I don’t understand, at all, how those symbols avoid confusion in any way. I find it fascinating that, in the many, many years I have been reading the Dope, I can parse my way through dense discussions on subjects that I have very little formal training in (physics, advanced mathematics, sometimes even pop culture!) and feel that I understand what each poster is getting at, but bring up one thread on pronunciation and I feel as though I just accidentally started reading a foreign language board.
I don’t know what a voiced guttural fricative (or whatever) is. That sounds like gibberish to me. I consider myself fairly intelligent (Dunning-Kruger?), but there is no way I am going to sit down and learn IPA in an afternoon, judging by the density of the Wiki page. But I can, with no specialized knowledge outside of standard English language, get my point across about how I pronounce something within a post or two, using the simple “No, ‘BRAWT-wurst’, like ‘BROUGHT’ and ‘WORST’ smashed together!”-type explanation.
You’re assuming that every speaker of English pronounces “brought” the same way. They don’t. How are you going to explain how to pronounce a word using other words as examples when you don’t know how your reader pronounces those words? That’s what IPA is for.
I was once corresponding with a British person and tried to communicate a pronunciation without using IPA. I referred to the “ah” vowel like in “calm”, “hot” or “sob”. He replied that those are three separate sounds in his dialect and he doesn’t know anyone who pronounces them the same.
Actually, the point you bring across is not accurate, because the sounds that you need to pronounce Bratwurst do not exist in the English language (of which there exists no standard) and are certainly not reflected in ‘brought’ + ‘worst’. Given that you already brought up Dunning-Kruger, I’ll just leave it at that.
I’m British and I don’t know anyone who pronounces the “hot” and “sob” vowels differently. But neither does anyone here pronounce “calm” remotely the same as those two. (Why would you? One’s a long a, one’s a short o!)
See, this doesn’t help me unless I know how you pronounce “brought.” Do you pronounce “caught” and “cot” the same? In my dialect “brought” and “brat” (shortened form of “bratwurst,” as opposed to a disagreeable child) are pronounced differently.
Yes, exactly alike. Brought, caught, cot, bot, jot, lot, ought… all the same vowel sound. The thing is, we also all HEAR different sounds based on our expectations. That’s why I don’t see a lot of point to the IPA, or find that it reduces confusion at all. There are those out there that don’t get the “YUUUUGE!” memes surrounding Trump right now, because Trump pronounces it the exact same way they do. How do you write that in IPA? How does the IPA handle things like the McGurk effect, especially with regard to semantic congruency? If somebody, based on their local dialect, would honestly look at you like you were crazy for claiming that they don’t pronounce the “H” in HUGE, or HUMAN, exactly the same way I do with my middle-of-flyover-country manner of speech, what good does it do to add arcane symbology to the mix?
This also does not help matters. I feel that this kind of post shows that the 5% (probably being generous here) of posters that are pronunciation wonks with deep understanding of the IPA really look down on those of us plebs that just won’t bother to learn it.
However, on the point addressed: if I call up somebody 3,000 miles away, and tell them I am cooking up some bratwurst, I guarantee that I will be 100% understood. And when I say it, it will be IDENTICAL to me just saying the two words “brought” and “worst” together as one.
There’s a difference between someone who doesn’t know something and someone who won’t bother to learn something, when that something is exactly what the topic of conversation is about.
Nope, I absolutely agree with that- some dialects pronounce words differently. And apparently, for some people, caught and cot are both spoken (and heard) as having two completely separate vowel sounds. For me, I hear the same sound both times in this sentence:
“I caught the perp, and he is currently sleeping on the cot in Cell A.”
I have never heard any pronunciation of those two words that did not sound identical. Same with my aforementioned examples: lot, tot, not, hot, brought, bought, nought, ought. They are all the same sound. I have never seen a movie where I heard a different pronunciation, and there are not a lot of movies set here in good ol’ Wyoming.
