Someday people will spell words phonetically. They will look back at our languages as primitive throwbacks, like hieroglyphics
Interactive IPA Chart
121–130 of 185 posts
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#122I can’t be the only one to click on this to be disappointed it wasn’t a website about beer! I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language? As far as people learning English as a second language it seems like one of the biggest hurdles is learning all the ‘exceptions’. Especially for people coming from languages where all vowels only have one pronunciation. En…
> I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language?
It’s mostly used for linguistic purposes — most often in grammatical descriptions of obscure languages, or for precisely specifying the pronunciation of a word (e.g. in my dialect ‘mutable’, say, is [mjʉːtˢə̆bu]). But I believe it gets used in language learning as well.
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#123I can’t be the only one to click on this to be disappointed it wasn’t a website about beer! I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language? As far as people learning English as a second language it seems like one of the biggest hurdles is learning all the ‘exceptions’. Especially for people coming from languages where all vowels only have one pronunciation. En…
> I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language? It’s mostly used for linguistic purposes — most often in grammatical descriptions of obscure languages, or for precisely specifying the pronunciation of a word (e.g. in my dialect ‘mutable’, say, is [mjʉːtˢə̆bu]). But I believe it gets used in language learning as well.
Thanks, I’ll have to read about this more. That makes sense, gives you system to precisely describe particular pronunciations I guess. TIL :)
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#124Someday people will spell words phonetically. They will look back at our languages as primitive throwbacks, like hieroglyphics
Regional accents won't play nice with that.
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#125Someday people will spell words phonetically. They will look back at our languages as primitive throwbacks, like hieroglyphics
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.
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#126Interestingly enough, the IPA is in fact not the only phonetic transcription system. The most famous alternative is Americanist notation [0], but there’s also the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet [1] and probably others as well which I’ve forgotten.
However, the IPA has one distinguishing feature: it’s standardised, by the International Phonetic Association. By contrast, Americanist notation (the main competitor) is mostly unstandardised; for the most part, it’s not so much a ‘phonetic alphabet’ as much as a set of conventions people follow. And this doesn’t matter if the author has been careful to define their terms correctly, but it can be a real pain if they’ve forgotten. (e.g. for a while, I believed that Kalam had [r] as an allophone of [d], until I realised that the author had used ⟨ř⟩ to mean [ɾ], not [r]…) Thus, the linguistics community has mostly standardised on IPA, with the exception of some subfields which still use Americanist notation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#127Can someone explain the usefulness of IPA currently? I guess I wonder what benefit there is to learning IPA at this point in time. I feel like its major usefulness was when there existed no way to communicate audio information easily, which is no longer the case.
Actors use it extensively to learn accents
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#128I came for the beer, but was not left speechless!
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#129I was curious what information an isopropyl alcohol chart would contain. This IPA makes more sense.
Re: Interactive IPA Chart
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a native Hebrew speaker. We basically have one way to say each vowel. It took practice for me (not with a coach but with some training videos etc) to even hear the different ways English speakers pronounce them, my brain just wasn't tuned to hear them, let alone pronounce them. Week, weak and wick will be pronounced and will sound exactly the same to a non trained Hebrew speaker, and to much much more hilarity -…
Aren't week/weak and piece/peace pronounced exactly the same?
Yes, they're homophones.