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Why don’t more dictionaries use IPA? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4310 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 1 of 30 04 April 2014 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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English dictionaries usually have them, but none in Spanish and German dictionaries
that I've seen. Clearly, transcriptions are usually redundant if a person has any headway in learning these languages with their spelling systems, but I still think the IPA symbols would be nice to have there on the page. I have heard that other languages have writing systems just as chaotic as English, but French is the only one, that I personally know something of, which is comparably inconsistent. Are they common in any other dictionaries and do you think that they are under-used? Even if they took some extra space on the page, I think it would only be good for language learning in general if the alphabet was promoted more. Even better, it might even become a staple of language learning methods, rather than the painful "prow-nunn-see-ey-shun" type of transcription typically employed. It has been embraced by the TEFL industry, after the dictionaries started using them - is it common in classrooms and dictionaries for other languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 30 04 April 2014 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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In my short career as an FSL teacher, all the material I've ever seen indicating pronunciation used IPA, as do virtually dictionaries, and most of the other teachers I worked with also used IPA (or nothing).
Oddly, French IPA is very consistent, but just have a quick look at ESL sites teaching IPA for English, and you'll see so much variation: i:/i, i:/I and i/I (same pattern with e and u), 3 different versions of a, etc. Very confusing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4846 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 3 of 30 04 April 2014 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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English and French cannot be compared. You can predict how French words need to be pronounced if you know the rules, while English is very irregular. There are very few exceptions to the rules in French, but unfortunately the rules themselves are a bit complex.
However, for languages like Spanish and German, IPA is not necessary, because you can derive the pronunciation from the way words are spelt. Unfortunately, a lot of language learners don't really deal with pronunciation rules, which leads to unnecessary mispronunciations. For languages like Danish, Faroese, or Irish, however, IPA is indispensable. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5230 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 4 of 30 04 April 2014 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Probably the same reasons that we use the English alphabet for spelling instead of just using IPA.
1. Historical lock-in. The QWERTY effect. 2. The same phoneme may have a different realization in different dialects. So we use one letter to represent all those realizations in a dictionary, while if we used IPA we'd have to use a different symbol for each dialectal variation. 3. Ease. For you and me, reading IPA may be fairly easy. For most readers, I'd guess, it's a lot easier to read "prow-nunn-see-ey-shun" than "/pɹəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃən/." Do Spanish and German dictionaries even have pronunciations listed? My experience is they don't even bother with it since they're so phonetic, giving pronunciation only for the few exceptions, like "hamster." 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chav Diglot Groupie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4491 days ago 43 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English* Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 5 of 30 04 April 2014 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Back when I did a semester of linguistics my main problem was having to learn the sounds of Received Pronunciation so that I could even begin to use the IPA. ("But 'boot' and 'foot' have exactly the same vowel sound!")
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 6 of 30 04 April 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't get that one. Where is the exception with "Hamster"? I don't know about regular dictionaries, but there are pronunciation dictionaries for German. German wiktionary also gives you the pronunciation in IPA for most entries. There are some tricky details, mainly stress, but also r-vocalization and schwa-elision. The latter two are quite rule-bound, but rather complicated nontheless. But I do think regular dictionaries indicate stress, albeit not necessarily via IPA. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5191 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 7 of 30 05 April 2014 at 2:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I guess in the Spanish dictionary it might be looked for under Jamster!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5230 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 8 of 30 05 April 2014 at 4:34am | IP Logged | ||
The h may be pronounced in Castillian. And let me tell you, a non-silent h in Castillian is absolutely bananas. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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