Which writing script can represent all human sounds?

Question

Being a Nepali language speaker, I can easily produce most sounds in Devanagari script as every letter has the same sound despite the place of use.

But there may be many sounds that are not pronounced (by people like me) and thus not have any corresponding grapheme in Devanagari.

Also, reading English has always been difficult as the English alphabets sometimes have different sound, like:

do and go have different sound for the vowel o.

Also, I have not learned any third writing script yet.

So, I would like to know if there is any writing script in the world that can represent all human sounds and is also phonemic?

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The intention of asking the question is that:

I think a better writing script should be used to store characters (1-byte) instead of English alphabets, thus replace the current ASCII specification. This wont be a complete replacement for all scripts currently used in the world because there will be Unicode.
This can surely have many benefits like use of language other than English in programming, and true multi-lingual programming can be done.
There may arise question about difficulties in doing so. But all that computer understands is 0 and 1. So, some new specification should be developed instead of replacing computer architecture.

Answer 1

The only writing system that comes close to what you describe is the IPA, or the now-deprecated APA. However, if you add the consideration of being "phonemic", then we would have to know exactly what you mean by that. IPA has the resources to write distinctions that are not phonemic (in some language), for instance aspiration which is not phonemic in English though it is in Nepali. IPA has a lot of resources, so you can represent rather minute phonetic detail using IPA symbols. Thus IPA can be used to represent any phoneme of any language – assuming you mean "phoneme" rather than "sound" (people can make lots of non-linguistic sounds for which there are no IPA symbols). But it can even represent allophonic differences, so it isn't strictly phonemic (since it is not particular to a single language, and "phoneme" is a property of a particular language).

Answer 2

There is another universal script, called Shwa. It can be seen here : www.shwa.org

Shwa has two huge advantages over IPA: - it's featural, so letterforms give you a good idea of the sound value, and - it only needs a 20-key keyboard, not the 160+-key keyboard you'd need for IPA. The IPA is adequate for linguistics, but it is not a candidate for a practical script.

On the other hand, Shwa only represents vowels "phonemically", that is, close enough to distinguish them from the other vowels in that language. It doesn't try to describe the exact vowel sound, since the vocal space is continuous. For consonants, on the other hand, Shwa can sometimes be too picky.

Answer 3

Yes. It is called "International phonetic alphabet" (IPA).

Answer 4

No doubt IPA surpasses all existing writing systems as it not only provide specific symbols for phonemes and allophones on the segmental level, but it also provide varying degrees of stress patterns, linking and juncture (pause) features; I strongly suggest learners of a new language should practice its sound system through IPA. For those learning English could well benefit from IPA texts in phonetic transcription clips uploaded in YouTube.

Answer 5

None. If by all human sounds you mean all sounds which have been distinguished (acoustically) and given a grapheme, by linguists, that's probably IPA. There's more sounds than IPA graphemes (say, between every two IPA vowel graphemes you can try to produce the 'middle' or 50%50% one and then you have created/found a new sound, for which there is no direct grapheme).