Who is talking about “simplifying” English spelling and pronunciation? The I.P.A. is merely a tool for (relatively) unambiguously transcribing pronunciation, indispensable when pronunciation is the subject under discussion.
I read it pretty well, only the clicks get me.
I think I was in a college French class before I ever heard the term. I seem to have come through primary school at an awkward time, just at the tail end of the sight-reading era and before phonics gained widespread use in reading education. I don’t remember much time being spent on the sounds of letters at all. The shapes of letters we had to practice, but the sounds I don’t think got so much attention.
That meant that for example I had a pretty advanced reading vocabulary for a kid, but I didn’t know what the words sounded like, and I stumbled badly trying to read aloud (and also became very frustrated when a later teacher would tell me to “sound it out”–I struggled for a long time on how I was supposed to do that).
I think that may be part of why, when confronted by the IPA, I still get frustrated. Intellectually I know I should be able to memorize what each symbol sounds like, e.g., but there’s just some mental block. Why I can remember that Cyrillic Ш sounds like “sh” but freeze up when confronted with ʃ is a mystery, but so it is. I have tried various mnemonic tricks, and tried sitting down to memorize the list of the most common IPA symbols, and then the next time I run into IPA (usually in an SDMB thread 
), I get rattled all over again and have to start from scratch.
If limited to Western phonetics, I can read it quite fluently.
Caught, cot, dawn, don, they all sound the same to my ear. If you type in IPA, you might as well be typing in Cyrillic.
That’s exactly why I.P.A. is useful. Because they don’t sound the same to everyone.
As I, and someone else said, I’d have an easier time trying to learn Cyrillic. I just can’t bother putting in the time and effort. I’d rather drink an IPA. If you think that makes me an ignorant lugabout, I’ll tip a glass to ya’.
Why would you have an “easier time”?
See, this is not about IPA and it’s not about your ability to learn. It’s about this attitude that you have chosen to adopt and add to this some kind of macho posturing. It’s an anti-education, pro-ignorance attitude, which is worse than just not knowing something.
If they sound the same to you, you’ll use the characters which reflect that.
Exactly.
I’ve known about IPA for years but I’ve never felt that I would derive enough benefit to justify the effort in learning it. Yes, it’s the best way of transcribing pronunciation but, if I have doubts about how a word is pronounced, I still want to hear it spoken by an authoritative source.
Please use IPA to demonstrate those three pronunciations. Also, given that you do not understand sentiments like these, what steps are you taking to understand?
Please use IPA to demonstrate how those words don’t sound the same to everyone.
Also, why do you write “I.P.A.”? The International Phonetic Association uses “IPA”, as does the Wikipedia article.
But I cannot appreciate a difference. Maybe it’s my hearing disability, but just like Cochrane, caught and cot sound identical as do dawn and don and all the other examples people use. How would I be any better off learning pronunciations I’m already fine with?
I’m not anti-education. When my daughter learned the ASL alphabet I encouraged her to continue learning. It eventually became useful now that she is a nurse.
I’m the same. I cannot hear the difference between caught /kɔt/ and cot /kɑt/. (There’s sound clips at those links.) This is common among those in the caught-cot merger area, where we pronounce both words as /kɑt/. But, the utility of IPA is that I can notate the difference even without being able to pronounce or hear it.
Just like even though don’t have a good pitch sense, I can read music notation and know the difference between the notes.
Here’s an audio sample of me pronouncing both “caught” and “cot.” My Chicago accent actually exaggerates the difference quite a bit. The sound in “cot” is fronted towards an /a/ or /ä/ rather than the /ɔ/ of other accents. (And the “Shih-CAW-go” vs “Shih-CAH-go” at the end demonstrates two pronunciations of the city here. The “Superfans” accent will do the latter, with an even more fronted and exaggerated “AH” sound, and locals will argue that my first pronunciation of “Chicago” is the “true” Chicago accent. Others [from my neighborhood on the Southwest Side] will argue the second pronunciation is the “true” Chicago pronunciation. The truth is, in my estimation, that there are multiple “Chicago” accents in the city, and my theory is the Irish neighborhoods were more likely to use the first, and the Slavic neighborhood the latter. But that’s just the base of a personal hypothesis.)
