A phonetic transcription describes all the speech sounds of a language. Unlike in normal orthographic spelling, there is a direct relation between the written symbol and the speech sound it describes. This relation does not change, no matter where the speech sound is. In Irish, for example, the letter sequence ‘adh’ is used in words like ‘adhmad’ and ‘rugadh’, but it is pronounced differently in both words. In a phonetic transcription the symbols /aɪ/ are used to describe the diphthong at the beginning of ‘adhmad’ and /uː/ to describe the long vowel at the end of ‘rugadh’ (in Connaught Irish). Thus, for those who are familiar with the system, a phonetic transcription can give a detailed description of the speech sounds of a given language.