OMG! :eek:
That “dawn” and “don” are pronounced the same by some dialects is something I did not realize or discover until well into my teens, at least, perhaps even my 20s. It boggled my mind, as we were taught they were different, and I seem to recall dictionaries we used distinguishing the two vowel sounds with two different symbols. That they were the same was simply ridiculous to me! Bunch of uneducated lazy language speakers!
However, around that same time, I discovered that some people distinguish (at least two, if not all three) “Mary,” “marry,” and “merry.” What the hell? All those are the same vowel! Well, no, no they are not to many dialects in the US. And since then I’ve discovered all sorts of other mergers and vowel shifts and stuff. So is it me being uneducated and lazy in my own speech, too? No, we just talk as the people around us talk. And also, this is exactly why a common pronunciation alphabet like IPA or SAMPA is so useful. When talking with people within my dialect, it’s not really necessary, but when speaking to a group of people from disparate dialect and language backgrounds, it’s a no-brainer that it is the best way we have of communicating these sounds using text.
OK, here’s a quesiton I’ve never asked. For those of you for whom “dawn” and “Don” contain the same vowel, do you use the same vowel in phrases like:
“Awww…isn’t that cute?”
and
“Open up and say ‘ah!!!’”
So, is the “aw” and “ah” there the same?
Same for me. I just looked it up and it’s this symbol: ɑ
It’s the same one I use for “awe” as well.
Mary, merry, and marry are the same for me too.
I would say most questions of “do they sound the same” will be answered “Yes”. Perhaps it’s lazy NE Ohio speaking 
That’s emphatically not the case. To learn Pinyin pronunciation means learning to distinguish several Mandarin phonemes that are unknown in English. How would an English speaker know how to distinguish between Pinyin c and z, ch and q, sh and x, to take a few examples? It would require forming new neural pathways in the brain just to become able to *hear *the crucial differences between sounds that we’ve never learned to distinguish before.
We already know and can easily distinguish all the English phonemes, of which there are a limited number. When the International Phonetic Alphabet, for our purposes here, is restricted to the set of English phonemes, it doesn’t require any new learning other than matching one-to-one correspondence of symbol to sound. That makes it far easier to use than the sloppy, disorganized one-to-many conventions. It brings immediate, tangible benefit to Dopers comparing different English pronunciations.
Look, English phonology has only 24 consonant phonemes and 12 or 13 monophthong vowel phonemes, plus 3 basic diphthong phonemes. Of the consonant phonemes, 16 already use the same symbols in English orthography as in IPA. That’s a big saving in learning time. As for vowels, the correspondence of English orthography to pronunciation is so poor that it makes a one-to-one set of symbols a necessity.
This is so easy to learn and the benefits to the learner are so great that it’s a no-brainer. For one thing, it will make the English speaker finally understand the sounds of their own language, which were not taught very well in our school systems. It allows us to compare different pronunciations with ease and without confusion.
Please leave NE Ohio out of this. I’m from Cleveland, where caught /kɔt/ and cot /kɑt/ are completely distinct. This is true over most of the Western Reserve. You’re from an outlying region influenced by bleed-over from the merged Pittsburgh dialect.
I’m cool with that. At least we pronounce cot and caught the correct way. Perhaps you are influenced by Canadians sneaking across Lake Erie? 
Back in high school, when I was in AP English, one of our homework assignments was to memorize the beginning of Chaucer’s “Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, and be able to recite it, in Middle English. I was taught by a Kentucky-raised teacher, so I have no clue if she got it right, but she taught us to pronounce “yronne” as “ye-run-eh", with the stress on “run”.
I went to an IPA keyboard, to try to render that in IPA, and I think it’s [ʏˌ ʀʌŋ ˈə], but I’m not sure; I got caught up in a maze of “mid-front rounded vowels”, “alveolor taps” and “nasal velar fricatives”, so I have no bloody idea. I know the IPA is the best way to represent speech, but "easy and intuitive to learn”, my arse.
Fundamentally, it is rendering sounds in text. Reading a book is not the best way to learn IPA. That’s the way I initially learned it, but it took longer. Having someone show you the sounds through some kind of audio demonstration is much easier. But I don’t know why you think that “being able to learn it in one go by reading” is fundamental to the definition of “easy.”
NOT learning IPA is, of course, much easier than learning IPA. But that isn’t the only factor when trying to determine how hard it is. A critical component should be to compare the effort to learn it with the ability to convey speech sounds in an unambiguous manner.
