IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

General discussion about learning languages

International Phonetic Alphabet freqency of use. 0=never 6=daily

0
11
17%
1
21
33%
2
8
13%
3
6
9%
4
2
3%
5
5
8%
6
11
17%
 
Total votes: 64

jimmy
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby jimmy » Fri May 27, 2022 3:22 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:What jimmy said.

I just had a look at Swedish phonology. We have the long å which has the IPA symbol [oː]. However, when I look for how the symbol is used in other languages I see examples like English yawn [joːn] and Spanish camión [kaˈmjoːn]. (Of course, the information on Wikipedia may be wrong...) Neither is particularly close to any Swedish manifestation of the long å. Now, it is said that it's "often diphthongized to [oə̯]" which makes a lot more sense. Anyway, I'm just saying that one symbol can mean different things for different readers.

hi jeff, it seems we mean the similar things. see this one:

hahaha haha (now I am smiling in Turkish)
jajaja ja ja (I decided to smile in spanish just now)
ğağa ğa ğa (oh, gosh ! I am smiling in kurdish)

now I will ask you a question (smiling :) )

I provided smilings in three languages.

find please how I can smile in arabic or in chinese :) :) :) :)

haha haha ha ha

:)
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby Dragon27 » Fri May 27, 2022 3:38 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:What jimmy said.

I just had a look at Swedish phonology. We have the long å which has the IPA symbol [oː]. However, when I look for how the symbol is used in other languages I see examples like English yawn [joːn] and Spanish camión [kaˈmjoːn]. (Of course, the information on Wikipedia may be wrong...) Neither is particularly close to any Swedish manifestation of the long å. Now, it is said that it's "often diphthongized to [oə̯]" which makes a lot more sense. Anyway, I'm just saying that one symbol can mean different things for different readers.

Compare with the more detailed description of the Swedish phonetics in CanIPA:
http://canipa.net/lib/exe/fetch.php?med ... 170609.pdf
Page 2 has the vowel diagrams for 'neutral' Swedish, and page 3 the diagrams for 'mediatic' Swedish ('mediatic' means "of media"). The long /oo/ phoneme there is a diphthong, that starts as higher-mid back rounded vowel and ends up as lower-mid back-central (i.e. intermediate between central and back) vowel, which is either rounded (in the neutral accent) or unrounded (in the mediatic accent), kinda like IPA's /ʌ/.
Last edited by Dragon27 on Fri May 27, 2022 4:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby Le Baron » Fri May 27, 2022 4:14 pm

In agreement with what zenmonkey said elsewhere, I prefer to do the bulk of sound system acquisition by listening, and matching this to the written language because this is what I'm going to be working with in the real world. I have used IPA to check and confirm things when I've been unsure about the sound, but I'm not going to add another layer of work checking out things like this all the time.

Good tool, but on the whole I prefer pale ale.
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby tractor » Fri May 27, 2022 6:29 pm

Yes, IPA is just a tool. How the language is actually spoken is the real thing.
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby Lisa » Fri May 27, 2022 7:48 pm

I learned IPA in a course... but never needed it, and promptly forgot all the details. In spanish or german, if I'm unsure of the pronunciation I just use online audio (and also I started as a false beginner in these languages). Might be a different story (1) learning a language with much harder pronunciation and/or (2) that I didn't previously have some speaking ability and/or (3) without all online dictionaries with audio.

The schwa that is the same (I think) in IPA as in the old-school phonemic spelling, I do know and use (rarely) for english words.
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby lingohot » Sat May 28, 2022 7:48 am

IPA will become the new polyglot craze, I already see that coming... Just like Anki or A*ATT :lol:
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby garyb » Sat May 28, 2022 12:15 pm

IPA was an absolute essential when I was learning French, both for understanding the sounds and how to produce them (particularly vowels) and because the orthography is irregular enough that it's usually sensible to check the pronunciation of any new word in a dictionary.

Unless the learner has a really good ear for picking out and reproducing sounds, I'd say that proper study of the pronunciation is essential to speak comprehensible French, and even to understand it and identify words with similar but different sounds like "roue" and "rue".

IPA isn't the only tool for the job, but I feel it's the best simply because it's well established and described and is standard in resources like dictionaries. It's like the argument for teaching grammar using established grammatical terms: you need to codify it somehow anyway, so you're better off using the established system rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and inevitably come up with something less useful, as many "anti-grammar" resources do.

IPA does have its limitations. As I posted in another recent thread, it's useful for comparing different sounds in the same language, but not so much for comparing different languages. The examples I gave were the French /u/ and /y/ (as in the words above) compared to the English /u/ which is somewhere in between them; /u/ is a "closed back rounded vowel", but the French one is more closed, more back, and more rounded while the English one is closer to the middle and so somewhere in between the two French sounds. IPA, as used in practice, also doesn't usually account for articulations like dental versus alveolar consonants and light and dark L; it does provide annotations to specify these, but they're not used very commonly.

It wasn't quite as important for Italian, but it was still extremely useful for quickly checking open versus closed E and O (in "standard" pronunciation), syllable stress, and occasional irregularities in the dictionary.

Now that I'm mostly focusing on Spanish and German, I don't feel I need IPA much. Neither had any truly new sounds for me (German has a few awkward ones, but none that I didn't already know from French!) and the pronunciation is regular enough that dictionaries often don't even use IPA.
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby golyplot » Mon May 30, 2022 2:24 pm

jimmy wrote:hahaha haha (now I am smiling in Turkish)
jajaja ja ja (I decided to smile in spanish just now)
ğağa ğa ğa (oh, gosh ! I am smiling in kurdish)

now I will ask you a question (smiling :) )

I provided smilings in three languages.

find please how I can smile in arabic or in chinese :) :) :) :)

haha haha ha ha

:)


I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, laughter is "fufufu" for some reason.
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby Le Baron » Mon May 30, 2022 2:43 pm

golyplot wrote:I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, laughter is "fufufu" for some reason.

Perhaps an onomatopoeia of a sort of closed-mouth laugh with the laughter escaping? Like the word 'titter' in English.
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Re: IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon May 30, 2022 3:51 pm

Le Baron wrote:
golyplot wrote:I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, laughter is "fufufu" for some reason.

Perhaps an onomatopoeia of a sort of closed-mouth laugh with the laughter escaping? Like the word 'titter' in English.

It is, the more neutral laughter is also hahaha (ハハハ).
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