On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 02:16 PM, Brian's Mail list account wrote:

So the concept is then, trying to put sounds into a writable form for a person who cannot see it in the first place. This sounds a bit like some kind comedy sketch from an old goon show.

Precisely.

I also don't know how to explain that we who see and are examining material in the IPA are not trying to read it, but are really using it to "sound it out."

As you're also a Brian, you know what our shared name sounds like.  It would be written in IPA so that linguists, or non-native speakers of a given language, can sound out how we pronounce it.  No one ever reads it character by character using the actual IPA character name, but using the sound (AKA phoneme) that the character represents.

The list that John Isige presented is not comprehensive, either (and, John, that's not a swipe at you, it's just an observation).  A number of the common vowel digraphs of English are missing.

All of this takes me back to when I was studying speech and language pathology for my master's and put together a child-language checksheet for order of acquisition of various English phonemes, morphological markers, as well as interactional skills/communicative intents (among other things).

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Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763  

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

          ~ Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back