On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
What's the point of using a phonetic alphabet that 95% of our readership can't interpret? If the idea is to help readers understand how a word is pronounced in English, it should actually be useful to the majority of readers and not largely useless but academically perfect.
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Emily Monroe bluecaliocean@me.com wrote:
I'd have to agree with you, Nathan. I can't read IPA to save my life!
The idea behind IPA is, that there be a single standard alphabet that everyone can use which can help us all communicate a bit better when speaking a new language or just using a term from another language. It's basic and encyclopedic information and should be included. Consider a word we've all seen recently: Eyjafjallajökull, which apparently just means "island-mountain glacier" (I suggest that "Eyja-fjalla glacier" is the sensible English translation). It's not necessary that anyone pronounce it exactly as [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœːkʏtl̥], still its basic information about the name itself. A name is a key into a concept, and a foreign name is a key into a foreign concept. We don't omit basic information just because it gives us too much of a window into strange and foreign ways of conceptualization that we just don't understand.
The issue of accessibility is valid, but I can answer that by understating IPA's usability as flexible, ranging from the basic to the expert. Most people I imagine start with learning few of the IPA vowels, and the consonants are mostly intuitive. Being flexible means that its also quite forgiving, and that anyone who makes an honest attempt at writing in IPA is making a contribution, even if they are politely corrected here and there by someone a bit more.. 1337.
I agree that IPA can seem a bit cumbersome and even ambiguous when used at extreme detail (ie. it gets into reproducing whole foreign-language phonologies at a single-word level, which isn't always useful nor necessary). At least I can understand why it's not universally accepted and used on our foreign encyclopedias, namely that its still a bit esoteric enough for us on en. Nevertheless its, again, encyclopedic and necessary.
-Stevertigo