International air travel created a need for a worldwide standard. Many (loosely or strictly) standardized spelling alphabets exist, mostly owing to historical siloization, where each organization simply created its own. However, to gain the advantages of standardization in contexts involving trained persons, a standard version can be convened by an organization. For example, it is common to hear a nonce form like "A as in 'apple', D as in 'dog', P as in 'paper'" over the telephone in customer support contexts. For example, in the Latin alphabet, the letters B, P, and D ("bee", "pee" and "dee") sound similar and could easily be confused, but the words "bravo", "papa" and "delta" sound completely different, making confusion unlikely.Īny suitable words can be used in the moment, making this form of communication easy even for people not trained on any particular standardized spelling alphabet. This avoids any confusion that could easily otherwise result from the names of letters that sound similar, except for some small difference easily missed or easily degraded by the imperfect sound quality of the apparatus. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them. P is pō in pīnyīn.A spelling alphabet ( also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. May I have your name?ī: My name is Yīmíng Xǔkù’ěr. Speakers ask the spelling of the name (or have various shortcuts)Ī: Thanks for choosing our company. Quite a lot of this when encountering names, much like many English ![]() Instead of spelling words, Chinese speakers in general explain theĬharacters in terms of other words, a kind of 解说. The Chinese Wikipedia gives a few more examples of the numbers substituted in technical contexts. The exact same vowel and tone shared by the numbers 1 and 7 mean that they are very easily confused over a poor line, so much so that in civilian conversation when enunciating numbers, 幺 is the usual substitution for 一 when reading phone numbers and other long strings of numbers (as well as other specific examples). The disambiguation aspect is particularly obvious with numbers in Mandarin Chinese. But since the information being lost is encoded slightly differently in the written script, the actions developed to compensate are different. This was true in late 1890s Britain, which resulted in the 1904 British Army Regulations, is still true in aviation contexts, and is also true of the Sinosphere. One must then go back to the reason for a spelling alphabet in alphabet- and syllabary-using language systems: when the technology of audio transfer causes the risk of information loss to be large enough to impede communication. If the character is rare enough not to have such words, then other ad hoc explanations are required. These are very far from standard in the way that NATO or ICAO are, and there are plenty of ad hoc cultural variants but generally they use high-frequency disyllabic words. Chinese speakers do quite a lot of this when encountering names, much like many English speakers ask the spelling of the name (or have various shortcuts). ![]() Instead of spelling words, Chinese speakers in general explain the characters in terms of other words, a kind of 解说. The need for a standard English in international aviation is so important that there is much research in China into teaching ICAO English standards, and their standards are to be adhered to in aviation environments. That is not to say that radiotelephony procedure is unimportant. The idea of a "spelling alphabet" of course assumes the concepts of "spelling" and "alphabet", which does not apply to Chinese characters.
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