I am of the belief that all adults should memorize this list (including pronunciation, they are slightly different than the normal words).
It’s not onerous and can be done in a few minutes, and if nothing else will save you from sounding like a fool when spelling things over the phone (“a like apple, c like cat”). They are standard for a reason.
What I don't really like about the list is that if you don't know the list (which many people don't) then some of them are such unintuitive examples that they will catch a decent number of people off-guard and force you to repeat. Or, you know, the other way around. If we're using words as obscure as "Yankee" and "Zulu" (I wonder how many people have even heard these words, especially non-natives and English learners across the globe?), you'd think maybe sticking with a few categories would've made things easier and more intuitive? e.g. if we're using "K for Kilo" (which itself seems kind of bizarre in North America) then you'd think other natural choices would be "M for Mega", "G for Giga", "T for Ten", etc. which everyone speaking English (and then some) would've heard of... but nope, instead they're Mike, Golf, and Foxtrot (?!) of all things. They seem targeted specifically toward people to whom all the words come naturally and who've ideally learned the list. No wonder people don't go out of their way to learn them.
The words are chosen so that they sound dissimilar to each other, and they have an unamibiguous spelling and and pronounciation. They also ideally need to be words that won't come up in normal speech. The actual meaning is irrelevant.
So mega/giga would be undesirable as they sound similar, and beceause many people pronounce giga as "jigga". And "Ten" is just terrible, what is someone is reading out an alphanumeric string?
Do they? I do, because it is the correct pronunciation (the hard G only became prevalent after hard drives grew to GB sizes and Americans unfamiliar with the French system of units mispronounced the prefix), but I am literally the only one I have ever heard use it in person, and the only other instance I have heard it pronounced correctly is by Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in Back to the Future.
Why do I persist when everyone around me pronounces it incorrectly? Indeed, if everyone else pronounces a word a different way, are they right and am I wrong? I guess I just like tilting at windmills, I guess!
The French pronounciation is the "Correct" pronounciation? Wait 'till you hear how Greeks pronounce "Giga" and "Mega"- Greek words meaning "giant" and "large" :)
Oh come on. Ten is terrible because someone might be reading out an alphanumeric string? You can say that about other stuff already on that list. What if they're just reading out names? Then Charlie and Mike will be confusing. What if they're reading months? Then November will be confusing. What if they're reading countries? Then India will be confusing...
The particular choice of words wasn't even my point, and of course I get the dissimilarity thing. If "Ten" bothers you then just choose "Tom" or whatever. I know I've never seen anyone say jigga instead of giga, but if you have, then just pick another word. My point was about having a common theme to help make the list intuitive, not that "Ten" and "Mega" are inherently better than "Tango" or "Mike".
The list was designed for people who are going to train extensively to get them right, and for situations where mistakes can kill people.
You could probably develop an easier-to-comprehend list for everyday use, although I’m not persuaded by your complaints that the existing list isn’t suitable.
Yeah, the list is great when you're working with other people that have also learned the list. We use it in emergency communications and it's definitely way less mentally taxing and less confusing all using the same alphabet.
I'd say at least half the time when I use it talking to some call centre employee I lose them about two letters in to whatever I'm trying to spell.
That said, if there was a great replacement that would probably be in use instead. It's not just a list of words that happen to start with those letters, it's a list of words that do not sound similar to each other, are unambiguous as to what letter they represent, and maintain those qualities in a wide variety of accents and dialects.
Some use name expansion and it's intuitive: M for Michael, T for Thomas. Though properly covering latin alphabet with english phonetics can be challenging. What name should correspond to A? Arven?
I came across and learned the phonetic alphabet when I was 11 or so (in this wonderful video game which was tons of fun for the time: https://www.gog.com/game/independence_war_2), and I can honestly say it's come in handy a surprisingly high amount of times in my life since. Agreed with your recommendation :)
I learned the phonetic alphabet around high school age. I think I found it printed in the instruction manual for Microsoft Flight Simulator or something like that.
That used to happen to me too, then I studied it more, and would periodically spell words in my head using it until I recognized which letters I'd forget (kilo, lima, mike, november), then studied those some more.
