Online discussions about pronunciation didn’t exist when I learned IPA, but yes, a functionally equivalent purpose. I never studied pronunciation formally, if that’s what you’re asking. I learned it so I would understand written material about pronunciation, which is exactly what this thread is. It was easy to grasp the basics. And it is much easier now when you can just go online and find guides with sound samples without ever leaving your chair.
Fair enough.
Personally, despite my bilingualism, I’ve never been very good at learning foreign languages (I studied Arabic in high school and French in college, to little effect), and to me, that’s what IPA looks like, with its weird symbols and non-intuitive spelling - just another foreign language. I may give it a shot if you say it’s not that hard. Still, IMHO, the SDMB is supposed to be largely a community of laymen, and you can’t ask all of us to learn specific professional notation and terminology just to discuss a certain subject. If I learn IPA, shouldn’t I also learn physics notation, or chemistry, or any other of the 10,000 different disciplines we shoot the shit about here on a regular basis? After a while, it gets to be a bit too much.
Yep, lack of knowledge. And grade school students are stymied by mathematical notation for differential equations, despite that the notation was invented to eliminate confusion. I’m sure if you took a semester of linguistics, IPA is perfectly sensible. For the rest of us, it’s as clear as mud.
I’ve read over a decade’s worth of SDMB posts with IPA. I’ve read Wikipedia, and other articles attempting to explain it. I have an EE degree, I’m not dumb, but this isn’t something I’ve been able to teach myself. I bet it’s a great tool at linguistics conferences, but I’m skeptical of its benefits in casual online discourse.
I don’t know enough of IPA to be able to discuss comparative linguistics, but we were taught enough at secondary school to be able to recognise the sounds that French, German and Russian have that English doesn’t, and very useful it was too.
American English even has sounds that may be difficult for other Americans to deal with. In British English, it would seem as though the words “hawk”, “hock” and “hark” are nearly perfect homonyms; in American Midwest English, the vowel sound in “hock” is not the same as the vowel sound in “hawk”, and I can hear the difference, if I have to, but in my region, those two are effectively perfect homonyms. Of course, “hark” has a completely different vowel sound that is much shorter than how the British would pronounce it – somewhere between “hack” and “hock”, “r” sound notwithstanding.
Insofar as any casual online discourse avoids using some kind of standardized pronunciation notation, any understanding gained is necessarily and heavily limited. Casual online discourse about pronunciation tends to go around in circles. In the end, the lack of precision in these discussions actively works against mutual understanding. People often ask good phonetics questions in their OPs, but then sometimes turn away from the minimum necessary level of information that is required to achieve understanding of the answer to that question.
I never really thought of comparative pronunciation – especially between dialects of the same language – as an academically difficult field of study, but I guess the initial learning curve can seem steep.
IPA is not window dressing for linguists to show off to other linguists – it is an essential tool of the trade in many professions that deal with speech in both academic and non-academic settings (e.g. speech therapist, dialect coach). Furthermore, many non-professionals have learned IPA along the way in the pursuit of their own general interests in linguistic matters.
Ironically, very often the question that starts someone off on the path to learning IPA is “Why do they say X like that?”. Variations on that theme are common on this message board. Sometimes I do wonder whether or not the original posters ever do chase IPA down the ol’ phonetics rabbit hole a bit – or rather, it’s all just too much bother after all.
I think a big part is that, unlike engineering or science, where there’s plenty of jargon, but when discussing any particular topic you only need to familiarize yourself with one or two terms, with IPA you need to know a ~200-character alphabet (including how to type all that on a standard QWERTY keyboard) as well as an entire dictionary of terms like the following:
[QUOTE=Acsenray]
[r] for the alveolar trill
[ɹ] for the post alveolar approximant most common in American and British English
[ɻ] for the retroflex approximant
[ɾ] for the alveolar tap or flap
[ʀ] for the uvular trill
[χ] for the voiceless uvular fricative
[ʁ] for the voiced uvular fricative
[l] for the alveolar lateral approximant
[ɫ] for the velarized alveolar lateral approximant
[ɬ] for the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
[/QUOTE]
All that is entirely Greek to me. Aren’t alveoli parts of your lungs? We’re talking about internal anatomy now? I’m supposed to understand all this just so I can figure out how British people pronounce a single letter differently than me?
