#ipa symbols in parentheses

[tohrinha]

That'll be interesting because Californian English still has more vowels than Spanish (or Portuguese - @shardreach still has a devil of a time distinguishing the vowels in beet (i) vs bit (ɪ) in some contexts), so you'd also need to see if you've picked up the new vowels.

The big mergers in Californian English are:

Low back merger or cot/caught: I recommend listening to Wikipedia's examples, but the cot vowel (ɑ) is a bit closer to an aa (æ) as in mad, while caught (ɔ) is more rounded like aww.

Mary/marry/merry: Unmerged speakers say Mary with a long a sound (eɪ) like day, marry with an aa (æ) like mad, and merry with an eh (ɛ) like bet. This merger is specifically for those vowels before r, because American accents tend to "color" vowels with r's instead of saying the full hard r sound.

You also get pin/pen (ɪ/ɛ before n/m), fill/feel (ɪ/i before l), and full/fool (ʊ/u before l) in more inland California.

California ALSO has a vowel shift going on. Compared to speakers further north and east (until you hit Canada, because Canada has the same vowel shift), Californians say their front vowels a bit further back and/or lower - bit sounds more like bet, bet sounds more like bat, etc.

Vowels Californian English has that Spanish (usually, see obligatory disclaimer) doesn't: ɪ, ɛ, æ, and varieties of grunt (ə, ʌ, ʊ).

one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet

[vergess]

An alernative explanation, for people still wondering how "bloofer" becomes "beautiful" then simply read it in your best "Hewwo? Mistew Obama? UwU??" voice.

I'm going to vainly struggle to represent in IPA the way the kids are actually saying this.

ɓwʉ(ʏ/`)ɸa

Which if I'm using those symbols right, should sound something like "bwoofu'" or "byoo`fu"

The (ʏ) is in parentheses because I have no idea how to actually write in IPA, and that middle syllable is usually dropped by small children, people speaking quickly, etc, and replaced with a sort of glottal pause I don't know the name of.

So the transformation goes "Beautiful" > "Byootiful" > "Byoo`ful" > "Byoo'fa"

And when trying to render that into text that would create the same baby-talk impression, Stoker's use of "L" instead of "Y" or "W" is quite common in Irish transliteration, because "L" is pronounced contextually very differently in Irish.

Plus, using apostrophes the way I just did to identify the dropped syllable is wildly ungrammatical. It's applying contraction rules to simple words, and runs the risk of confusing readers if you haven't spent a whole essay explaining how to read the apostrophe as a pause. It's technically correct; as in, for technical applications, it is correct.

But since Stoker isn't writing a technical paper it's not a great choice.

So he went with "bloofer" I guess. It's a nonsense word, and if you already know the accent he's referring to, its a modestly comprehensible bit of baby-talk.

But!!!

Most of us have no possible way to reach the correct conclusion anymore!

This is why you have to be REALLY! GODDAMN! CAREFUL! about the way you use Funetik Aksents in text. Your readers probably don't speak like you do, and even if they speak like you now, they won't in another hundred years.

(Link to IPA reader in the reblogs)

[brainshock-alpha]

okay!! first complete pass at nmd phonetics!!!!!

i’m pretty happy with this, all things considered! i’ve been hung up on how to analyze some of the graphs for a while and honestly sometimes it just feels good to Make A Decision on stuff lol. but also i know there’s room for improvement of course. like, there were sounds that i really wanted to include for fun/aesthetic value but they made for weird consequences in other areas -- like <c> and <x> defs could stand to be other phonemes, and <sh> is uh kind of a hot take lmao. anyway i think i’ll iterate on this a couple more times before i move onto phonology. exciteing !

more info below...

