phonetic alphabet & regional accents

I really "Mountain Speech," the article we read in class on Monday. It was interesting to see how a person with no linguistic background tried to explain the "rules" of a dialect. This article also showed me how important the phonetic alphabet for communicating about pronunciation. In "Mountain Speech," the author often tried to explain how words were pronounced by spelling them out "phonetically" (ex. window = winder). Usually, it made sense, but in some instances, I wasn't sure how the "phonetic" translation would be pronounced. (ex. sa-ick, sa = suh as in sun or sa as in sack?). If the real phonetic spelling had been used, however, this would have been easy to determine. 

When we went over the phonetic alphabet, I was surprised at the sheer number of possible sounds, and how few I could make myself. Pretty much any epiglottal or glottal sound was out of my reach. It would be interesting to know which sounds are the most common across languages and how many occur in just a few languages at all. A lot of sounds also means a lot of symbols to learn! I feel like I'm starting a whole new language.