September 16, 2008
New tricks for an old dog
Recently, my father—a self-proclaimed “old dog”—brought to my attention something that was troubling him in the world of words.
An avid learner and Internet surfer, Dad is a big fan of Wikipedia for its simple, direct explanations, definitions, and pronunciations. Well, you can imagine his surprise—and frustration—when he first encountered the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) on Wikipedia.
Anything but simple and direct, the IPA is a series of signs and letters for the representation of human speech sounds. Sponsored by the International Phonetic Association, it provides a “uniform and universally understood system for transcribing the speech sounds of all languages.” The problem is it looks like Greek. That’s because a lot of it IS Greek. Or Latin. Or some crazy combination of the two.
Dad wants to know what’s wrong with the phonetic symbols we learned in elementary school. These figures, used by most American dictionaries, are relatively intuitive and familiar, whereas the IPA symbols—like ð and θ—are anything but.
Here’s an example:
versus
in-tər-nash-nəl [Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary]
Which pronunciation of the word “international” do you understand better?
Proponents of the IPA would say that in today’s global world, interpretation should not depend on the reader’s dialect, and there should be an international phonetic standard in place.
An “old dog” like my dad says that he just wants to know how to pronounce a word in English without having to learn any new tricks—or Greek.
What do you say?
Filed by rebecca at 4:55 pm under For the love of words
I have never even heard of IPA and I was a Spanish minor in college not too long ago. When I want to know how to pronounce a word I usually click on the audio file next to it and listen to it!
This is all well and good, but what about billion Chinese, who arent’ all familiar with Greek Characters?
What if the phonetic alphabet was in Mandarin Characters, instead?
What a complete WASTE of time, these phonetic symbols are. WHy not just SPELL the word out phoneticallyi (IN-TER-NASH-SHUN-NUL), instead of making people learn a new alphabet (like your Dad says).
Jamie: I was a double major in English and French and I hadn’t heard of IPA until my dad told me about it.
(I love those audio pronunciation files. thefreedictionary.com offers both American and British versions, so you can hear the different accents. Very cool.)
Friar: Good point! (I knew this would set you off
) I’m with you and my dad: What a waste of time.
Hmmm…interestingly, I was able to use the first gobbledy-gook one to pronouce the word, but not the second gobbledy-gook one. But I’m with the majority here (all 3 of you!), why fix what ain’t broken.
Urban Panther: I’m quite impressed that you were able to decipher the first IPA transcription!
Well, I have studied French, German and Latin. Not to mention read Old English, so that might have something to do with it.
I knew what the word was, looking at the first example. The second was beyond me - too foreign looking for me to bother!
I’m all for tradition and stuff, but I find the IPA worse than just looking at “international,” which I imagine anyone familiar with our alphabet could sound out. Even if someone said “in-ter-nat-io-nal” they’d be close. Seems odd to try to explain how to pronounce something without using the same alphabet. I’ve always tried to avoid having to look up pronunciation in the dictionary, even though it explains how to read each upside down, squashed together,
Greek, and Latin letter. It just all seems more foreign to me than the original word!
This is definitely Greek to me. It’s unclear why these symbols are being used but I do like the idea of some kind of international phonetic alphabet. That could be helpful in learning new languages. But an English dictionary should definitely be in English
@Urban Panther: Well, that might explain it!
@Steph: It is odd to explain how to pronounce something using a different alphabet than the word you’re trying to pronounce. The assumption is that we all know IPA; and I’m pretty sure that most of us don’t!
@Melissa: I agree: The idea of an international phonetic alphabet is a good one, especially for new language learners. I just think there might be a better way to do it than IPA — or at least IPA should be taught to people at a young age so they can actually use it.
I agree that IPA is difficult to decipher, but I’m not sure that simple phonetic spellings are any better as they assume a standard pronunciation of phonemes. Even in a small country like the UK (where I live) there is a huge variation in accent and the way that a Londoner would spell a word phonetically could be vastly different to the way someone from the North East would write it. And American pronunciation is very different to any British accent, so what looks fine to someone from the US might be pronounced completely differently by a Brit. That’s not even taking into account the fact that many readers of Wikipedia are not native English speakers.
The other main advantage of IPA is that it allows more accurate pronunciation of non-english words, which can be difficult with standard phonetic spellings. Many languages contain sounds that are rare or absent in English, and therefore don’t have an adequate phonetic spelling.
That said, it can be time consuming to sit and work out how to pronounce words written in IPA symbol-by-symbol; I wonder if this is something that could be automated somehow? We’ve had text-to-speech programs for years now, and I would have thought this would be even easier with IPA since it explicitly spells out every single phoneme in a standarised way, whereas text-to-speech programs often struggle with the irregular pronunciations of English words. It’d be great if we could click on a little audio link for every single IPA pronunciation, with it all completely automated so no-one has to manually add the link or record the sound. I have no idea how feasible something like this would be, but it seems like the ideal solution!
Hi, Saskia:
You bring up some great points about accents differing among countries — and even within the same country. And I agree that IPA certainly has its advantages in the international realm. I love your idea of an automated audio link for each IPA pronunciation; let’s hope someone comes up the technology to support it!