Couldn’t we just link to short Youtube clips of people pronouncing things now? I mean, jeez, it’s the 21st century. You can’t learn different pronunciations just by seeing it written anyway. You’re going to need to spend several weeks on Youtube just to know what all these upside down Greek letters sound like, anyway. I don’t need to do that to participate in a discussion of yak mating habits, or space shuttle technology, or ancient Roman sports.
Something like “Grandma pronounced it ‘warsh’,” on the other hand, makes perfect sense, to me and many others. No specialized mastery of a 200-year-old scientific endeavor is required. Quite limited in applicability, I admit, but at least we can discuss it without resorting to an unfamiliar, highly-specialized language.
When everyone in the discussion belongs to the same (narrow or broad) speech community, sure.
But Grandma** didn’t pronounce it “warsh” the way antechinus and Spectre would pronounce it “warsh”. So you’ve communicated something very different to your British readers, of which there are many on the Dope.
** assuming she is American 
Agreed. I’m not against IPA, and I recognize its usefulness. It just seems a much bigger hurdle to jump than we usually ask of our audience on the SDMB.
We can talk about cosmology, quantum physics and relativity without requiring each other to know tensor field calculus and Hilbert space algebra, but we have to resort to an entirely different, special purpose language just to discuss the letter “R”?
-
of, relating to, resembling, or having alveoli; especially of, relating to, or constituting the part of the jaws where the teeth arise, the air-containing compartments of the lungs, or glands with secretory cells about a central space
-
articulated with the tip of the tongue touching or near the teethridge
You’re touching on something salient here that I am working to fully grasp … maybe someone else can jump in here and refine my thoughts:
With many topics of study, even complicated ones, topics can often be condensed into layman-level language. Of course, when this is done, the achieved understanding is at a level of remove from the understanding of a professional or a expert. But that’s OK, because going from zero understanding to some understanding is a welcome improvement.
Now, with speech, it seems to be different. Most all of us can talk – and for the most part, we are experts at it naturally. It doesn’t seem complicated in the least. We learned it at our mother’s knee, after all.
The trick is that what we really learn is a manner of speech that is similar to those who are around us and different (to varying degrees) from those who live elsewhere or come from different backgrounds. Later on, we learn a standardized orthography (aka our ABCs) that most all native speakers of our language learn. The familiar Roman alphabet and the written form of English – they combine to press an ill-fitting form onto a wriggling, recalcitrant spoken language.
So from whatever dialectical background we come from, we “know what an ‘r’ is” and what it " ‘r’ sounds like". Or do we? Might our own ingrained patterns of speech, learned before we achieved active academic comprehension, get in the way sometimes of understanding the nuances of the speech of others? Are they really “*pronouncing ‘r’ in ‘bath’ and ‘past’ *” or are they doing something else entirely which is internally consistent in the speech pattern of their dialectical community? What assumptions do we make that get in the way of understanding why some English speakers don’t sound like us?
Since we are all experts at the speech patterns we have already learned, we don’t approach phonetic matters with the same unfamiliarity with which we approach yak mating or space shuttle engineering. We approach phonetics with just enough understanding to raise insightful questions, and then to completely boot meaningful answers (e.g. categorically stating that " ‘aw’ and ‘or’ are the same sound").
In any meaningful discussion about pronunciation, something has to cut through the assumptions that our varying speech patterns (dialects) lead us to unwittingly make. That something is a common standard of pronunciation symbols, of which the IPA is the most prominent.
.
I don’t know St Louis accents, but I would bet you’re talking about something similar to what the New Orleans accent does to the word “quarter.” Sounds like “kwah-ter” to me, where not only does it not have the rhotic /r/ sound, it also has a different vowel sound - the first vowel in my Texan dialect actually sounds more like the long “o.”