Harvard University’s Geoffrey Chaucer page has a recitation of the first 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales Prologue. “Yronne” appears in Line 8: “Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne”.
The speaker renders “yronne” as [i’rʌnə] (ee-RUN-uh).
…
Working with an IPA keyboard cold is going to be tough. I’d recommend looking at the English phonology article on Wikipedia as a handy intro to IPA symbols. This way, you narrow the memory load down to the symbols necessary to discuss the vagaries of English pronunciation.
Start with the English vowels, which are somewhat more complicated than the consonants IPA-wise. In the sound charts, note that “GA” stands for “General American” and “RP” stands for a British standard called “Received Pronunciation” (aka ‘The Queen’s English’).
For anyone interested in picking up the IPA symbols for English in minimal time, YouTube is a godsend:
American English vowels
American English consonants
British English vowels (I assume Received Pronunciation)
Just a quick Google search or a search from within YouTube using terms like “IPA” and “English vowels/consonants” turns up dozens of videos like these. For a narrower focus, also throw in terms like “British/American” or “Irish”,“Scottish”, etc. … whatever you may be curious about.
When I took 9th-grade French in America almost half a century ago, the textbook used IPA to convey the French sounds. In combination with audio tapes listened to while looking at the IPA symbols in each lesson, it made the most effective language learning program I’ve ever benefited from.
When I started looking at contemporary British & American English dictionaries from Oxford University Press—N.B. made for popular everyday use—and found the pronunciations given in IPA, it was clear that there was no longer any excuse for English speakers to shun such a simple and accurate pronunciation tool. British people are lucky that publishers treat them as intelligent learners. Americans are ill served by publishers that won’t wean them off the childish pablum of substandard pronunciation keys.
Can’t stand to hear the current o-mahj, for homage. It’s aw-mij (accent on first syllable)
Close. It’s hom-ij. The H is pronounced.
Apparently, some people in NE Ohio are lazier than others.
This really annoys me too! But it seems like it’s too late to stop the shift.
My two dictionaries have both pronunciations. The dictionary from from 1975 lists the pronunciation with the H first, the dictionary from 1994 lists the other one first. Both are perfectly valid.
So all this smug, “I’m so superior” attitude comes because of a fluke where you happened to forced to learn something back in high school?
Boorish lectures from someone who elected to independently study the subject would be bad enough. You didn’t have a choice.
I happened to be in a job where I learning it was useful, yeah me!! I’m so wise.
I don’t find that smug at all. I find it to be an informative post from a professional from which amateurs should learn something. I have been reading Johanna’s posts for years and she is anything but smug or superior.
Agreed. It’s amazing to me just how anti-intellectual the Dope gets about the subject of IPA. I use both lay and IPA explanations for pronunciations in most threads, but I can only be sure I am conveying the correct information using IPA. If you at all interested in languages, dialects, and learning how words are pronounced across these areas, especially if you like discussing these things in a textual medium, it is immensely helpful.
(It is especially helpful to me when discussing foreign languages, rather than getting some person’s idea of an English pronunciation of a foreign word, I can get a much more accurate idea of its pronunciation through IPA. And, certainly, it’s helped me in learning how to pronounce foreign languages. When I lived in Hungary, I couldn’t make heads or tails of how certain pronunciations in a “Teach Yoursel Hungarian”-type book mapped to how I actually heard Hungarians speak. That’s because it was written by an English author, and their English approximations were sometimes quite different than what I, as an American speaker, would approximate it as. It was a bit later where I discovered a more modern learner’s book which had IPA in it where it became clearer what vowels and consonants mapped to vowels and consonsants I already knew – I grew up speaking English and Polish, so I had two sets of languages to draw from --, and which I had to add to my arsenal and learn. I believe that was when I first began learning IPA and its utility. Since learning it – and I’m often discovering new sounds and symbols as I come across them – I’ve also become more keen at picking out and identifying different accents and dialects. I can read somebody describe a New Yorker’s distinction between marry/merry/Mary or Canadian raising [where, in certain cases, a word like “about” becomes something like “aboat” – or as popularly rendered – “aboot,” which it doesn’t sound like at all to me in any of the versions I’ve heard of it] without needing an audio transcription.)
It’s a lovely system that makes talking about pronunciation much easier and more accurate. I do understand that for most people, who may only intermittently participate in such conversations, it isn’t worth the time investment (which I do agree with others is fairly minimal for the basics), but if you enjoy talking about pronunciations or just love languages in general, it’s worth looking at, as it opens up a lot of avenues for further learning.