You just posted the opposite of the truth. There’s nothing messy about it. It’s highly organized and coherent. Half the symbols are already intuitive and the rest of the English phoneme set can be easily learned by English speakers in a short time. The English dictionaries in the UK use IPA and the British people are well served by this. Only because American teachers and publishers have shied away from it can anyone think they can get away with promoting ignorance like you just did. Most of all, it’s the only system that actually works to communicate information without confusing others. You’re the one who’ll need good luck if you shun IPA.
The SDMB is devoted to fighting ignorance and one of its greatest strengths is to uphold science against the enemies of science. Unless the science in question is linguistics, since its enemies somehow feel emboldened around here. That’s deplorable.
What makes your peers so great that you accord them power over your speech? I wonder if you’d be so blithe and nonchalant if your beloved Polish and Hungarian words were getting mangled like that. Italian language is my blood, my life, not “fancy pants.”
Polish is my other native language and, no, I don’t care in the least when words like pierogi or goląbki or my last name get pronounced differently in English. Why would I?My parents settled on the most common English pronunciation of my last name, and we don’t care in the least. Polish natives will pronounce it natively to each other, but otherwise we follow English phonetics or whatever the predominant English pronunciation is. And, for Hungarian, I tend to say “Budapest” unless I’m talking with Hungarians or Hungarian expats where I will say “Budapesht.”
I provided IPA because you were having trouble understanding. I happen to already know how to use IPA, due to being fascinated by pronunciation guides as a kid and having to learn it for a class in college. So it was easy to help out.
I don’t expect anyone else here to know it, nor do I expect them to have to take the at least weeks I took to learn it just for a casual conversation.
So, yes, I do believe it would be that hard for most people in this thread to respond using IPA.
It was easy to understand but not because IPA was used, it added nothing for me. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where IPA would have been a help to me.
International pedants language is more like it.
I don’t care in the slightest how people pronounce words. I like the fact that they are different the world over and gain correctness through usage. I also slightly enjoy the fact that “wrong” pronunciations seem to annoy some people for no good reason.
IPA is the only way to communicate pronunciation without widespread confusion.
Again, despite the Dope’s vaunted self-image of fighting ignorance with science and doing valiant battle against the science-haters, many are quick to turn their back on their ideals when it comes to the science of linguistics. To think that we would nurture this anti-science viper in our own scientific bosom.
As a native Arabic speaker, the thought that a word’s incorrect pronunciation could become the correct one, after a sufficient number of people adopt its use, is almost mind boggling. Arabic would, absolutely, not allow it. Now, Arabic has dozens of dialects and hundreds of accents, but every Arab will submit when challenged on their local pronunciation of a word to the classical/standard one.
Almost all Japanese words become changed when they enter English, but that OK because almost all English words get changed when they are adopted into Japanese.
I heard a mispronunciation of a Utah related word “Deseret” by someone from the Midwest. They must have assumed that it’s French and dropped the “t” but it’s a Book of Mormon name so the “t” is pronounced. Sometimes you can’t win.
