FYI, Phonetic Alphabet

Thanks for the tip.

But communications is slidding,

You can pretty much blame the liberal educational system for that. I knew it was getting bad when Ebonics hit the main stage back in the mid 90's.

Not even goig to touch the rewriting of history books.

"But communications is slidding" ... Well certainly we can all improve.

If you check any modern discussion about history you'll soon see there isn't any objective "History".

I think the police agencies here in Az. should use it, but they speak some sort of gibberish. All given names, I guess. George, Henry, Ida..........

One Az. city has decided to just speak plain English when talking on the radio.

As in no 10-codes. Go figure.

I learned it as the NATO alphabet. The one that still kills me fifty odd years later, is "whiskey", pronounced, "wiskey". Admittedly, sounding the "h" before the "w" is odd, but it is the correct pronunciation outside this phonetic alphabet.

J; Juliet

X; X-ray

Y; Yankee

Z: Zulu

Hi Ace,

You beat me to the correction.

Chas

I've always wondered why they called it the 'phonetic alphabet'. Very misleading.

A better name would have been 'crackle alphabet' or something hinting that its for when audio conditions are very poor and you need to be sure someone knows which letters you are saying.

'Phonetic alphabet' means a complete alphabet for the sounds of a language, presumably as the basis of a fonetik spelling system such as Nooalf.

Just another example of kaos in the brain hobbling conglomeration known as english.

Another thing - Are there distinct names for the numbers?

A better term might be "Spelling Alphabet"; there are many of them! The list mentioned by one earlier post may be the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) version, but there's also a "Name List" commonly used in the financial field. Quite a few can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spelling_alphabets and the links found there.

it's called RADIO ALPHABET, originating from the times you described, days of "crackle" and hiss of radio communications, requiring the sender to clarify words by spelling it.

Hi Tippycanoe,

nice post, whatcha mean by "golf is for those who can't sail"? I think golf is the sport in this case, Golf meaning a wind is German (same as the car). Is the wind name gulf or golf in English?

I remember NATO alphabet having some weird names for digit spelling, like "tree" for 3, "four" rhiming with "flour" and "niner" for 9.

Season's gretings

Snel

Yep, back in the day (_{Oh, no, here we go again with the old fart stories}) when I was in the army and running radio communications between General Custer and General DeGaulle, we pronounced them (at least the ones I remember) as Won, Two, Thuree, Fower, Fyive, Six, Seven, Ate, Niner, Zeerow. Or something like that.

The German language has a similar problem in that "zwei" and "drei" are easily confused. The word "zwo" was introduced to negate the risk.

Any body out there remember

Able

Baker

Charlie

Dog

Easy

Fox

George

How

Item

Jig

King

Love

Mike

Nan

Oboe

Peter

Queen?

Roger

Sugar

Tare

Uncle

Victor

William

Xray

Yoke

Zebra

I might be remembering this wrong, but when I was a student pilot in '75 , I used "one - five -juliet - tango", C-152 as call sign, has the phonetic alphabet evolved?

I do think it would be a good thing to teach children.

Yes Tippie, IMHO the Phonetic Alphabet should be taught to children worldwide.

Hell, if the US Army has been using for decades all cannot be so bad. It eliminates a lot of communication errors! And thank God for a good RTO's in the Army, as they're worth their weight in Gold for the Infantry Company CO!!!!!

===signed CaptMoosie, former Captain, US Army

you want to add more torture at school more than you refused when you were student...

I am often amused by the substitutions people make when constructing their personal phonetic alphabet.

Sometimes it is on purpose... Super Troopers '...Donna...Peanut...Eunuch...'.

Anyone else have any favorite or notable substitution spelling alphabets from movies or real life?

Benbenben

So we are all (most of us) ex-forces, taught to communicate under stressful situations. but to be able to do that we must have had a good base education.

I believe that the kids today need to be able to read and write (and speak the Queen's English) before they need to learn how to communicate on a radio.

No point in learning this if you can't spell