Can you read IPA?

[Acsenray]

@Ravenman

… but I can’t say I’ve thought of a time where I personally had to communicate in writing to someone who needed to know how to pronounce something.

Discussion of pronunciation happens all the time on the SDMB. I don’t consider it a particularly esoteric or academic or specialized subject. All of us all the time are pronouncing things and hearing other people pronounce things, and around here people talk about pronuncation.

Which posts in this thread (or elsewhere) do you think that using IPA is offensive?

This is a viewpoint that comes up every once in a while here. “Don’t use those stupid dictionary symbols,” is a phrase stuck in my memory.

Here’s one example —

@ftg

IPA is totally messed up. An incredible hodgepodge of symbols that make no sense whatsoever. While a “universal” alphabet is desirable, the way the IPA has gone about it is unbelievably bad.

Avoid it around “normal” people. I.e., nearly everyone.

I can see that there are times when it is unhelpful because it isn’t common knowledge. I mean, many many many more people will understand “to-MAH-to” than will understand “tʰə̥ˈmɐːtʰɐʉ”

I don’t know exactly how to respond to this, because it seems to be intentionally deceptive. I’ve posted in a lot of threads about pronunciation using I.P.A. and non-I.P.A. methods. I’ve never used a transcription like “tʰə̥ˈmɐːtʰɐʉ” to note a basic difference in alternative pronunciations of a word.