Hacker News Reader

Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in learning to pronounce non-English things, I highly recommend learning the IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

You can get away from this vague stuff like 'an "ah" vowel', and learn (1) the real way the pronounce the names, including sounds that aren't in English, and (2) the precise closest English approximation, without having to go through analogies and metaphors that won't be valid across English dialects.

View on HN

I lost enthusiasm for IPA once I found out that there's no unambiguous way to denote a rolled r. It sounds like IPA has already accumulated its own historical baggage and recommends users to specify what they mean by each symbol, so you're just trading one set of vague analogies and metaphors for another.

Sometimes linguists transcribing particular languages have developed conventions so they don't have to hunt around in the special characters. For example the English r sound is really ɹ but people writing about English might write it as r. But in standard IPA, rolled r is the symbol r and nothing else.

Some of the other things that look like nonstandard IPA are actually Americanist notation, which a lot of older linguists were trained in rather than IPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation

Still it's a lot less ambiguous than "sounds like 'ah'" which could be just about anything.

This, exactly. The rolled r is only r in IPA, but way too often people reach out for the wrong symbols when representing English pronunciation. Often I also see ◌ʰ being often left out when a consonant is usually aspirated, and so on.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. In phonetic transcription, rolled r is unambiguously [r]. In phonemic transcription… well, /r/ can be ambiguous depending on what language you’re transcribing, but that’s OK because phonemic transcription isn’t supposed to represent specific sounds anyway.

I was chatting to a speech pathologist the other day, apparently when they were being awarded their degrees, the entire class submitted the IPA transcription of their names to be read out at the graduation ceremony.

I agree fully, and I wish, for written communication (chat, emails) people could use some latin/ascii based transliteration of IPA. There is X-SAMPA [1], though it's not much used yet. I think a simple input method, available on all keyboards and maybe some textual annotation for text sections being in IPA, might give this a much bigger audience. Many people are often in meetings where they don't know how to pronounce the names of meeting participants - would be really great to have an ASCII based IPA notation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA

This would be a bad idea, due to inter-dialectal variation. As I said in an earlier comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070624]:

> Phonetic spelling is useless when you’ve got more than one dialect. For instance, consider the word ‘castle’. Is this [kæsɫ̩], or [kɑːsl̩], or [kɑːsu] (as it is for me), or something else entirely? Having an orthography which is not purely phonetic avoids this problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com