HOW TO READ THIS CHART: all sounds are in ipa. letters enclosed in <> indicate the corresponding grapheme (when it doesn’t match the phoneme’s ipa symbol). parentheses indicate a co-articulated sound, in w’s case, or a marginal sound only used in loanwords, in ʒ‘s case. why did i use parens for these two distinct cases? it was an accident lol

HOW TO READ THIS CHART IF U DON’T KNOW IPA OR LINGUISTICS: uhhh i don’t have time to help you with that right now,,, sorry!! when i release a final product (or major snapshots) i intend to make it more accessible to the general audience. until then, umm, you can learn about the ipa online if u want. here’s a nice starter resource (3min video)

SOME PRONUNCIATION EXAMPLES:

Dedusmuln /dɛdʊsmʊln/

Odozeir /ɔdɔzɛɪɾ/

Yiithorn /çɪːtʰɔɾn/

Moodbleen /mɔːdblɛːn/

Tyiclarnaikh (random h1 place) /təɪt͡slaɾnaɪkʰ/

technically these are all broad (inexact) transcriptions cuz they don’t have allophony rules yet lol. but there u go

A VERSION OF THIS CHART WITHOUT GRAPHEME CLUTTER:

[dedalvs]

How did you come up with the spelling of the title of your book?

Good question with an interesting story behind it! Might as well tell you the full story so you can better appreciate the final design.

In early December of 2014 I got an email from Colin Webber saying he had a design idea for the book. He said he’d been reading it and found it really interesting, and that based on some of what I described in the Sounds chapter he thought it would be cool to break things down syllable by syllable. Before pitching it to the rest of the team, though, he wanted to be sure he had the actual symbols right, so he showed me his work in progress. This was it:

The design really blew me away. I had sent along some ideas about cover ideas (ideas featuring dragons, quills, parchment, etc.), but they were nothing like this. This was wild in its minimalism, and, well, modernism. It looked so sleek! And I loved the colors. If you’ve read my book (or glanced through the first chapter, at least), it looks like Colin was probably inspired by the section on Optimality Theory, where I group words by feet (not syllables) using parentheses.

Naturally, though, the symbols here aren’t close to right, and since the whole point of the book is to learn the actual fundamentals of phonetics, among other things, I thought we should try to get it as close to right as possible. Even so, there’s no way we were going to get away with a cover that was 100% in IPA. So what I did was I emailed Colin back telling him I loved the look of it, and I gave him the title transcribed in several different transcription systems. This is what I sent (note: the IPA lines are my pronunciation [since it’s my book!], not general American):

IPA (Narrow): [ði ˈɑɹt ʌv ˈleŋ.gwɪdʒ ɪɱ.ˈvɛn.tʃɨn]

IPA (Broad):  /ði ˈart ǝv ˈleŋ.gwɪdʒ ɪn.ˈvɛn.tʃɪn/

Americanist (Broad): /ði ˈart ǝv ˈlæŋ.gwɪǯ ɪn.ˈvɛn.čɪn/

Mirriam-Webster Transcription: thē ˈärt ǝv ˈlan-gwij in-ˈven(t)-shǝn

Dictionary.com Transcription: thee ahrt uhv lang-gwij in-ven-shuhn

Only one difference: the “th” in M-W is underlined. I also made sure to let Colin know that there was a crucial difference between the mark used for primary stress and an opening single quote mark.

I sent that info on to him, but my agent Jo made sure to let me know that Colin contacting me was extremely unusual and a bit of a mixed blessing. An author rarely sees a work-in-progress cover (unless they have some personal connection with the artist, which is rare), and is also rarely consulted in this way—and, furthermore, the artist rarely takes the time to read the book the way Colin did (remember that this isn’t fiction here, but a rather esoteric art form that delves heavily into linguistics. Far from a light or easy read!). So this was really cool, and showed that Colin was dedicated to the task, and that was great, but Jo told me that the cover is still a group project—that often after a cover is presented, it gets workshopped, and not just with the artists, but also with the marketing and sales team. So it was great that Colin was dedicated, and great that I liked what he produced, but she warned me that the end result might not look anything like this, due to circumstances out of our control. This was good info to have, but I thought that was fine, since this was a cover I was never expecting in a million years.

A month passed, and my editor reached out to me and said they’d selected two finalists, and these were they:

As you can see, Colin made some compromises, clearly trying to satisfy as many wishes as possible, while staying true to his original vision, which I loved. First, we now have the subtitle of the book in there. Second, in case there would be any confusion, the title now appears in English in white. Third, he primarily stuck with the M-W transcription. There’s no overline or underline on the first word, “the” (so that the first word is totally familiar to English speakers, I’m guessing), and proper IPA primary stress marks are used throughout. I’m not certain why the “v” was changed to an “f” in the transcription of “of”, since no version has that, but you’ll also notice the (t) which is present in the M-W version has been moved to the last syllable, where it’s reminiscent of my IPA transcription which uses tʃ, and places it at the head of the last syllable. (Also, I imagine that you don’t have either “laŋ” or “lang” because the descender would mess up the spacing.)

