international fanatic alphabet

Conventionally written between backslashes, the international fanatic alphabet (IFA) allows amateur linguists living in bedsits to become angrily engaged in the latest language-related controversies by spamming other people's blogs with off-topic comments. While other, more complex, transcription-systems require years of practice, IFA simply requires years of prejudice. Unfettered by scientific considerations, IFA-practitioners need simply to insist that words be written precisely as they are spoken.

The centring "schwa" vowel, the commonest sound in English, written in IPA with an inverted "e", but in IFA with \UH\.

IFA transcriptions are particularly useful when representing the American-English tendency (aka to Grossman) to try to make foreign words sound even foreigner.

* part of linguististics, the scientific study of how you pronounce language-experts' names