‘lta’ was delta and ‘vo’ was bravo and not some other words.
Experts and multilingual people were involved in choosing the words that could be pronounced clearly by people who spoke different languages, the words were each unique, and they have been consistent across many decades. The current list is the survivor of multiple attempts to do the same thing!
This annoys me unreasonably, because they use Quebec for ‘Q’, but the correct pronunciation of Quebec is KEH-bek. It’s as dumb as pronouncing Lyon as ‘LIE-un’ instead of ‘lee-OHN’.
I pronounce it with the ‘Keh’ sound when I use the phonetic alphabet, and I’ve heard others do so as well. The word doesn’t need to start with the sound of the letter, it just needs to be somewhat intelligible as that word, and not one of the other words in the phonetic alphabet. For example, if Celine was spelling her name, she would use the phonetic ‘Charlie’, even though her name doesn’t start with the ‘Ch’ sound.