Hi Meinhard - just because three words would be spelled the same in a phonetic alphabet (which I do not dispute, by the way), does not mean that they are not pronounced differently. A phonetic alphabet is just a starting point, not an end result. I refer you to one of Bernard Shaw's most popular plays, Pygmalion, for a great discussion of this, both in the work itself and in Shaw's preface to it, where he advocates a phonetic alphabet (he actually left money in his will for this express purpose!). Any professional speaker such as an actor would make a difference between those three words, if they were spoken in close proximity, to aid understanding. And this discussion doesn't take into account accents, or other changes in pronunciation. In Shakespeare's time, for instance, "meat" was often pronounced "mayt."