While full IPA would be great, I loved this cover. I was absolutely ecstatic about the look of it. I did ask that the stress mark be removed before “of” and that the “f” be changed to a “v”, and both my requests were honored. Also, though, when it came to color, I had a choice to make. Originally I fell in love with the blue cover, but as I looked at these more and more, I found the black to be more striking—and also felt the white stood out on the black much better than it did on the blue. For that reason, I went with black as my choice.

So, having passed that info on, I was quite content! I was going to have a great cover, and I had some meaningful input on it both before and after the presentation. This was great!

Then in April of 2015 I got an email.

Apparently marketing and sales were concerned that the cover wouldn’t tap into the the sci/fantasy market, since the cover was just text. They decided to ask Colin to go in a different direction, and asked me to choose one of these two as the final cover, as they were planning to finalize it the next week:

Now, don’t get me wrong here: These are handsome covers—and Colin clearly did a lot here to try to ameliorate the fact that my top choice cover was being passed over (and I was grateful for it!). First, he used my narrow IPA transcription in its entirety (save for the missing stress mark on [ɑɹt], which I’m sure could’ve been added very simply); second, he mentioned my other book, Living Language Dothraki; third, he included my original idea of having different types of writing implements. Furthermore, I had been told specifically by my agent that this might happen at exactly this stage.

Still, I was heartbroken.

I disliked the book/author font; I disliked the colors; I found the icons a little too cutesy (plus, I would’ve switched the robot and crown. Placed where they are, the robot looks like it’s misaligned. It’d be better in a square [I do love that dragon, though]); the style wasn’t classically heraldic, in my estimation… But for some reason the thing that got me the most is that we don’t see the other end of the brush and pen. I recognize full well that we should not, due to the angle, but it still drove me nuts. It’d be like seeing a skull and cross bones with only the top of the X appearing above the skull.

I initially asked my agent to try to sway Penguin for me, because I wanted to be diplomatic. She encouraged me to voice my opinion in my own words, though, so I sent an email back detailing everything that concerned me about this new direction. Ultimately, I said (and I still think this is true) that there are a large number of people who know who I am because of Game of Thrones. I could imagine fans of Game of Thrones hearing about the book because of the show, going to the store, picking up the book, looking at the cover, and putting it down. The cover is just too juvenile. (Though if it had to be one, it would be the blue one; that was certain.)

I sent that email off, and waited.

The next day I received good news. My amazing, fantastic, wonderful, outstanding, incredible editor Elda Rotor went back and interceded on my behalf, and she won the day! We were going back to Colin’s original design, the one I liked.

So, yes, the title of the book is not in proper IPA—it’s not even in proper Mirriam-Webster transcription—but I LOVE the cover. I adore it. And we had to fight for it—and I’m so grateful to every person at Penguin and New Leaf who helped make it a reality. The book could’ve had a cover that looked totally different and had the actual IPA title on it, but ultimately, I think this one is the one it was meant to have:

(And note that Living Language Dothraki made the final cover!)

Also, check out what happened afterwards. The Art of Language Invention was published September 29, 2015. In December, Colin Webber, designer of my book cover, was recognized as Print Magazine’s Designer of the Week. If you follow that link you can see a nice writeup they did on him, and throughout they show images of some of his work, including—wait, which book?!

OH YES THAT IS THE ART OF LANGUAGE INVENTION!

And it gets better! In January 2016, Colin’s cover for The Art of Language Invention was selected by the Type Directors Club as one of the winners of the 2016 Award for Typographic Excellence! ARRRRRGHGHHEHIPWE81-8128128218!*!*!3838 I WAS SO EXCITED FOR HIM!!!!!!

So, yeah, that is the story of how the title of my book is spelled. Some day if someone is curious I’ll also tell you how I got the title of the book itself, since that was not the original title, and that too is a bit of a story. But, yes, I love the cover of my book—every single letter of it. It makes me happy every time I see it. :)