Linguistics

[Die Neue Zeit]

In posting this I recall the many historical campaigns against mass illiteracy.

1) How practical would it be to have the [currently] 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks of the International Phonetic Alphabet replace the alphabets of every language worldwide (certainly the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, for starters)?

2) Could a mass IPA literacy campaign be practical immediately for everyone, young and old, to take part in, or would there have to be a transition period whereby the younger generation folks are "fluent" in the IPA and the alphabets of their parents, and then the next generation would be "fluent" exclusively in the IPA (except language historians and their students)?

[Welshy]

In posting this I recall the many historical campaigns against mass illiteracy.

1) How practical would it be to have the [currently] 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks of the International Phonetic Alphabet replace the alphabets of every language worldwide (certainly the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, for starters)?

When you are dealing with a language like english where they are many dialects and no real standard, you have the problem of choosing which dialect you use to make the standard IPA transcription. Once you choose a dialect, it would become difficult for people with dialects that are very different from the standard or at least didn't undergo key sound changes. Or if you chose to have every dialect transcribed in IPA then you will have deal with people from people from the west coaster writing 'rider' and 'writer' as 'ɹɑɪɾǝɹ' but someone from the upper midwest writing 'rider' as 'ɹaɪɾǝɹ' and 'writer' as 'ɹǝɪɾǝɹ'. So in order to become fluent in your language you would need to learn everyones dialect as it is written. But what writing systems like what English has does well at is bridging over differences between dialects. Also IPA can get rather unreadable the more accurate your transcription gets.






2) Could a mass IPA literacy campaign be practical immediately for everyone, young and old, to take part in, or would there have to be a transition period whereby the younger generation folks are "fluent" in the IPA and the alphabets of their parents, and then the next generation would be "fluent" exclusively in the IPA (except language historians and their students)?

With the high level of literacy in some countries and the general stubbornness of people when it comes to adopting such radical changes to writing, I would have to say the cost of such of a campaign would not be worth it. The current writing systems have proven themselves to be quite good at what they are meant to do. With some spelling updates hear and there to keep up with changes in the written standards of various languages, there is no reason why they should just be dropped for IPA. Plus you would have to spend time and resources change all the books, documents, signs, and etc into IPA which would be an absolute waste. Plus IPA isn't the easiest thing to learn. It took me several months when I was 14 to teach myself it, plus years constant exposure through my hobby of conlanging. And even though I'm now able to write down the entire thing while horribly drunk, I still have a hard time remembering every single diacritic.

[RED DAVE]

In posting this I recall the many historical campaigns against mass illiteracy.

1) How practical would it be to have the [currently] 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks of the International Phonetic Alphabet replace the alphabets of every language worldwide (certainly the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, for starters)?Why would you want to do that in the first place? Why not just conduct literacy campaigns with the "native" alphabets?


2) Could a mass IPA literacy campaign be practical immediately for everyone, young and old, to take part in, or would there have to be a transition period whereby the younger generation folks are "fluent" in the IPA and the alphabets of their parents, and then the next generation would be "fluent" exclusively in the IPA (except language historians and their students)?After the revolution, we'll decide such questions.

P.S. As a teacher of English on all levels for over 35 years, I see no purpose in the use of IPA in the learning of this very complex language. I have never had any particular problem teaching the alphabet, including to people who spoke languages very different from English.

RED DAVE

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

People almost certainly wouldn't want to do this, they are generally proud of this thing called culture, dunno if you know much about that. So yeah, I doubt this would get off the ground at all.

[Rooster]

As the IPA records only vocal sounds, it would miss a lot compared to other writing systems. This might be good in some cases and might be terrible in others. It would probably result in a degrading of the language's quality, flexibility and unique charms. Some languages you can only tell the gender of a word, it's tense or even which word it is when written down. Also, it would hamper the ability for the reader to understand where words come from and how they relate to others in certain languages. In Gaelic, for instance, you can regularly have 15 or more letter words with about half of them being silent, with the silent ones affecting the pronunciation of some of the others. Only when written down could you tell how that word relates to other words, if for instance you did not know it's meaning, where that came from (latin, english, german, etc). The alphabet, if IPA, would have to be changed every so often, even if a general dialect was imposed, because that dialect and pronunciation would change as time marches on.

[graymouser]

In posting this I recall the many historical campaigns against mass illiteracy.

1) How practical would it be to have the [currently] 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks of the International Phonetic Alphabet replace the alphabets of every language worldwide (certainly the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, for starters)?
It would not be practical at all.

The IPA is primarily about sounds, not words. So you'd actually have to impose phonetic regularity across languages - which would certainly be a class issue, as different regions and classes have different dialects. Within a capitalist context this would certainly be used to attack the lower classes and oppressed national groupings.

On a practical level this would require:
1. The creation of a single phonetic standard for each language or each dialect. For instance, in Spanish you would have to decide whether to render [z] (and [c] before [e] and [i]) as /θ/ or /s/. In Latin America they would say /saˈpat̪o/ but in Spain /θaˈpat̪o/ - which becomes the word for "shoe" (zapato)? What about the the letter ll - does the word "to call" become /ʎa̠ˈma̠ɾ/ or /ʝa̠ˈma̠ɾ/ or /ʒa̠ˈma̠ɾ/? The Real academia española would say the first, most Spanish speakers the second, and Rioplatense speakers the third - but how do you pick? If you don't each dialect becomes its own language.
2. IPA keyboards, with a boatload more keys, replacing every keyboard and electronic device in the world.
3. The adoption of a global standard for data transmission and storage - what standard are you using for IPA?

It's simply an unthinkably bad idea.


2) Could a mass IPA literacy campaign be practical immediately for everyone, young and old, to take part in, or would there have to be a transition period whereby the younger generation folks are "fluent" in the IPA and the alphabets of their parents, and then the next generation would be "fluent" exclusively in the IPA (except language historians and their students)?
It would not be practical at all - it takes a college level understanding of phonetics to make the distinctions within the IPA.

[The Young Pioneer]

Considering how the "wonderful idea" of Esperanto was "incredibly successful"... :rolleyes:

...I'd say not practical at all.

[graymouser]

Considering how the "wonderful idea" of Esperanto was "incredibly successful"... :rolleyes:

...I'd say not practical at all.
Esperanto ne estas sukceso hodiaŭ, sed socialismo ankaŭ, kamarado. La ideo de internacia lingvo ne estas la sama kiel fonetika skribo de nunaj lingvoj. (Sed mi ne pensas ke Esperanto estos la lingvo de la nova socio post la revolucio, ĝi havas diversajn problemojn kaj ne estas ideala.)

Esperanto isn't a success today, but neither is socialism, comrade. The idea of an international language is not the same as phonetic writing of modern languages. (But I don't think that Esperanto will be the language of the new society after the revolution, it has several problems and is not ideal.)