#learning ipa

[gaasublarb]

Hobie's Accent Challenge/Practice

I tried to find a sentence with every english phoneme and this came up.

That quick beige fox jumped in the air over each thin dog. Look out, I shout, for he's foiled you again, creating chaos.

So here goes /)////(\ Wish I knew more IPA

Me:

ðat quick bæj fahx jəmpt in ðə ær ohver ɪch thin dahg. Look owt, aɪ showt, for hɪs fohɪld you əgin, crɪæding kæahss

Hobie:

Tha' quick bæj fox jəmpt en ðə eh ohvə ɪch thin dog. Look ow', ah show', foh 'ɪs foɪld yə əgen, crɪæ'en kayohss

[salvadorbonaparte]

I'm considering giving my students a five minute crash course into phonetics and phonology and the IPA because I feel like if you even have just a basic understanding of manner and place of articulation, especially for vowels, it makes language learning a bit easier.

[skymantle]

noticed a while ago that yes man has a small lisp that's noticeable in a handful of his lines, so i made a little compilation of the ones where its Most apparent! :-)

[nostalgia-tblr]

I feel like anyone who's about to embark on attempting to type out a character's accent phoentically (at least as well as one can with English) should probably stop for a moment before they get going and ask themselves, "How would I, myself, feel about a fic where the one character who sounds like me had their speech written out like this and every other character just got their dialogue left in standard spelling?" I feel like a lot of people would tone it down a bit, at least, if they'd done that thought experiment first.

(Anyone who answered "but I don't have an accent!" isn't allowed to write out anyone else's accent, ever. This rule may seem harsh but you need it. Really, you do. Because you've never had anyone treat your accent as abnormal or comical or wrong, so you really don't know what you're inflicting on others here.)

[nintendont2502]

i love seeing any poll on pronunciation that uses the pronunciation of other words as reference. tumblr users learn what accents are challenge /lh

[msburgundy]

my beef with ipa comes down to the fact that i simply do not like, conceptually, that there is a contrived writing system intended to capture every single sound in human language. i would much rather just mix scripts (like throwing a fully english word into a korean sentence and vice versa) i UNDERSTAND why we don't (thus i can forgive romanization etc [to a degree]) and i also understand why in academic contexts such a writing system is quite valuable.

in actual life, however, there is simply no need to represent all those sounds, and you're simply better off learning the native scripts of languages whose influence you encounter frequently

[noctude]

i don’t know. i don’t know what to tell you

[lurkingteapot]

When I say I wish popular romanisations of Thai were less ambiguous and more consistent, it's stuff like this:

Phupha and Pat (and Pa!) have the same initial consonant sound. Pran's is different—it's the same as Kampung's "p" sound. Pran, Pa, and Phupha share an "a" sound though—the same "a" sound Kampung also has (though it's written differently (*)). Kampung's "u" sound and Phupha's "u" sound are not the same. Kampung's "p" is the same sound as the initial in Pran. Kampung and Korn share an initial. It's the same sound the names Gunn (MSP) and Gun (Atthaphan) and Kan (KPTS) start with. All three of those names are pronounced identically. Kan (KPTS) is not pronounced the same as Kan (The Eclipse). Tian does not share an initial with Toto, but Toto (BBS) and Tinn (MSP) do. If the romanisation of BBS given names and ATOTS place names were consistent, we'd have Phut and Pha and Pran (or Pa Pan Dao). (Pa the person and Pha the word for cliff do not sound the same because of tones, but that's another topic.) I could go on.

And all this is just based on consonants and vowel quality and lengths, not even going into different glyphs for the same consonant. I don't have a solution to offer for this. I 100% think authors or subtitling teams (or, y'know, REGULAR PEOPLE who just want folks who don't speak Thai to be able to put their name in writing) choosing a romanisation that looks good to them is valid. But I'm also a language nerd, so I can't quite stop thinking how much harder this makes it for folks trying to learn more about the language, or pick up more about it, either.

(Name examples and corresponding official romanisation taken from real life, A Tale of Thousand Stars, Bad Buddy Series, KinnPorsche The Series, My School President, and Our Skyy 2)

(*) Edited 2023-06-16 to add: this was a mistake stemming from too many unchecked edits and I'm sorry. Kampung's "a" is neither long nor short whereas Pran, Pa, and Phupha have long "a" sounds and Pat has a short one.

[awkward-teabag]

I have to wonder how many people celebrating AI translation also complain about "broken English" and how obvious it is something was Google translated from another language without a fluent English speaker involved to properly clean up the translation/grammar.

Because I bet it's a lot.

I know why execs are all for it—AI is the new buzzword and it lets them cut jobs thus "save" money and not have to worry about pesky labour laws when one employs humans—but everyone else?

There was some outcry when Crunchyroll fired many of their translators in favour of AI translation (with some people to "clean up the AI's work") but I can't help but think that was in part because it was Japanese-to-English and personally affected them. Same when Duolingo fired many of their translators in favour of LLM translation. Meanwhile companies are firing staff when it's English to another language and there's this idea that that's fine or not as big a deal because English is "easy" to translate and/or because people don't think of how it will impact people in non-English countries.

Also it doesn't affect native English speakers so it doesn't get much headway in the news cycle or online anyway because so much of the dominant media is from English-speaking countries and English-speakers dominate social media.

But different languages have different grammar structures that LLMs don't do, and I grew up on "jokes" about people speaking in "broken English" and mocking people who use the wrong word when it was clearly a literal translation but the meaning was obvious long before LLMs were a thing, too. In fact, the specific way a character spoke broken English has been a way to denote their native tongue for decades, usually in a racist way.

Then Google translate came out and "Google-translated English" became an insult for people and criticism of companies because it was clearly wonky to native speakers. Even now, LLMs—which are heavily trained on English compared to other languages—don't have a natural output so native English speakers can clock LLM-generated text if it's longer than a sentence or two.

But, for whatever reason, it's not seen as a problem when it goes the other way because fuck non-English readers or people who want to read in their native tongue I guess.

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

"my education is my highest priority" everything returns to vocaloid

[triviallytrue]

"my linguist gf" had me thinking "oh i didn't know triv and max are dating" as if the only linguist in the world is max. i think i need to log off

@max1461

[thedaily-beer]

Mother Earth Higher Learning Hazy IPA (Picked up at Windmill Farms). A 3 of 4. Very interesting tropical profile on this with coconut, stone fruit, and lots of other tropical fruit. The body tastes slightly sweeter and fruity, and has a slight thickness to it.

[xx3m0j1nxx]

as someone who had to learn phonetics and ipa during acting class i LOVE whenever phil talks about his education

[dsm-wannabe-linguist]

Celebrating a HRT milestone by analysing which symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet I would like to fuck

[haxyr3]

Thanks to everyone who voted and helped me decide on IPA. As you can see, almost 3/4 voted in favor of IPA in the vocabulary posts. I am very pleased to see that the term IPA is familiar to almost everyone who reads my blog.

As some of you rightly pointed out in the comments, Latinization of Russian words would only work for speakers of a particular language (e.g. English), while IPA is equally understandable for everyone.

Let's help those who don't know IPA yet! What resources would you recommend for learning IPA? I did a bit of googling, but Google only showed me sites about Irish Pale Ale. I don't know what Google thinks of me ;)