Show HN: Add a play button next to IPA on Wikipedia
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Because of how it is used, IPA isn't really the 'one true standard' many would think it is.
Phonemic transcription of English "pot" is /pɔt/, and "spot" is /spɔt/. However, a phonetic transcription is closer to [pʰɔt̚] and [spɔt̚]. Note the addition of aspiration on the initial /p/ in "pot", and marking the /t/ as unreleased in both. But you don't need to differentiate stop aspiration in English, because they are conditioned allophones. And all final stops in English are unreleased, so you don't need to mark those phonemically either.
Basically, your first sentence is entirely correct, but your second sentence is a bit inappropriate. It serves it's purpose of a standard, but you must keep in mind that most transcriptions are not phonetic but phonemic. And a phonemic reading is not meant to be independent of the language -- there are plenty of languages for which [p] and [pʰ] are not allophones and must be distinguished in even a phonemic reading. You should be familiar with the phonemic conventions of a language in order to actually render a phonetic reading.
And even then, a phonetic reading will be dependent on things that boil down to individual speaker differences. That is, there is not any standardized, singular mapping of a phonemic transcription to a phonetic one, in either direction.
> Phonemic transcription of English "pot" is /pɔt/, and "spot" is /spɔt/.
Your use if this particular IPA indicates that you speak a dialect that has undergone the cot-caught merger, which probably means your accent is from Scotland, the western half of the US, or the Boston area. If you didn't, then you'd transcribe those words as /pɑt/ and /spɑt/ if you spoke a dialect with the father-bother merger (most American accents) or /pɒt/ and /spɒt/ if you spoke a dialect without it (many English accents, including RP).
I'm leaning towards you being Scottish, since Scottish English tends to merge them to [ɔ], while American dialects with the merger tend to merge them to [ɑ].
This goes to show that IPA transcriptions are heavily dependent on dialect.
Though this does give opportunity to point out that even phonemic transcriptions can have dialectal differences. There is no one phonemic transcription for English, as the different vowel mergers mean that minimal pairs differ between groups. This kind of variation tends not to happen as much with consonants as vowels, which make them much harder to transcribe even phonemically. But, for example, here's a list of mergers for non-rhotic dialects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Mergers_c...
So yeah, IPA doesn't completely specify how things sound.
It'd be neat to know what exactly the server is doing, though.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...
Console Error: ipa.js:38 Uncaught (in promise) DOMException: Cannot decode detached ArrayBuffer
Chrome 59.0.3071.115 (Official Build) (64-bit) Mac OS X
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...
I'm not going to reupload this work to the AMO for it to be signed for distribution though. Limitation sucks also
The idea is great but some more love for ffox users would be nice :)
For example, I haven't learned to distinguish /pʰ/ and /p/ or /bʰ/ and /b/, as Hindi does, but thanks to IPA, I know that that issue exists and maybe I can learn it some day. Also, I haven't learned to say the consonant at the beginning of a Chinese friend's name (I think it's [ʈ͡ʂʰ]), and IPA helps remind me that [ts] and [tʃ] are just approximations to it.
IPA is necessary in phonetic and phonological research. You need a way to transcribe and abstract sounds consistently; you can't just submit a recording, along with your paper, to a journal.
(While we are at it, can people please start "transliterating" names from languages that use the latin alphabet in very different ways, like "Saoirse (seersha)"? And liberally using hyphens to break up longer foreign words? I know everybody is proud and feels well educated when they can pronounce foreign names, but I think there is no shame in using pronunciation aids.)
Wikipedia already has a respelling key for this purpose. English orthography is such a mess, though, that I wouldn't trust a machine with this task. And even a human can't get around the problem that many pronunciations simply can't be expressed in “respelled” form, because they violate the rules of English phonology. That doesn't necessarily mean they're hard for English speakers to pronounce, but it does mean that trying to spell such words as if they're in English will get you nowhere.
And that's before we get to the issue of different accents!
> can people please start "transliterating" names from languages that use the latin alphabet in very different ways
No. Transliteration doesn't exist to make words from other languages pronounceable by English speakers, it exists to express a word in a different script. Focussing on English speakers would sacrifice important nuances, like maintaining phonological distinctions English doesn't have, or the ability to convert back to the original script losslessly. For example, Mandarin Chinese has at least two different consonants that sound like “sh” to an English speaker, and at least four that sound like “ch”, but the distinction between these is critical to Chinese speakers, and if we “transliterated” them to just “sh”/“ch”, we would end up with large numbers of homographs, and the transcription would be useless to Chinese speakers.
Also, what you're describing is the job of transcription, not transliteration.
I recognize parts of IPA, but I frequently forget the sound of some characters, and can't reproduce arbitrary IPA with confidence. I think if you haven't learned it properly, and use it regularly, its somewhat impractical.
Mandarin is an interesting example. I found Pinyin really intuitive (as an English and German speaker), and once you get used to some quirks (like x vs sh, or q which is more like english "chi" than english "qu", or i and e that sound much more schwa-like than I'd expect), it is fairly easy to pronounce most words (provided the tone marks are indicated. Official signage in China usually omits them for some reason).
And I know the difference between transcription and transliteration, that's why I put transcription in scare quotes. What I mean is, lets pretent Irish words are not written in Latin, but in ... Lotin (which looks 100% like Latin but is completely different :-)), and then treat it like Cyrillic. I have less problems reading Russian or Arabic or Greek names, compared to names writen in other Latin-alphabet languages - because most transliteration schemes try to preserve at least some familiarity for west European language speakers (unless it is Klingon, or Wade-Gilles...).
It's bewildering even serious dictionary publishers now predominantly use pseudo-English transliteration in most of their products.
You can't really learn proper native pronunciation from such transliterations. They are an approximation at best (IPA is too, if you take accents into account but even then it's much more exact).
Moreover, having these pseudo-English transcriptions may leave people with a false impression they know how to pronounce something, while in fact using these transcriptions with naïve English phonology still leaves you incomprehensible (or at best very grating) to native speakers. Something something 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing' something something Dunning–Kruger something something.
Better just learn IPA yourself. Seriously.
I guess I would just spell out names the given audience is likely to mispronounce - although you could argue to do it with every name, like one newspaper always mentions who a person is, no matter how famous ("bla bla, Donald Trump, president of the United States, bla bla Joe Schmoe, plumber from Virgina")
For example, every Saoirse I know pronounces it "sur-sha".
It's not an isolated example. For instance, "chez" is pronounced "shay" in English but in French it sounds more like "sheh" to me.
As a monolingual English speaker until college, I have had a terrible time with distinguishing some word-final diphthongs. For instance, I catch myself using the English "-o" /oʊ/ in Spanish, when it should be just /o/. I also have a hard time with /e/ vs /eɪ/.
"say" and "seh" sound pretty much the same to me, but I'm not a monolingual English speaker, I grew up in Germany and the US, and I might also mix up things.
I find the first syllable harder to describe, since there is no way to note these nasal sounds in English (actually, I think they should be called anti-nasal, since no air goes through the nose when I say it, but I disgress). But I think in general, some basics of French pronunciation are known to most English speakers, so using a French word is a bad example.
I would say it's most like the long 'a' in 'fate' or 'mate'.
So it really sounds like "a" to you? Huh.
It does, yes, but as I alluded to that differs from 'ay' in which I'd linger slightly more on the end 'y' note if you see what I mean.
Less extreme than the way Americans linger on a syllable-ending 'r', but the same sort of thing.