The people who object to IPA remind me a lot of peepel hoo see no reezun to learn and yooze established English spelling, only in reverse.
The attitude in both cases seems to be “That’s too hard to learn, I think everyone should just spell it out the way that comes natural, we’ll all know what it means”
And in both cases what comes natural to you isn’t going to be reliably self-explanatory to everyone else.
Yeah, in most cases I can parse out what you mean by “SHED-yool” or “ky-YOE-tee” but think of those threads about “hey folks do you pronounce Mary merry and marry the same way and if not how do you say 'em?” … so with that in mind, you realize that if you write “aksh-you-werry” and I don’t know if your version of “werry” is wɛri or wɛIri or what, we’re going to be going around and around in circles.
Likewise if sumwun rites da wey dey siz thyngs but onfernchly da wey yeh siz thengs leets ter macon fear deevercolt gowen … it’s just easier if we can use a standardized system, reallly.
In the case of IPA, I don’t judge you for not knowing it, because not enough people are exposed to it, but everyone should be exposed to it, it’s not that hard to learn and it serves a really useful purpose.
This is the crux of it for me. Not knowing something is perfectly normal. It’s the hostility towards something unfamiliar that bothers me, especially a tool so useful and easy to learn.
Add these to this group — [æ] [ɪ] [ʊ] [ʌ] [eɪ] [aɪ] [oʊ] [ju] [aʊ] [ɔɪ]
And then these are easy to understand if you know any Spanish, Italian, or German—
[a] [e] * [o]
So for basic American English pronunciation, the only ones that take a little investigation to figure out, and they are also the most useful in discussing differences in English pronunciation. Minimal effort yields a lifetime of rewards —
I like words and languages, so I use IPA all the time. And I still have to look up symbols frequently (hell, I’ve got a chart on my bookmarks bar so I won’t have to go hunting). Especially the vowels.
I’d love to learn IPA, to be able to understand and maybe even participate in threads about the cot/caught and Mary/marry/merry mergers or skedjul vs shedyule, but in years of trying I have never been able to “get” IPA. I see symbols such as [tʃ] [dʒ] [ʃ] [ʒ] [j] [θ] [ð] [ʊ] [ɛ] and my brain just freezes up. To me, they look like gobbledygook, and after literally years of trying, they still look like gobbledygook. (And I certainly never learned [ə] or [ŋ] in school.)
I’m good at puzzles, I’ve shopped enough at the Russian grocery to learn to sound out Cyrillic, and I want to learn IPA, and I am no where close to halfway there.
I self-taught myself IPA from linguistics books when I was in intermediate school, having wandered into that topic area starting from JRR Tolkien’s notes.
The IPA is the only practical way to discuss pronunciation in a written format. Here is a table from an online dictionary mapping IPA symbols to several common English dialects. It’s no different than learning specialized notation when learning mathematics or music or circuit diagrams. If you’re not interested in a particular field of higher learning, fine, that’s your choice. (For example, I’m not going to learn guitar chord notation.) But people who are, are going to use the jargon and notation of the field when they talk about it–because that’s the practical way to discuss it.
Helpful people may be willing to explain things at a general-education level, but it’s always going to be idiosyncratic because any such explanation is going to be non-standard. The standard is the specialized notation.
nods I sympathize. I play the piano and all my life music teachers and other musicians have told me I should be able to look at stuff like this and just hear it in my head and my fingers just go to the right places when I’m looking at it. Doesn’t happen; looks like a flock of crows on telephone wires, although I can painstakingly decipher it.
I don’t know why IPA “speaks to me” but it does. Within weeks of being introduced to it, I could read it at speaking speed, plus or minus, although admittedly not as fast as I can read printed English. And I don’t have to think about what symbols to use to write a spoken word, I just know. (Unless it’s an odd unusual sound within a word, at least).
Some consonants are easy: /b/, /d/, /f/, /g/, /h/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /p/, /s/, /t/, /v/, /w/, /z/ are pronounced like the American letters they look like.
The rest are pulled from other languages:
/j/ looks like a German “j” and is pronounced like an American “y” as in yawn.