You’re misunderstanding. His perception of what an “r” sounds like is not the same as yours, so when he says that he hears an “r” sound in there, it’s completely different than what you would describe an “r” as sounding like.
My take on it is that an English person perceives the “r” as changing the vowel sound that precedes it, not as making what you and I would consider a consonant sound. So when he said that Americans say “coffee” like it has an “r” in it, he’s really saying that the first vowel sound is different in American accents.
Do you remember the 80s pop singer Sade? There was a note on the album that it should be pronounced like “shar-day,” but that note was directed at a British English audience. People over here in America pronounced her name with an American “r” sound, which was incorrect. If she described the sound to an American, she should have transcribed it as “shah-day.” Same thing with the “r” in coffee example.
Can you do basic arithmetic operations? If you understand 0123456789+–X/=%^ and roots then you can learn enough IPA for what’s usually required in these discussions.
I would offer to teach you basic IPA myself but I doubt the sincerity of this statement and in reading it I feel tremendous doubt that you would make a sincere attempt to learn.
You have a degree in electrical engineering. You have also learned to speak, read, and wrote English with considerable fluency.
Learning the basic symbols of IPA is easier than both of those things.
What gives you the impression that you would have to learn 200 symbols in order to be able to use IPA for the purposes of the SDMB?
See this is why I believe that resistance to learning IPA is nothing but sheer cussedness on the part of people who say it’s too difficult.
That post of mine you quoted was specifically in response to someone who wanted to know how granular IPA symbols could be if he wanted to represent very fine distinctions in speech.
Not only that but in that response I say more than once that it is very unlikely that SDMB discussions would require knowing them.
I said all you would need to know is [r] and [l]. Given the fact that you are posting here in fluent English I think I can be confident in saying that you are capable of learning those two IPA symbols.
I’m interested in finding out whether you’re going to deny that.
If by learn you mean use an IPA transcripter and a dialect chart then yeah. It’s not cuneiform, just IPA.
Even noting that you said "nearly perfect, I don’t believe that’s correct. I don’t know of any British accent in which any two of those words would be homonyms.
- In non-rhotic accents, “hawk” would be homonymous with “hork” (if such a word existed), but not with “hark”.
- There is a difference in vowel length between “hock” and “hark” in non-rhotic accents. If vowel length is not contrastive in your accent (e.g. if you pronounce “ferry” and “fairy” the same), it may be hard for you to hear this difference, but it is very real and obvious to those whose accent preserves the distinction.
Two letters? Sure. And if you think you can teach it, open a thread. I’ll give it a shot. It’s a useful thing to know.
But, I mean, none of those symbols are on my keyboard. Do I have to hunt and peck through the character map or copy-paste from the IPA wikipedia article just to discuss the letter “r” on the Dope?
And you can’t teach it in writing, right? At least not fully. I’m going to have to go to some multimedia site to hear and figure out how to distinguish the differences between each of those “107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks” in the IPA?
But I like to learn. If you know of a decent tutorial on this, please share.
My point is only that I think this is a little-bit too specialized knowledge to expect everyone discussing funny “Brits talk like this, Americans talk like this” videos on an opinion forum to learn. Not trying to disparage anyone else’s knowledge, or expertise or usefulness or any of that. Nor am I discouraging others from learning, or even saying I won’t learn it myself. I’m simply concurring with the few other posters who find this system to be somewhat overkill for casual discussions of English pronunciation.
Yes. Spectre asked about “all the variations of liquid sounds (/r/ and /l/).” I listed a whole bunch but said that for the most part Dopers only need to know [r] and [l].
I’ll consider it, but I’d just like to point out that there are people on the Dope who are more qualified than I am do do that.
