|
 |
International Phonetic Alphabet for all? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 12 25 August 2009 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
|
We already record our speech patterns with as much detail as we want.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6080 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 12 25 August 2009 at 10:46pm | IP Logged |
|
What about the fact of accents?
One example that springs to mind is that I pronounce the word "Out" with the Ou as in "owl", or "Ow" (what you say when youve hurt yourself). My friend however, pronounces the "Ou" as in "Oat" or "Boat" or "Coat" There are two different ways of saying it. He is from a Lincolnshire family though, while Im from a Cornish family. How do you say that one is right? You can't! IPA will have 2 different ways of showing the word "Out" then ... it will then go back to how Old Cornish was, and to some extent, English, with no set way to write it. That leads to massive problems, as we have found in Cornish. Basically, it leads to big splits in language users, that can turn very nasty (to the extent of written attacks in the Prolouge of books at people JUST because they dont spell the word like "Noweth" and instead "Nowydh"!!) TEL 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 12 25 August 2009 at 11:26pm | IP Logged |
|
I don't think so:
Distribution of phonemes in natural languages as opposed to the ideal phonemes represented by the IPA, especially when the actual phoneme is covered by more than one IPS symbol. Especially funny when the choice between the phonemes doesn't follow language-intern rules (as the consonants Jiwon mentioned in Korean) or the -ch- in riechen /ç/ and roch /x/ (to smell, smelled) in German, but depend on the register the speaker is using at that time. Sandhi. One thing I'm extremely grateful for is that the human brain can pick up sandhi and use it without having to be fully aware of the complicated rules it follows - you just learn how things are supposed to sound, not what internal rules make them sound the way they do. Homonyms, especially important for languages that use a rather symbolic or a less-than-phonetic script. Visual cues like a symbol or the spelling of a word can aid the reader to understand which one of the possibilites is meant. In spoken conversation, you usually can ask for immediate clarification. This often is not true for written language, and there are languages that would suddenly become very poor if the author always had to compromise between the intended wording and the most comprehensible one. The impact of using a extremely phonetic script on the language and culture in question; speakers of many language would not be able to read content in their old script, speakers that are not proficient in the standard language would not be able to communicate (well) with speakers of different dialects. The fact that no language needs all possibilities of the IPA, which means that people would learn a simplified character set used for their own language. Which makes me question the value of using IPA instead of other scripts and makes me think it's not unlikely that what started out as IPA would change soon in a lot of local variants. I also hold the belief that more symbolic scripts are more likely to be conservative in keeping the meaning of words, but not the pronunciation, whereas more phonetics scripts might have the opposite impact on a language. To me, the concept behind a word is more important than the way it is pronounced. Edited by Bao on 25 August 2009 at 11:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5567 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 12 of 12 30 August 2009 at 6:23am | IP Logged |
|
Bad idea.
1) As mentioned before, it would destroy the consistency of morphemes' orthography. In English, we would no longer have the parallels between word pairs like declare/declaration, sign/signature, know/knowledge, etc. It would also destroy countless cognates between languages. The effects on languages like Chinese and Japanese would be catastrophic, as both languages have tons of homophones. 2) Whose dialect do you write? If you're, say, an international news broadcaster or an ESL teacher, do you write in the English of England? The USA? India? Australia? It's bad enough that they have to choose between "color" and "colour". I have a hard time believing there would be an international standard dialect to write in. Besides, there are some dialects I have a really difficult time understanding; however, I can read their English perfectly fine. People would have to become familiar with accents from all over the world just to read stuff; a word like 'lɔɪd' might mean "Lloyd" in America but "lied" in Australia. An especially difficult problem for deaf people, who on top of it have no accent of their own to write in and need to devise a way to "spell" IPA names in sign language. 3) It's impractical to expect to teach every kid in a classroom the ins and outs of their own dialect just to be able to write simple sentences. "Little Jimmy, since you moved here from Canada, you should write this 'ɔ' as 'ɑ'. You see, you lack a phonemic differentiation the rest of us have. And little Susie, you have a non-rhotic Southern accent so I don't want to see 'ɹ' at the end of your words unless the following word begins with a vowel..." 4) Also, you have to take into consideration that the IPA can be used in different ways. You can make a transcription based on the phonemes of the language, or you can make a more phonetic transcription. And phonetic transcriptions can range from broad ones to extremely narrow ones that attempt to capture every possible aspect of every sound. 5) Foreign writing systems are cool! I don't think I'd be nearly as interested as I am in Chinese and Japanese if it weren't for their writing systems. Think of the Arabic script, the Cyrillic alphabet, Devanāgarī, Hangul, the Cherokee syllabary...in my opinion the world is much richer for having all these beautiful writing systems. BTW, I have a degree in linguistics and I loves me some IPA. I just don't think it has any role to play except as a tool for linguists and those interested in phonetics/phonology. Edited by Levi on 30 August 2009 at 6:52am 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