/ɹ/ looks like an upside-down “r” and is pronounced like an American “r” as in run.
/ʃ/ looks like a vertically stretched “s” and is pronounced like an American “sh” as in sure.
/ʒ/ looks like a cursive “z” and is pronounced like an American “zh” as in azure.
/tʃ/ is the combination of two sounds (think about the word tchotchke) which when combined are pronounced like an American “ch” as in churn.
/dʒ/ is the combination of two sounds (think about the word djinni) which when combined are pronounced like an American “j” as in jury.
/θ/ looks like a Greek theta and is pronounced like an American “th” in thigh.
/ð/ looks like an Old English eth and is pronounced like an American “th” in thy.
/ŋ/ looks like an “n” with a descender like a “g” and is pronounced like an American “ng” as in singer. Compare /sɪŋəɹ/ to /fɪŋgəɹ/ finger, which also has a /g/.
The vowels are a lot more difficult, especially because there’s wide variation in many words of the pronunciation of their vowels. Most IPA vowel symbols are reversed or upside-down or other variation of the traditional five vowel letters: “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u”. As a crude guess, which vowel it’s most similar to is what it sounds similar to. But there’s no substitute for a skilled speaker or sound snippets to know for sure.
Try to find “minimal pairs” for close sounds to help distinguish them. For example, thigh vs thy differ only in the initial sound to help with /θ/ vs /ð/. Or, wood vs wooed for /ʊ/ vs /u/.
I think your music teachers were a bit demanding of you.
If you’re picking up Cyrllic, it’s about the same level of difficulty for the basic symbols, so I know you can do it. For some of your letters, maybe it’ll help how I remember them:
ʃ = “sh” It kind of looks like a funny, elongated “s,” so I just think of it as a “modified s” or “sh”
tʃ = So what happens when you put a “t” sound in front of an “sh.” That’s all this one is, literally t+sh, which is what is normally represented as “ch” in English (or sometimes as “tch.”)
ʒ = Simlar to the “modified s” this looks like a “modified z” to me, so it’s a sound sometimes marked as “zh” in pronunciation dictionaries. Thing the sound in the middle of “treasure.”
dʒ = This is d+zh. What happens when you ram these sounds together? You get a “j” as in “judge.”
θ = If you know math or Greek, you’ve probably come across “theta.” That’s the unvoiced “th” sound as in “math.”
ð = This is the voiced “th.” I happen to know this from Old English, where it also represents a “th” sound, so this might not help you here. In IPA, this is the voiced “th” sound as in “this.”
And so on. These symbols are not so far away from letters you already know, and especially if you are learning Cyrillic and how to sound it out succesfully, I bet you can find a way to pick up the basics of IPA. It’s a similar level of difficulty for the basic stuff.
I have a M. Ed. in curriculum and instruction with a focus in Reading, and I never heard of IPA before today. It’s not taught any of the schools of education or curricula I’ve had experience with.
Some here say it’s easy; others disagree. Easy for some, very difficult for others. Just like everything.
Unless it becomes a standard used in Elementary reading, I don’t think I’d need it.
As for English spelling and pronunciation, you don’t simplify an ancient and extensive system without a massive outlay of time and money.
Reason: I took a linguistics course (post-bac) and that was one of the things that was taught and we needed to know for the test.
It comes in very useful for trying to explain or understand what something should sound like (/a/ or /ɑ/ is clearer than “‘a’ as in ‘pajama’”). It’s also really helpful when I’ve tried to learn foreign languages; looking something up in IPA can really quickly clear up what the teacher is trying to get me to do vs. what I’m doing (“Oh! You mean ‘/ɨ/.’ Not sure I can do that.”)
Heh. Funny how you just ninja’d me with some similar explanations. I was going to add the other letters, but I had to run out to pick up the kids and you beat me to it, anyway.
The question there is, which “standard” guide do you mean? I’m curious. How do you notate “short a” as in “cat” and “long a” as in “hay.” Between grammar school and high school, the dictionaries I used had at least three different ways to notate each of those sounds. For me, what I learned in phonics class in first grade was “ă” was “short a” and “ā” was long a, but I’ve since discovered that is hardly universal.
