Tim Mills
irne jawe@TimPhon but you know it wasn't designed in any meaningful way, right? a cobbled together hodgepodge
@pewterbaw Oh yes! After many cozy evenings with Pullum & Ladusaw's Phonetic Symbol Guide (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3634736.html), I'm kind of fond of the IPA. It's like a beloved old uncle, who has a lot of wisdom, but rambles a bit and maybe likes his own colonial legacy a bit too much. But he's mostly harmless.
In class, I feel constrained to teach the IPA as-is. I can point out its flaws, but I can't really complain about them. Here, I get to have a bit of fun. (Am I becoming the *cranky* old uncle? 😡)
Phonetic Symbol Guide
Phonetic Symbol Guide is a comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedia of phonetic alphabet symbols, providing a complete survey of the hundreds of characters used by linguists and speech scientists to record the sounds of the world’s languages.This fully revised second edition incorporates the major revisions to the International Phonetic Alphabet made in 1989 and 1993. Also covered are the American tradition of transcription stemming from the anthropological school of Franz Boas; the Bloch/Smith/Trager style of transcription; the symbols used by dialectologists of the English language; usages of specialists such as Slavicists, Indologists, Sinologists, and Africanists; and the transcription proposals found in all major textbooks of phonetics.With sixty-one new entries, an expanded glossary of phonetic terms, added symbol charts, and a full index, this book will be an indispensable reference guide for students and professionals in linguistics, phonetics, anthropology, philology, modern language study, and speech science.
@TimPhon i just worry about trying to find patterns where there are none, and that students might fixate on such things -- but i have a tendency to be too worried in that respect
@pewterbaw I may not be worried enough. At any rate, what I give my students is this bag of mini-patterns that helps me make sense of the #IPA: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVXShLb2geZG5nboknDha2ubuFMZdw1-j (Comments and suggestions welcome!)
@TimPhon my main approach is that no one really needs to memorize the IPA. we usually wind up using just a few symbols quite a lot, and can always look up unfamiliar ones. (not to mention the lack of consistency in how people use various symbols anyway, meaning that you kind of always have to puzzle out what they mean in context)
@pewterbaw Definitely. I think my general approach to teaching transcription/IPA stuff is to teach to a level at least a bit above what they need, so they can then back off to something more comfortable, but with the confidence that it's an appropriate level.
And I definitely always teach that the IPA is a *tool*, and we should always be aware of what it's good for and what it isn't good for.