"ASCII IPA: is it really useful?"

I'm forwarding this posting, which was originally posted to alt.english.usage, to alt.usage.english because it has remarks in it that I hope will be of interest to readers of that newsgroup. I've suppressed the identification of the AEU poster on the chance that he or she might not want to be identified beyond AEU.

= Begin copy of AEU posting (with some of my typos corrected) =

On Mon, 14 Jul 2003 00:56:40 GMT, in alt.english.usage Bob Cunningham (Email Removed) said:

On Sun, 13 Jul 2003 (an AEU poster) said:
[nq:1]From http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ "In August of 1992, some of the readers of the Usenet newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english got fed up ... author). Since individuals pronounce different words differently, this tended to lead to (occasionally interesting, but often merely) long, fruitless threads."[/nq]
First, note that the passage you've accurately quoted from Evan Kirshenbaum's Web site seems clearly to have something wrong with the first sentence. What does "readers got fed up with common" mean? It may have been intended to say "readers got fed up with common discussions".
[nq:1]Is this really true? Are there any examples of long arguments caused by pronunciation differences?[/nq]
I believe you have made an unwarranted assumption: that long arguments were caused. I think the writer's intent was to say that long discussions were held that led nowhere because the participants didn't have a common ground to discuss how words were pronounced. The writer said nothing about arguments so far as I can see.
[nq:1]I know that pronunciation does differ a bit between dialects, but far and wide, it shouldn't be a significant source of confusion.[/nq]
There again I think you're misunderstanding what the writer was saying. The point is not that there will be confusion of understanding between different dialects. The confusion arises only when writers try to describe in words, without hearing each other speak, how words are pronounced.
[nq:1]The line about long, fruitless threads seems like a canned statement. An easy and obvious excuse. In reality, there probably has not been any real confusion caused by the diversity of pronunciation.[/nq]
Again, the confusion is not one of understanding, but in the ability to discuss verbally what the differences are in pronunciation.

A very simple example may be taken from an exchange that occurred in alt.usage.english a few years ago. A lady in America and a lady in England were pleased to find that they both pronounced "stove" the same way because they both pronounced it with the vowel of "hoe". The truth was almost certainly that the pronunciations of "stove" and "hoe" by the English lady were quite different from the pronunciations of those two words by the American lady.

It wasn't that each of them wouldn't have known what the other was saying when they said "stove". It was that, lacking training in phonetics, they had no meaningful way to describe to the other person in words how they pronounced "stove".

Another example: I pronounce "father", "fodder", "solder", and "sawhorse" with the same vowel in the first syllable. Do you pronounce them the same way I do? How would you, without using technical articulatory descriptions, tell me the ways in which you pronounce them differently?

You should find that you can't describe your pronunciations without making comparisons with the ways you pronounce other words. The failure of that method comes from the fact that I don't know how you pronounce those other words, either.

You could make it work by referencing sounds that are made by speakers we both can listen to. IPA is in one sense -- from the point of view of the nonspecialist in phonetics -- a generalization of that approach. There are sound recordings that let you listen to a sound that is typical of each of the IPA symbols. You can then use an IPA symbol to refer to a sound in the sound recordings that is the same as or close to the same as the sound you have in mind.

You can find such recordings, made by both experts and dilettantes, either resident at the AUE Web site or linked to from there. See http://www.alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml , and note especially the link to "Focus on Vowel Sounds", http://www.alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml#focus . At that point you'll see links that are labeled "4" and "5". The "4" links are for sounds taken from a CD with the title "Sounds of the IPA". The CD was made by John C. Wells, a leading phonetics authority at University College London. The "5" links are for sounds taken from the "Online Phonetics Course at the University of Lausanne. I think you can assume that those sounds are also spoken by experts.

The Lausanne course has pronunciations for nearly all of the IPA symbols, both vowels and consonants. It has been moved from the URL shown at the AUE Web site. It's at http://www.unil.ch/ling/english/phonetique/table-eng.html . I say "nearly all" because I think there are a few vowels that are defined in ASCII IPA but weren't shown at the Lausanne site the last time I looked. (I've wondered if that's because they don't occur in French). Those vowels may have been added in the few years that have gone by since I last looked. You can tell which vowels they were by looking for the cases in the "Focus on Vowels" table that have a "4" but no "5".

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