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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.




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