So what’s your solution for talking about pronunciation clearly and unambiguously? In pronunciation threads, it’s extremely helpful. In threads where pronunciation is just casually mentioned, perhaps not so much. The best solution so everyone is happy is to use both when possible. Why the irrational hatred towards IPA? It’s like trying to discuss how a musician plays a piece and saying musical notation is stupid or something.
For those who don’t like it or say it’s the suxxors, please, suggest a clear, unambiguous alternative that works across languages and dialects.
If you’re posting on the internet, as opposed to writing a book, it’s quite easy to link to an audio example.
But you don’t need to. For 99% of cases, a VERY simple comparison, such as “the a in father” or “rhymes with X” will suffice. You’re all hot and bothered about rare cases – cases that even people who are interested and/or need to know this sort of thing seldom come across.
These are not rare cases. These are mires that a huge proportion of our pronunciation threads get caught in. “What do you mean, those don’t rhyme/Yes, they do!”
There’s really no reason for it. Those who are comparing it to learning a completely new language are engaging in a type of hyperbole that amounts to nothing more than “Don’t make me learn anything new!”
It’s petulant obstinate clinging to ignorance for basically no reason and for something that takes as little effort to learn as anything you will see addressed on these boards.
The alternative? How about I post my cell number in my profile? Anyone who wants to know how I pronounce something can just give me a call, and I’ll tell them.
It’s actually not all that rare here. I find myself having to be very precise in my explanation when using non-IPA terms because of things like the caught/cot and the merry/marry/Mary mergers. It shows up time and time again in pronunciation threads. From one of the pronunciation threads going on, a simple example is that a poster said a syllable was pronounced as the “aw” in “BRAWT-wurst.” I have never heard “bratwurst” pronounced with what I would call an “aw,” but I suspect their dialect is part of the caught/cot merger, so they don’t make a distinction between “aw” and “ah,” and that sound is what I would consider an “ah” sound. But I don’t know for certain. Maybe he does say it as “BRAWT-wurst” and not “BRAHT-wurst.”
And then when you add non-rhotic accents in the mix, it gets even more confusing. British people will often spell out “r-colored” vowels with the “r” and, as an American, it confused me the first dozen times I saw this until it dawned on me that they were writing pronunciation in a non-rhotic accent and that the "R"s are not pronounced in their accent. I personally find that when writing to an international audience like this one that uses many types of English, it’s difficult to accurately convey what I mean by analogy and that the only accurate way to do it is either by audio sample (which I have done many times here) or through IPA. There really isn’t any other way, and IPA is not stupid but a very clever and precise way of communicating the sounds of speech.
Odd; it took me less than a minute. “sʌtʃ” gave me some problems at first, but ʌ was used previously in the sentence in a word I’d already figured out, and ʃ is clearly (from its appearance) a sound related to s but distinct from it, and I already knew that English “ch” is actually pronounced as “tsh”, so it all fell into place.
IPA is the only effective solution. Dopers are fascinated with each other’s pronunciation variants, which has inspired thousands of threads. I’ve been reading them since 1999 and have seen needless confusion get repeated over and over again due to this lack of shared medium for communicating phonetic information. While making IPA mandatory seems too extreme, I advocate that it must be strongly encouraged and supported.
It’s already in English, so the correct term is transliterate.
As a linguist, I prefer the use of IPA to indicate pronunciation. I also do not think it should be mandated on this site. For those who do not know IPA, they can choose from any number of dictionary schemes. What I would ask for those who do that, of course, is to state which dictionary scheme they’re using (preferably one that’s available online and not behind a pay wall).
It’s also easily learned by quite a number of students in South Korea. The Korean-English dictionaries my students were using employed IPA to indicate the English pronunciation.
Some of us think it’s fun to learn.
[url=http://www.sil.org has a few programs available to enable one to type IPA.
Agreed. When I began using IPA, I was quite pleased with how well it works. Is it perfect? Of course not. No writing system will perfectly represent sounds; however, the IPA is, IMHO, the best we have at the moment.
Indeed. I understand it can be a bit daunting at first but, in threads that are about pronunciation, it helps to have a common language to talk about pronunciation. Just like we do in math, music, etc. If you’re genuinely interested in learning about pronunciations, it’s worth your while to learn IPA. And it’s deeply rewarding when learning other languages, so you can figure out what phonemes map to languages you already know and which are different. I had a bitch of a time figuring out the “a” sound in Hungarian, for example, because of stupid examples like this. ’ "as the vowel in “law” or “car” ’ The fuck? Those are two different vowels to me (and would be probably be interpreted as two different vowels in Hungarian, too – a vs á). Now, a simple IPA notation of /ɒ/ lets me know that I’m dealing with what is an “aw” in my accent, not the “a” in “car.”
OK, I mainly have one thing to add: Complaining about IPA in threads where people are trying to use it is thread-shitting and should be treated as such.
I’m not saying the mods aren’t doing that, but I do think it bears mentioning.
Other than that, I’ll echo what a lot of others have said:
IPA is the only minimally acceptable way to transcribe pronunciation. Is it perfect? No. Does it have a few flaws? Sure. It’s still the only minimally acceptable solution to the problem.
I even prefer IPA over X-SAMPA and SAMPA, because it isn’t 1995 anymore. We don’t have to avoid “special characters” like we’re sending mail through an ASCII-to-EBCDIC-to-ASCII gateway which will choke on anything which wasn’t on an IBM keypunch in 1964. It’s easier to find reference material on IPA and it’s only marginally more difficult to enter. That said, if someone uses X-SAMPA, I’m certainly going to be happy.
Now, if I could find some reason why anyone would spell a /d/ sound as ð I’ll die a happy man, having thoroughly shaved the largest yak in SDMB history…
I disagree. It’s essentially a foreign language; if I started posting in Malay mid-thread people would rightly get pissed and demand I switch back to English or provide a translation.
Like I said before: IPA is gibberish to a lot of people (including me); it’s completely useless for trying to convey sounds in that sense.
This. (Lest I be accused of hypocrisy, I admit that I’ve never made the effort to include an IPA description in an SDMB posting, yet. Maybe next time.)
If you did so for no reason, then of course people would be upset. But if the question is something like “how do you say this in Malay?”, then the only reasonable answer is one posted in Malay.
Similarly, it would be jerkish to just start posting in IPA for no good reason. But when there’s a question like “How is ‘Odin’ pronounced in the original Norse?”, the answer must contain some clear way of writing a pronunciation. And most of the ways that ordinary folks think are clear, aren’t.
Don’t be silly. Everyone knows Martians write in GREEN!
Exactamundo! It would be like complaining about the use of integral signs because you’ve never taken calculus when the thread is discussing something that requires math.
Since the quick reply function on this board does not support IPA, requiring it would compel posters to open an appropriate text program, enter unicode symbols, then copy, paste, close the text editor and continue on with their day. You can do that if you want, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to demand everyone on this board follow it.
It doesn’t matter how carefully you explain what the consonant should sound like in “Odin” when people will actually pronounce it Oh-thin, Aw-thin, Uh-thin, Ooh-thin (as in moon), Ooh-thin (as in book) and other variants of “O” that I can’t even describe – because that’s how they naturally pronounce it.
I don’t know what “doesn’t support IPA” means, but there’s no need to use unicode. As already posted in this thread, there are websites that allow one to fairly quickly type in IPA, with buttons for those symbols that don’t appear on a standard keyboard. Type, copy, paste, post.
[θɹoʊt wɔblɝ mæŋgɹoʊv]
Took me all of about 30 seconds.
(I didn’t transcribe that rigorously, in case anyone wants to criticize it.)