As a preview, let me point out that:
— You already know these 16 consonant symbols: [p b m w f v s z t d n r l k g h]
— There is 1 more consonant symbol that I am guessing you probably already understand [ŋ]
— There are 6 more consonant symbols that are new symbols for sounds you probably already know how to represent in another way [θ ð ʃ ʒ tʃ dʒ], so you just have to learn a new symbol for them, the same way that as an engineer you know several different ways to represent multiplication and division
— There is 1 consonant symbol that is probably used differently than you’re used to so you’ll have to relearn its meaning [j], but if you know some basic German, then you already understand it
That just leaves learning:
— The 14 basic vowel symbols [i ɪ e ɛ æ a u ʊ o ɔ ʌ ɑ ɒ ə], which is the hard part, but someone with your level of education should be able to master in a reasonably short amount of time. The way I learned them is that I initially took away a rough understanding and then over time as I used them more and saw how others used them, my understanding of them deepened, and continues to deepen.
(If you know some basic Spanish or Italian then you already know what [i e a o u] mean, so then you’re down to learning just 9. And if you learned English in an American school, then you probably already know what [ə] means, so then you’re down to 8 [ɪ ɛ æ ʊ ɔ ʌ ɑ ɒ].)
— And then you likely will easily grasp the 6 basic dipthongs [eɪ aɪ aʊ ju oʊ ɔɪ] (which again are likely just different symbols for sounds you already represent some other way).
So, being generous, that means you already know 16 and you have to learn 28, only half of them having any significant degree of difficulty. So, in my view, that means you really only have to work hard to learn 14 symbols. That’s a much easier task than learning 200, isn’t it?
There are solutions to this, including the fact that there is a standardized way of representing IPA on a basic keyboard called ASCII IPA, which is considered perfectly acceptable to use online. Once you understand IPA, translating to ASCII IPA will be easy (ŋ=N θ=T ð=D ʃ=S ʒ=Z ɪ=I ɛ=E æ=& ʊ=U ɔ=O ʌ=V ɑ=A ɒ=A. ə=@)
The other main solution is to do what I do, which is to type out what you want to write on another website — http://ipa.typeit.org — and cut and paste into SDMB.
To a great extent, you can learn it in writing, which is how I learned it. I had no handy audio sources when I learned IPA in 1987-1988. But it’s much easier if you have audiovisual assistance. Since I already know IPA and I don’t teach it on a regular basis, I can’t say I know what a good website is. But I bet Johanna has some recommendations along those lines.
My theory, as stated above, is that you already know 16 and need learn only 28 for basic facility. I wonder whether Johanna, who is an actual expert on the subject, agrees.
In my opinion, the content of “Brits talk like this, Americans talk like this” conversations on the SDMB are 85 to 95 percent misunderstandings, repetition, and talking past each other, and that’s pretty much because of a failure to use and understand IPA. As I said before, if you can already speak, understand, read, and write English, then you can easily learn IPA for the purposes of discussing English pronunciation.
One huge reason we can’t use “just watch and listen to this YouTube clip” as the standard of phonological description is that it’s often extremely difficult to correctly perceive differences in similar sounds that may go unnoticed in our own language either because they don’t exist or because the difference plays no phonemic role (i.e. distinguishing one word from another). In English–in all dialects, I believe–initial voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) are aspirated, meaning that a tiny puff of air escapes your mouth when you pronounce words like pin, tin, and kin. You can try it right now: hold your hand an inch or two away from your mouth and say those words, and you’ll feel that puff of air. But when those stops are preceded by /s/, they are unaspirated. Do the same test with the words spin and skin, and the puff of air should be absent. Because the presence or absence of aspiration doesn’t play in the minimal distinction between one word and another, we are unaware of it. There are other languages like Sanskrit and Hindustani in which aspiration is phonemically significant. Fluent speakers of those languages can (could) easily hear the difference in much the same way we can hear the difference between between /p/ and /b/, so we know if we’re talking about pins or bins. I don’t know if the name Gandi exists in Hindustani, but if it does it would be pronounced differently from Gandhi, and a fluent listener would notice the difference immediately.
So, you might be about to ask, wouldn’t any linguist discussing Sanskrit need to be somewhat fluent in order to do so? Not at all. I don’t think there are any linguists who are fluent in seventh century Italian Proto-Romance, but that doesn’t mean they can’t analyze its structure or attempt to reconstruct its grammar The IPA and similar systems provide a systematic way to describe and compare the phonology of different languages or dialects.