Mmm, I suppose although this abstracts away from the issues of dialects (that is either you have chaos in spelling or you have spellings that in fact are not well conformed to the actual dialect.
Really? Are there are any examples of IPA being adopted on a mass basis for writing - excluding educated specialists? As in used by large numbers for ordinary daily writing usage?
So we’ve established it’s certainly possible. What we seem to be asking now is, is it useful?
Assuming that spoken Japanese can be understood properly (presumably due to contextual information), converting those sounds to a written form shouldn’t result in the loss of any information. It might be easier to read with the visual differences, but they aren’t necessary.
IPA system does work to some degree, but it is simply not the right candidate for universal (that means not only for top 5% literate geeks) alphabet.
Ergo - no good for that purpose. Still strictly IMHO.
Not large numbers, no. But lots of native North American languages are written with IPA. But these are very small languages that had no native writing system.
See for instance languages from my neck of the woods: Salishan languages - Wikipedia
It isn’t true that the IPA is used by large numbers for ordinary daily writing usage. But it is true that there are many languages that, to the extent they are written, are written in IPA.
Mmm, in my book that’s not the same thing as actually using IPA as a living writing system, that’s capturing the language via IPA.
As far as I can parse your point here, the answer to your objective - an actually used for mass usage “universal” writing system is impossible. And I am not sure what the point would be.
It’s a fair cop.
Technically close to impossible. I agree. 7 billion people with ten thousands of languages, hundreds of writing systems … Looks impossible to me too. But if you have a point for making that kind of enterprise… Yes, what it could be that point … Standardization? At levels impossible to imagine?
Back to sci-fi. If some kind of catastrophe eradicates all the population, but, let we say, random million. Would that general idea be less outrageous then?
But if we have 1 million random people, they will be scattered all over the globe. And there will be no need for a standardized writing system then, because global travel will be finished for generations. People will stick with whatever writing systems were dominant where they lived, if writing systems survive at all.
Or, if 1 million random people are brought together and isolated, they aren’t going to invent a standardized writing system. One or two languages and writing systems become dominant, and the rest will die out in a generation or two. The old writing systems might become modified to incorporate features of the other writing systems, but we’ll end up with chinese and hindi and english and spanish and maybe a few others, and probably eventually one would take over. But the end result wouldn’t be a universal writing system scientifically designed to represent any language, it would be a system designed to represent whatever language the isolated people end up speaking.
!Yes
Sure it would – each language would just use a limited selection of the whole range of letters available; only linguists would need to know the whole universal alphabet. The advantage of that over what we’ve got now is that each phoneme would be represented by the same character in every language that uses it at all.
Where? frɛntʃ?
What two consonants are being used to make one sound? tʃ perhaps? Not one sound, it is two sounds. In English we usually represent it as “ch” and are taught to think of it as “one sound”. In German they’d do it as “tsch”. (And “sch” would be our “sh” sound, ʃ).
(Not that there’s no room for dissent, but that’s the conventional wisdom among the phonics folks, that the sound is a t sound followed by the “sh” sound “ʃ” and not a separate distinct sound on its own. And I do agree with them).
Why would you want a universal alphabet?
No, the [tʃ] is one sound, an affricate. One phoneme with two articulatory gestures, like a diphthong. That’s why it should be written with a diacritic connecting the two. They are often contrasted phonemically in languages from the stop + fricative sequences they are “made” of. Some IPA-like systems do write them with one letter (usually [č]and [ǰ]), but those symbols are not descriptive in the way the two letter symbols are.
But I care about a system as a linguist, and while the IPA is not 100% great for 100% of the world’s languages, it’s pretty damn good pretty damn much all of the time.
Are there any languages which distinguish between an affricate and its two components pronounced next to each other? E.g., which distinguish /tʃ/ as one sound from /t-ʃ/ as two sounds?
You’re splitting hairs, I think. Yes, like a diphthong. But then I consider a diphthong to be “two sounds”. Were it one sound it would be a unique sound and have its own unique symbol. It is because it is composed of two sounds (one gliding into the other) that we use two symbols. That’s what I meant by “sound” when I said “one sound” as opposed to “two sounds”. In contrast, the sounds represented in english by “th” (either of them) are each a SINGLE sound despite being represented by two letters in english, and therefore are each represented by a SINGLE symbol in IPA.
That’s not hair-splitting, that’s phonetics. Affricates are different than stop-fricative sequences. First of all, the articulation is different; the frication in the release of an affricate is shorter in duration than the frication in a fricative, but longer than the frication in the release of a stop. Acoustically, the frication of an affricate is different in quality than that of a fricative.
Further, as the Wikipedia link shows, affricates can contrast phonemically with stop-fricative sequences. For instance, in Polish, the affricate [t͡ʂ] contrast with the sequence [tʂ]. Across languages, English has [ts] sequences, as in ‘cats,’ but not the affricate, like other languages, like Hungarian, Italian, Cherokee, etc., have.
“Sound,” as you are using it, has little to do with phonetics. Replace it with “articulations,” and it makes more sense (though many phonemes, like [w, l, r] have more than one articulation but only one “sound” in your sense). They are two articulations that work as one whole. Two symbols are used in the IPA to describe how the affricate (or diphthong) is articulated, but these phonemes behave much differently within the phonology than a stop-fricative (or vowel-vowel) sequence would, as well as being articulatoraly different. You can say that this is a failing of the IPA system that you have to use two symbols, and you would have a point, though as I pointed out, if one is being rigorous, one uses the linking diacritic.
Well, I agree that splitting hairs in that particular way was not my intention to start with opening that topic. But we are still just debating. And yes in my language is tʃ is č and ʃ is š. In rare occasions in first case you could use them separately, but still in same word (mind “kat - shing”, something old cash registers usually do, but slower).
But again, I am not here to nerve anyone. I’m just trying to present you not so new idea in a fresh, better way. Or I believe so.
What do we need it that frickin universal alphabet for, you ask?
Warning, sarcasm ahead.
We do not. We speak Engrish. We do not need that kind of foreign (insert your random curse).
End sarcasm.
I am trying to look 100 or 500 years ahead from now.
Yes, in 100 or 500 years there will probably be greater globalization. But we won’t be looking at a universal alphabet in that case, we’ll be looking at a couple of languages and writing systems that have overwhelmed the others. There might still be people who speak tiny minority languages, but there won’t be a need for the readers of the extant major languages to puzzle out their phonetics any more than there is today. If you don’t speak the language, there isn’t much use in knowing their writing system.
And learning a different writing system is pretty easy compared to learning another language. You can learn another alphabet in an afternoon.
I don’t think that’s strictly true. There’s a finite number of variables, and a range for each variable, but the range is analog and not digital. There is some minimum division needed to approximate the languages currently extant, but any new or not yet found language could theoretically fall somewhere between the points currently marked out.
I think the best way to do it is simply identify the variables and ranges and assign each phoneme the proper amount for each variable.
What would be much more interesting though, if it could be done, is an alphabet that actually corresponds to the anatomy of the sound being made…