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== IPA's purpose and Wikipedia's use of IPA ==
IPA's purposes are to:
IPA's purposes are to 1) represent the [[phonetics]] of words (how they sound) and 2) to give samples of the [[phonology]] of a language (how the language as a whole sounds). The second purpose concerns only linguists. The first purpose concerns any interested reader, but only to a limited degree, as transcribing words into IPA does not need to be perfect or overly [[Phonetic transcription#Narrow versus broad transcription|precise]] (something for fluent IPA users to consider). The word "transcribe" is used to distinguish this from normal writing or spelling, which has other purposes (such as preserving word etymologies and meaning). ▼
# represent the [[phonetics]] of words (how they sound) and
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IPA is complex enough to represent nearly anything, but high-fidelity transcriptions will use glyphs that are unfamiliar to English readers and unpracticed in English [[phonology]]. For example a transcription of something like the Icelandic name ''[[Eyjafjallajökull]]'' is pronounced {{IPA-is|ˈeiːjaˌfjatl̥aˌjœːkʏtl̥||Is-Eyjafjallajökull (3).oga}}, meaning ''island-mountain glacier,'' may approximate Icelandic phonology, but such information will likely be too much for English readers, who may need to reference the name using what is at best an approximate pronunciation anyway. (Often an English version of a foreign name will try to employ translation in combination with partial transcription, but this often stays unnecessarily close to the original spelling and therefore prevents English speakers from using sounds they can easily produce. For example ''Eyja-fjalla glacier'' (['eija-f'jala] ''glacier'') is a sufficiently close approximation, but ''Eyja-fjatla glacier'' (['eija-f'jatla] ''glacier'') would be closer and still easy to pronounce.)
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