Does anyone actually understand these phonetic translations? I'm guessing they're Latin, but who on earth uses them? Dictionary.com gives the modern English phonetic spelling (which can be switched to IPA via a button beneath the word) but I find a lot of online dictionaries give the IPA by default. Am I missing something here? http://www.dictionary.com/browse/muscle?s=t
I think they were the best we could do, before computers/speakers allowed the spoken pronunciation guides. As I understand it they're more precise than the attempts at phonetic spellings, since even the phonetic spellings will depend somewhat on regional accents, etc. The phonetic coded things give the actual sounds, I think. Print dictionaries used to, and probably still do, have guides in their front or back matter explaining what the different symbols mean. I've struggled through them a few times, but I'm more than happy to have the spoken versions available on line now! ETA: For example, I looked up "push" vs "mush" on the dictionary.com site. Their phonetic spelling for push is poo sh, which... unless the italicized oo means something different than the regular oo, doesn't work for me. And if the italicized oo DOES mean something different, then we're back to needing a guide somewhere to tell us what the code means...
So there are people out there who actually understand IPA code? I assumed it was some kind of archaic Latin/Hebrew traditional thing. We live and learn.
It was invented during the early days of linguistics to represent sounds independent of the reader's native tongue. Because I dare you to speak German with an English 'r'. Yes, there are people who can read it (myself only really the consonants), and it has precisely nothing to do with Latin or Greek, except that they reused some symbols. It's an invaluable tool in linguistics, and much more effective than the old style of "a like in cat", because not everyone pronounces "cat" the same way.
I used to know most of them back in high school because our English teacher insisted we learn them. It does come in handy when you come across a word you've never seen before and want to know how to pronounce it. It may also help when writing poetry and you want to know which syllables are stressed.