The IPA arbitrarily borrows and derives graphemes from the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic. The graphemes do not display basic features (i.e. place and manner of articulation) shared between phones like featural alphabets do (e.g. Hangul, Visible Speech).
(This bias is most obvious in that voiced and voiceless consonants have unique, arbitrarily chosen graphemes but aspirated consonants are indicated by a superscript "h" after the voiceless consonant.)
/a/
in English and German are two essentially different things. Leave alone/v/
or/s/
, for example. Every grapheme is an abstraction, unless it were strictly tied to a language (or even a specific dialect). Graphemes of IPA neither have any relation to similarly-looking those in various languages, unless if it happens coincidentally. – bytebuster Jun 6 '16 at 14:53