I’m no longer following your argument. You say you admit that some people pronounce “brought” differently than you. You accept that when they pronounce “brought - worst”, they will say it differently than you, and that they will perceive the difference (even if you don’t). Yet you claim that writing “brought - worst” will allow them to understand how YOU pronounce “bratwurst”? That doesn’t add up. Unless you’re saying that any phonetic differences that aren’t apparent to YOU simply aren’t worth distinguishing?
I’m kinda curious–has anyone tried doing a blinded test on the cot/caught merger? I’m certain that people hear the two words differently. I’m not totally convinced that there’s a true distinction in pronunciation, in that someone (with a dialect that makes the distinction) can always unambiguously distinguish between the two words in isolation.
There are plenty of optical illusions where the same color looks very different depending on the surrounding context. Why shouldn’t our auditory system be subject to the same kinds of illusions? Our senses are not perfect recording devices and what our brains perceive are strongly influenced by expectations.
I was told once that truck and chruck are pronounced the same way. This sounds absurd on the face of it; they seem nothing alike, and I can “prove” it to myself by sounding out the words. But I’m not certain that in actual speech, without context and without the extra emphasis from an artificial environment, that there’s a real difference there. A blind test would convince me, though.
Seriously? They’re unambiguously different to me. Just isolating the vowel it’s different, no context required. The slight majority of American dialects make the distinction.
My point is that if you show me the IPA spelling for your version of “brought” versus my version of “brought”, then let me listen to a recording of you saying “brought”, I would wonder why you try to show yours as being different than mine. So if we are saying the same word, that sounds identical, but you are claiming that you pronounce it differently, what did IPA add for clarity?
I did searches for pronunciations of BROUGHT, BOUGHT, COT, CAUGHT, and all pronunciations were identical to what I hear and say. I followed it up with a recording of the pronunciation of BRATWURST, which does, in fact, sound identical to the words BROUGHT and WORST smashed together.
Now, again, I do understand that different dialects of the same language will have differences. Obviously pronunciations across the pond differ, strikingly so in some cases, and those differences need to be communicated. My contention is that IPA is not useful to do this in a normal setting, among non-linguists. It does not add clarity, it adds an unnecessary layer of obfuscation- using a different alphabet with 4 times is many letters as English (not to mention all the diacritics) might be fine in a strictly linguistic discussion, among linguists, but it serves no useful purpose among those of us who aren’t already schooled in it. Phonetic respelling, however, can be used to get the point across fairly quickly, even if a following clarification question must be answered.
And I will point out that despite the many posts you’ve made here, I still have no idea how you pronounce bratwurst. I know that you pronounce the first syllable the same as you pronounce the word “brought”, but what that pronunciation is I haven’t a clue. It may be the same as the way I pronounce “brought”, or it may be the way I pronounce the first syllable of “bratwurst” (which are completely different), or it may be something else entirely, but I have no way of telling. I don’t even know how it would be possible for you to communicate it to me, other that via IPA or a sound recording. This, I think, is the crux of the issue here. You claim that you can communicate this via respelling, but that is, as far as I can see, completely impossible. The only possible way this would work is, after many back-and-forth postings, you would end up developing a private version of IPA for use between a few people who agree on your respelling conventions.
Yes, I can clearly hear two different sounds there. But it’s an artificial environment–words don’t sound the same when there is a special emphasis on clear articulation.
It also still doesn’t quite quite answer my question (which I see now was somewhat ambiguous). I’m not claiming that unmerged speakers don’t produce two different sounds for the two words. It’s whether there are two unambiguous sounds there regardless of context and the speaker. Perhaps there’s just one vowel sound with a broad range of possible pronunciations, and one man’s cot is another’s caught.
I don’t think any native English speaker could ever fail to distinguish not from note, regardless of who’s speaking or the context. The vowels are just too different. Is the same true of cot/caught?
Another question: what do unmerged listeners hear when a merged speaker says cot? Always one or the other, or is it random, or do they realize that there’s an ambiguity at all? Might shed light on the first question.