The amount of confusion created by non-standardized transcriptions in linguistics is huge. People who aren’t experienced in the art of interpreting ad hoc transcriptions–for instance, my undergraduate students–tend to be resentful of the scholars who use them.

It took me a long time to realize this (my own phonetic training was non-IPA). But now that I fully understand the advantages of standardization, I use strict IPA in my own publications.

Good comments about the Arial too, One more reason to use TeX & Friends…

Apologies for not blogging recently. The entry into 2008 has been quite a busy one for me. Anyway, a quick little post today on Sally Thomason’s comments on language log the other day, titled Why I Don’t Love the International……

My students seem to manage to distinguish esh from s in their handwriting with a bit of practice, but perhaps it’s different with the pressures of the field. Still, I can’t see anything wrong with using alternative symbols as long as their value is explicit in the conventions which accompany the text of the transcription. “Strict adherence to the IPA” doesn’t close off the use of “c” suggested because normal roman letter shapes can be used where they’re useful in particular languages, as long as their value is made clear. I suspect the issue at hand isn’t so much how appropriate the IPA alphabet is, but rather confusion between narrow, impressionistic phonetic transcription and the phonological value of particular sounds in particular languages. We find this in the common use of “r” in transcriptions of English: this thing varies quite widely in different Englishes but it’s relatively uncommon for it to be an alveolar trill, the “strict” IPA meaning of the symbol. But it’s useful to be able to use the symbol “r” as a cover-all for what might (in English) be a post-alveolar approximant or an alveolar tap or a labiodental approximant or whatever. As long as we make clear that’s what we’re doing.

I’m surprised that the two symbols which look like typographical variants of the first letter of the alphabet are criticised on the grounds that one of them will be hard to write, seeing that I find much more difficulty in handwriting the ash symbol (a-e digraph) which is used in the American tradition for a low open vowel. That’s why I think this whole thing is a problem of habit (ie if we’re used to IPA it’s easy; if we’re not used to it it’s hard). A proper low central vowel symbol might indeed be very useful, mind (I tend to use diacritics to solve that problem). Writing on computer is indeed a tricky issue here, especially with italics (though TIPA is pretty good in this respect). Doulos seems to do it right, though Charis doesn’t (even though it’s supposed to have a proper italic character set). Nor do Gentium or Junicode, among the free fonts with decent phonetic character sets. Lucida Sans unicode copes, but don’t get me started on what the phonetic symbols look like in that font!

Far be it from me to try and convert a non-IPA enthusiast, especially since I see the IPA alphabet as no more than a useful toolkit (useful despite its theoretical problems). But please, let’s all just agree to make clear what our transcriptions mean. Let’s spell out what our use of particular symbols represents. This sounds basic, but it’s not always followed. I have read published texts which explicitly state they’re using IPA transcription and then do things like use “j” for a palatal approximant on one page (ie as suggested by the IPA) and then use “y” for the same sound on the next page. It did take me a moment to work out what on earth that rounded front vowel was doing there. Nothing wrong with using one symbol or the other (though one tradition or the other would find it annoying to have to translate all the time), but everything wrong with causing uncertainty by not making the conventions clear.

If we don’t make this sort of thing clear, how can one person comment on or reanalyse someone else’s data? How on earth would we know what potentially interesting bit of phonetics has been glossed over in the transcription for ease of writing? If it’s crucial that open vowels could be front or central, we’d never get that information if the author of the transcription didn’t make it clear which vowel their symbol referred to. So we’d never know whether some theoretical phonological accounts were based on phonetic fact or on some vague almost-phonetics. We’d never know whether things transcribed with the same symbol in two different languages were actually the same sound and it would be nigh-on impossible to draw robust cross-linguistic phonological conclusions.

Just a few comments from a grumpy old phonetician, sorry. :-)

As someone who teaches actors accents for theatre and film, my students get frustrated that the IPA isn’t all they might imagine it to be. They hope that one set of symbols will be a universal code that will allow them to describe and learn the wealth of sounds of the worlds languages and, in particular, the great variety of English accents. It just isn’t possible. Even WITH diacritics, one just can’t be accurate enough with symbols. So we use sound samples to give students a sense of “When I say /a/, I mean ….”

I do feel though that poor handwriting seems an odd reason why one has it in for the IPA. But I bet that many of us have frustrations with symbols that we find look quite similar in our own handwriting style. My students often struggle to differentiate between /t/ and /ɫ/ because their /t/ symbols lack the hook-tail that the typographic version has. As I teach them phonetics, I actually take the time to teach them the letter shapes, so that they’re more easily distinguished. The barred i /ɨ/ is also hard to distinguish for some. I suggest that students add serifs to their handwritten /ɪ/ symbols, so there is less chance that they will be confused with /i/. But making the effort to learn how to lengthen your /ʃ/ so it won’t be confused with /s/ seems like very little work to me. Again I say though, in your private papers, who cares?

In the example that ends ” ‘be soft’ as [tʃep] and ‘bull elk’ as [t.ʃets’] ” I must say that what you finally agreed upon is much clearer to me, an outsider, because of that period (syllable break) in the second word. THAT reveals the difference between affricate and cluster very clearly. Why reinvent the wheel when the symbols are already there?

“First, the IPA symbol for the low central vowel is hard to draw, and it’s all too easy to draw in a way that makes it very hard to interpret afterward.” This is the “upside-down “a”, namely, [ɐ].” Yes, it is unfamiliar to draw, but it needn’t be DIFFICULT to draw in a distinct way. It’s essentially a handwritten /e/ with a little hook on the top left. This ISN’T hard to draw, it’s just not something you’ve taken the time to PRACTICE. I find, with my students (and in myself when I first learned IPA, to be honest), that they spend quite a lot of time to learn the sounds, but aren’t willing to spend a few minutes drilling a the shape of a new symbol so that their hand remembers the shape. I guess we figure WE KNOW HOW TO WRITE! Most of us don’t remember learning to write/print as something that was fun. It was a chore. Unfortunately it still is. But it is a chore that was worth doing, and is still worth some effort.

Well that is going to appear that way for everybody. But that has nothing to do with the IPA or the font. That has to do with the fact that Sally didn’t enter the character correctly as Unicode.