... pronunciation system of English. We begin with phonetics, a system for describing and recording the sounds of lan-guage objectively. Phonetics provides a valuable way of opening our ears to facets of language ... symbols, called diacritics, to the basic letters. For some English sounds and for languages other than English, symbols not from the English alphabet have been devised. (You might visit the IPA ... system is primary and the basis for the spelling system; (2) they may have to teach English pronunciation to stu-dents who are not native speakers of English; (3) they may have to teach poetry,...