I expect that’s true if you spend a lot of time discussing differences in English pronunciation.
And I understand that some people find this fascinating, and do indeed spend a lot of time discussing it. But for a lot of other people, the subject very rarely comes up; and when it does they give it a glance and move on. So those people aren’t going to get ‘a lifetime of rewards’; they might get a few minutes’ worth of rewards, for something that might take them many hours to learn.
I find it really interesting that people do find minor differences in pronunciation fascinating. And I find it interesting that people who think ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ are pronounced differently, and people who think that they’re pronounced the same, generally manage to understand each other anyway. But I’m not all that interested in the pronunciation differences themselves. Mileage, obviously, varies.
Dammit, wrong cut-and-paste symbols. My “o” as in “cot” is more like an /a/-/ä/ rather than /ɑ/ and my “aw” as in “caught” is more towards /ɒ/ rather than /ɔ/. Luckily, this was very helpful for me in Hungarian, where “a” is an /ɒ/ sound and “á” is an /a/ sound.
Springfield Public Schools District 186 gave a half-assed effort to teach it to me in elementary school, considering it was 1978 and if you wanted to learn about a word, you had to look at a dictionary printed with ink on paper. About all I remember from it is the schwa.
One thing I did not know about the IPA is how fanatically devoted to it some of its users are, as evidenced by several SDMB threads I’ve read wherein pronunciation is an issue.
General interest in linguistics and phonetics. I used to read reference books as a kid, and I remember often seeing an alphabet comparison chart in many dictionaries. A typical one would list the Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets side by side with letter names and very rough non-IPA descriptions of the sounds of those letters. There were a lot of letter descriptions that seemed really odd to an English-speaking kid – what does “soft sign” mean?" And why does one letter sound like “shch” and not two or more letters? And why is Hebrew aleph transliterated as an apostrophe instead of a regular letter of the Roman alphabet? And what is a “glottal stop” anyway?
Digging into those mysteries – and many more besides – led me to eventually pick up IPA.
I picked up IPA along the way to learning other linguistic concepts, as opposed to dedicating myself to master IPA over a definite time period. From first exposure to IPA (circa 5th grade) to feeling fluent (straight As in college phonetics course) was probably something like 8 or 9 years. But that was not 8-9 years of consistent concentrated study. I learned 95% of what I know about IPA in probably less than six months.
Once I started college, I was looking around at the various foreign-language dictionaries in the library’s reference section (non-lending) and I found this book – The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by British linguist [ (tell me that guy didn’t step right out of casting 
). And I devoured that book over a few weeks, eventually purchasing my own copy from the campus bookstore so that I could read it and consult it conveniently whenever I wanted. From that book, I got my foundations in IPA that would serve me well in my Phonetics course (and some others in my Linguistics minor) two years later.
Briefly: the best thing about learning IPA via Crystal’s book is that I was learning the [URL=“Place of articulation - Wikipedia”]anatomical foundations](David Crystal - Wikipedia) of speech sounds at the same time I was connecting those sounds to IPA symbols. The book had all I needed except live sound samples – I could flip back and forth between sections to connect symbol to anatomical process as my curiosity required.
I studied (superficially) French, Russian, and Spanish and that helped fill in a few phonetic-knowledge gaps … though I regret never even approached spoken fluency in any of those languages. And I can only read enough in those languages to get myself in trouble
I consider myself almost completely fluent in IPA. I know what the full set of consonant and vowel symbols stand for, even the click consonants. I know the tone symbols, and I know a healthy number of secondary articulation symbols as well. Some secondary articulation symbols do lead me back to consulting references or Googling … there are still many I don’t know by heart.
.
Fascinating how you think you can characterize me. Thing is, I only have enough room in my brain for things that I need to know every day. I’m not posturing and I’m not anti-education or pro-ignorance. It’s just not something I need to know to get through my day. Just like reading Cyrillic. Or your opinion of my attitude. Cheerio.
Gee, I wonder who could be like that in this thread? No one is that judgmental.
It’s amazing how devoted some people are to their exponentials and integrals and other weird notations when mathematics is under discussion.
And talk about fanatics going on about time signatures and keys and staffs when music composition is being considered.
It’s almost like specialized topics need to be notated in specialized ways.