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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

I have to assume IPA is basically gibberish to 99.9% of the world, if not more. Is there a digitally synthesized version? Whenever I'm reading Wikipedia/Wiktionary and see the phonetic version of a word, I wish I could click on it and hear the sounds (without having to have someone upload a sound file). The pronunciation key (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English) isn't particularly helpful.

Honestly, we're all basically just hoping whoever wrote it knows what the symbols mean. An example: Greenwich (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich).

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Yes, reading IPA is very hard, but it's hard for a good reason. It's the best way we have of describing human-made sounds unambiguously, because our regular alphabet doesn't work cross-language.

I agree it would be cool if there was a good IPA speech synthesizer, that would certainly help! There's some discussion on the issues and problems with it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514258

I studied English and French 2 decades before affordable computers and speech synthesizers. Reading IPA for a single language is not all hard. You just get used to the symbols needed in that language.

If you take a random language and believe that you can pronounce it correctly by reading IPA, well that won't work. Or at least be very hard.

Unambiguously, except for the symbol this article is about, which is ambiguous.

If the annual Wikipedia top-banner donation ask simply said "Donate $5 and we'll make the IPA keys produce an actual sound" I'd donate.

Nope, just gibberish to 99.9% of native speakers. BUT...

Because English is spelled non-phonetically, English learners across the world generally learn IPA together with English, to learn pronunciation.

Granted it's not the entire set of IPA sounds, and some students are better than others... but seeing as there many more speakers of English as a second language than native speakers (according to some sources, though this can be disputed), there must be at least hundreds of millions of people with a rudimentary knowledge of IPA, enough to sound out words in English.

The IPA doesn't actually describe a sound. It describes what you do with your mouth to produce that sound. Where you place your tongue, whether your lips touch or not etc.

The actual sound that gets produced can vary by context, what sound you made before that and what will come after etc. (And who is saying it off course).

See this diagram: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f8/1e/ea/f81eeaa4921133c3b67b...

English dictionaries outside of the US usually use IPA, so people are more familiar with it.

This IPA to speech tool seems fairly accurate: https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/

It seems limited to IPA symbols that also appear in English. (Understandable, given that it uses an English TTS synthesizer under the hood.) It didn't produce any sound for ʈ͡ʂʐ̩

Interestingly all four of those pronunciations for Greenwich are valid.

As a local I hear (and use) all of them interchangeably and am only vaguely aware of the difference if I consciously think about it

Living in China, I was curious to discover that many people there were actually pretty familiar with IPA, I assume it's taught as part of advanced language learning, to cope with all the very different sounds in other languages. On several occasions people expressed great puzzlement that I had no idea how most IPA symbols were pronounced.

I'm pretty sure IPA is the de facto standard for conveying English pronunciation in textbooks around the world, not just in China.

What do foreign language textbooks in English-speaking countries use to teach pronunciation?

Almost all textbooks and dictionaries use their own transcription key, I haven't come across plain old IPA in language learning textbooks, only in linguistics textbooks.

IPA was in use in every German high school book for English or French in the 1980s. I have no reason to believe it has changed, but I haven't used any since then.

Using own systems I have seen in very naive tourist guides and in text books by English speaking publishers.

I mean, one could say the same about musical notation. It might not be 99.9%, but probably close to 75%.

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