Total time spent memorizing it fully probably sums to less than an hour over a couple years.
So then you don't actually know the alphabet. Knowing implies you know all the letters and can recall them at will at any point in time, - that's what makes it useful. Of course if your forget some letters, that will just make the whole thing more cumbersome than just using letters.
I can name them, but perhaps not out of blue during a phone call. It's stored deep in the back, along with the position of stars and the lyrics of Disney songs.
Really? I've found it enormously helpful when communicating alphanumeric strings (like, say, license keys) over the phone with support people in countries where English is not the primary language.
One of the keys to the success of the NATO phonetic alphabet is the disambiguation across various accents.
Let's say you're talking with someone who doesn't have a distinct V or W in their native tongue. Victor pronounced Wictor and Whisky pronounced Visky are sufficiently different from each other.
If you're making it up on the fly you could easily pick a word that could be confused for another. Vine/wine, while/vial, etc.
The same goes for F/S across links that can't support the higher frequencies and L/R in some Asian languages.
It's worse because it's really easy to come up with a word that is hard to understand in unclear communications conditions and thus either remains ambiguous or, worse, suggests the wrong resolution of ambiguity to the listener. Standard phonetic alphabets like the NATO one are designed so that the words and pronunciations are very highly unambiguous even if the listener isn't familiar with the phonetic alphabet, and even moreso if the listener is familiar the alphabet.
It's also worse because if you have two speakers who are familiar with the use of a phonetic alphabet, you don't have to do “‘a' is in...”, you just spell out “Alpha Romeo Tango India Sierra Tango” (no, I have no idea why I picked that word for an example.)
I'm not sure it's so great when the listener doesn't know the NATO alphabet. A number of the words sound very similar to other english words, and some of the words are obscure.
For example, Charlie (pronounced char-lee or shar-lee) could be confused with barley, Karlie, hardly, Shirley, etc. Mike rhymes with dozens of words.
If you don't know the word 'sierra' you might be wondering, "was that fierra? Ciara? Tiara?"
I think using longer, simple words like,
Alphabet, Banana, Computer, Direction, Elephant, etc.
would be better for lay people. They're unambiguous and well-known.
> For example, Charlie (pronounced char-lee or shar-lee) could be confused with barley, Karlie, hardly, Shirley, etc.
The beauty of the phonetic alphabet is that there's nothing else on the phonetic alphabet that can be confused with "Charlie" regardless of how a non-English speaker pronounces it. If everyone is using the same phonetic alphabet, then the confused entity learns that "Sharlie/Shirley/hardly" stands in for "C."
Yep, that's my point. It was designed assuming both people know the phonetic alphabet. It's not so great when you're trying to use it over the phone with a tech support person who isn't familiar with the alphabet.
Yup, British postal codes are alphanumeric and I've never had a call center worker not follow when I read mine beginning "Sierra Oscar" rather than trying to just say the letters SO clearly enough. The codes are deliberately unambiguous (e.g. zero and the letter O can't occur in the same position) but it's less likely someone understands that and incorporates it into their parsing than that they're familiar with the NATO alphabet.
In the US Navy, because 5 sounds like fire, it's skipped when doing a countdown over a ship's PA system (called the 1MC). Countdowns are done for switching timezones/synchronizing watches, etc.
When your ear is ready to match against one of 26 known phonetics, it is possible to do so even with very high noise. I might only pick up “...orm” but I’ll know it’s “uniform” (U) because it couldn’t be the other 25.
“C like cat” is easy to misinterpret as “b like bat”, e.g. Granted, barley could be confused for Charlie over a poor transmission, but that’s why they’re standardized.
As a worst case scenario, when somebody asked for clarification between 'm' and 'n', I responded with "m as in mnemonic". Not only did it fail to resolve the question, it was perhaps the worst word I could have chosen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
I am of the belief that all adults should memorize this list (including pronunciation, they are slightly different than the normal words).
It’s not onerous and can be done in a few minutes, and if nothing else will save you from sounding like a fool when spelling things over the phone (“a like apple, c like cat”). They are standard for a reason.