And as to why I wouldn’t write a respelled version of the pronunciations in addition to the IPA, I don’t know how to do that. How would you write Los Angeles so that it’s clear the A is pronounced as in “ant” and not as in “angel” or in “anew”?
“Los Ăngeles” would be the traditional form – but, boy is that ugly.
I can’t say if it’s ugly or not, but it’s hardly any clearer than the other attempts at “spelling out” a pronunciation have been.
It’s not that spelling out pronunciations is hard, it’s that it can’t be done. English just doesn’t work like that - English spelling is ambiguous about pronunciation, and that ambiguity is a permanent part of the language. It can’t be overcome by substituting other English spellings, because all that can be accomplished with that is to trade one ambiguous spelling for another ambiguous spelling.
As far as I can tell, people who try to explain their pronunciations using “plain English” do so because they believe that people will understand what they mean. In fact, using “plain English” for pronunciations absolutely guarantees that no one can ever be sure what you meant. Someone who in every detail talks exactly the way you do is likely to understand you by accident fairly often; beyond that, it’s hopeless.
The IPA certainly isn’t perfect, and often doesn’t get used perfectly, but it’s workable. Respelling in English is not workable, and not fixable.
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A simple example: “I say Los to rhyme with boss” - well, even staying within the USA, the word “boss” sounds different in LA than it does in Chicago, and different again in New York.
That’s not what I said. I said most people understand the most common method of describing sounds in print, and that most people will have a good approximation (and many will have an exact match) of what the word sounds like.
There are nearly 19 million people in the Greater Los Angeles area. There are nearly 24 million people in Southern California. This thread is about the pronunciation of Los Angeles by Anglos. When you’re talking about double-digit millions of Anglos, they are not all going to pronounce anything in the ‘official’ way. It doesn’t matter if someone pronounces the vowel in ‘Los’ as it is in ‘loss’ or ‘thought’. Either way is ‘how Anglos pronounce it’. If you speak with an accent, then you’re still close enough. Why not use a system that everyone understands that does not require reference materials?
Because it’s too much bother to click on a link, find the character you’re looking for (it’s not as if they’re in ‘alphabetical order’ in the commonly understood sense), notice the difference between the given pronunciation and a similar one, and repeat for all characters. And then ponder such things as ‘Why it the “t” in “tie” different from the “t” in “tune”?’ IPA not unambiguous. To some people, ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ sound the same. To others, they do not. And you still have to take accents into account. It is faster and easier just to use the most common method.
Also IPA says that æ is pronounced as a short-a as in ‘pad’, but as has been pointed out, it is a long-e sound as in ‘feed’ when it is used in a word.
That’s exactly the problem IPA helps to solve, or at least to come up with a “common language” that we can talk about these sounds independent of accent or even language. It’s been immensely helpful for me in learning foreign languages, for example, because I can see what sounds map to languages I already know and which are different.
And yet, if you have an accent or speak a different dialect, it doesn’t.
In any case, I’m not saying people shouldn’t use IPA. I’m just saying that if they post IPA, they should also provide the common way of posting pronunciations because most people don’t use IPA.
I feel the same way about the current fad of posting things in Cyrillic characters in the many Trump threads. Post the damned translation. I’m not going to to copy and go to Google Translate and paste to find out what it says.
But, yes, it does. That’s exactly what it’s trying to standardize. I’ve learned to identify different dialects with the help of IPA transcriptions. For example, with the “caught/cot” merger. Those in the dialects that say it the same would have both words represented as /kɑt/ in IPA. For dialects that preserve the difference, it’s /kɑt/ vs /kɔt/. It’s the best way we have of identifying and communicating dialect differences in written form. IPA is independent of dialect.
Face. I type that word, and everyone who speaks American English knows what the vowel sound is. But what if you’re Australian? I’ve heard Australians pronounce it ‘fice’, rhyming with ‘ice’. So they look up ‘eɪ’, and determine that ‘eɪ’ means ‘a long-I sound’. Either way, the accented reader would have to say, 'OK, that word rhymes with this word. But the poster is from [this] country, so he pronounces it differently, or ‘OK, that IPA symbol stands for this sound, but I know that my accent is different from whoever came up with the example. So I have to find out how it’s pronounced in the ‘unaccented’ dialect so that I know what the IPA sound means.’
There is no unaccented dialect. The written sounds are accent and language agnostic. In your example, it’s very difficult to describe the difference in pronunciation using “plain English,” to people from different dialcts. With IPA, you can exactly pinpoint what the differences are, what I say when I say “nice” and what an Australian says when they say “nice.” You can figure out how words in, say, Estonian are pronounced using IPA. If you’re having trouble figuring out the sounds, click on the audio link. And they’re very useful for representing sounds that are not in your dialect or language. And it’s great in talking with foreign language speakers who know IPA (which there are a reasonable number of on the Dope) as to how words are pronounced in different parts of the US without trying to figure out what sounds are in their head when I write out a “plain English” explanation. Like I said, I do both when I use IPA, but I have no idea if my written out approximation matches the sounds in their head. With IPA, as long as they familiarize themselves with it, I know it’s well in the ballpark of what I’m trying to convey, without having to post an audio example.
Which is what I’m saying about the common way. Except you don’t have to familiarise yourself with it. If I want to see how something is pronounced in IPA, I have to look up each individual symbol, or else do a google search to find an audio example.
But then I can’t explain to people from other dialects and languages well using the “common way,” since there is no one “common” way (see my previous example about when I was trying to learn Hungarian from a UK published book on the language. Had the authors used IPA, or at least used IPA along with their dialectical approximation, I would not have been confused at all.) Once again, that is exactly the problem IPA is trying to solve: providing a standardized notational system for phonemes across languages and dialects.
Well, if it works for you, use it.
But most people don’t know IPA.
Nobody knows what someone transcribing in a dialect of English is transcribing to, unless they speak the same dialect and think of the same words the writer was thinking of. For most of us, reading IPA requires having the pronunciation key handy but it works.
Weirdly, both those charts say that I should make the Don/Dawn distinction, based on where I grew up and where my parents grew up, but we don’t. One chart has it a bit more ambiguous, being on the fuzzy line. Still, my dad grew up in a red zone but doesn’t make that distinction.
I would agree with you except for “trivially easy”. It takes a bit of extra effort, even if one has the IPA Wikipedia page bookmarked and knows how to click the symbols to hear them. To represent your own sounds in IPA is even worse - you have to hunt your way through the charts for each sound until you find the right one, unless you know what “rounded” and “front/back” and “close/open” mean. It’s a guessing game of some labor.
It’s certainly not a one-or-the-other type of boundary. For example, I live in “pop” country as far as the “what do you call a fizzy sweetened drink,” but my neighborhood was solidly “soda.” There will always be pockets within the general dialect region that vary from the predominant dialect in the greater region. Even something as simple as how do you say “Chicago” has at least a couple of answers within the city, depending on where you are.
The thing is, your method does not even work for you, though it might be easy for you to imagine that it does.
I mean, for you only within your own mind, of course anything works. This is about getting your point across to others. You may think your point gets across, but it can’t.
It works for me.
The charts of where words are pronounced certain ways are helpful as rough average guides, but of course each person talks however they talk. Immigrants, newcomers, and people who just don’t fit the averages, could live anywhere.
You may choose to believe that it does, but in fact no one who didn’t already know what you meant before they even read what you wrote has a chance of correctly understanding your pronunciation examples.
If the only people who can understand your example are the people who knew it ahead of time, then why waste your energy giving an example in the first place?