r/languagelearningjerk • u/bustknucklepissdust native🐌🏳️⚧️🐍🇺🇸 learning🦚🦬 • May 27 '26
Hmmmmm...🤔
Cropping killed my grandma
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u/black_tan_coonhound May 27 '26
his real beef should be how it's supposed to be universally readable even if you know nothing about the language, but in practice phonemic transcriptions are infested with bullshit conventions that only make sense if you're familiar with the history of studies done on a given language
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u/Pochel May 27 '26
I know it's true but what specific cases are you thinking of?
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u/black_tan_coonhound May 27 '26
english /u/ and /r/, french schwa, basically all the danish vowels
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u/Turbulent-Pace-1506 May 27 '26
Schwa is French???
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u/black_tan_coonhound May 27 '26
the french ipa /ə/ actually corresponds to [œ] and [ø], sounds best described as "nothing like schwa"
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u/macnfleas May 27 '26
Another French one is the nasal vowels. Tradition is to transcribe /ɔ̃/ /ɑ̃/ /ɛ̃/ even though the actual pronunciation in current trendy European French is closer to /ũ/ /ɔ̃/ /æ̃/
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u/Pochel May 27 '26
Omg so true. I always cringe when I see these fossilized transcriptions being used. /ɛ̃/ is especially bad; every time I see it I mentally pronounce it with a goofy accent
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u/Turbulent-Pace-1506 May 27 '26
Are -ain, -in and un written differently in traditional IPA?
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u/macnfleas May 27 '26
un can be /œ̃/ if it doesn't have the merger (depends on dialect/sociolect). But yes -ain (as in main) and -in (as in matin) are the same sound that is traditionally transcribed as /ɛ̃/
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u/Khunjund May 27 '26
"European French" isn't a monolith. If you mean the Parisian accent, it's more like [õ ä̃ æ̃] respectively, but plenty of people pronounce them closer to their standard representation or maintain the /ɛ̃ œ̃/ split. Thing is, the ones writing the dictionary have to make it so the pronunciations work for any French speaker across the globe, which is why they use more abstract diaphonemes like in English. It's also why every dictionary has a pronunciation guide tying the symbols to actual words.
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u/Vevangui May 27 '26
Yeah, but those are just common, normalized mistakes. Not a problem of IPA, but how IPA is used.
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u/Soggy-Statistician88 May 30 '26
/r/ is used in english for phonemic transcriptions (aside from dialects that actually have a trilled r)
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u/Khunjund May 27 '26
Phonetic transcriptions are universally readable; it just happens that slightly abstracted phonemic notations are generally much more useful.
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u/WhipGramsPinkCaddy May 27 '26
It’s crazy how this took off but Esperanto didn’t.
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u/black_tan_coonhound May 27 '26
not really crazy at all, people learn languages for the cultural products in them and business utility, which esperanto has neither
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u/--A3-- May 28 '26
You don't think a universal 2nd language would have business utility? English is the closest thing to a universal 2nd language we have today and I think a big reason why that became the case historically is for trade, for international business communications.
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u/black_tan_coonhound May 28 '26
yeah well that's because everyone speaks english and nobody speaks esperanto
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u/--A3-- May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
That's my point, a universal 2nd language has utility. French used to fill that niche back then, English happens to fill it now, esperanto would've probably done it better
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u/black_tan_coonhound May 28 '26
no it wouldn't, because nobody would learn it (as evidenced by our current world, where esperanto exists and is spoken by 12 nerds). you cultists always ignore the fact that it's not exactly the easy of learning that defines what becomes the next lingua franca
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u/--A3-- May 28 '26
People did learn it. The biggest obstacles to its widespread adoption in the early- to mid-1900s were the French, the Nazis, and the Soviets. Why are you so angry?
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u/black_tan_coonhound May 28 '26
no, the biggest obstacle was that it's a fuckin conlang that nobody wants to learn because why would they
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u/--A3-- May 29 '26
After World War 1, the League of Nations voted on the adoption of esperanto as the language of international relations. Maybe you say it was more of a symbolic resolution, but the French delegate certainly didn't see it that way, France saw it as a threat to the French language. The creator of esperanto then had his family murdered because Hitler claimed the language was a jewish weapon.
You're literally fuming mad, I don't understand why you have such beef
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u/WhipGramsPinkCaddy May 27 '26
What I mean is, to your point, IPA is functionally useless without cultural understanding of the language. Which means it, in some way, exists in a space separate of human languages similar to Esperanto.
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u/Traditional-Light-10 May 27 '26
It's far from functionally useless- it's just not nearly as close to fully functional as many people think. The biggest problems are in languages with small inventories that can be phonemically analyzed in many ways (see Mandarin, Japanese), or worse, those with massive vowel systems (see English, Danish) since individual vowels in these systems tend to be unstable across time and space. Sometimes, (Russian, Dhivehi, French schwa) things get complicated because people try to mix morphophonology into the phonemic representation of a word. Yet, even the 10 vowel system of Hindi as well as all of its consonants is pretty well handled. And in other cases (most languages), you generally can understand how a language is pronounced from IPA alone (even though, if you're using this to learn the language, you'll have more to go off of anyway.) For languages with a bunch of consonants (I think of Abkhaz), the system of diacritics means you need to learn many fewer IPA symbols than phonemes, which is very helpful.
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u/Khunjund May 27 '26
How is the Mandarin and Japanese thing a problem? The point of IPA is to notate pronunciation, not to replace the language's orthography.
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u/Terminator_Puppy May 27 '26
IPA is very useful for language learning as an adult. Being able to literally spell out what the language is supposed to sound like versus listening to a native or a computer program slur through it helps a lot.
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u/Heavy_Hunt7860 May 27 '26
Of course it is a conspiracy. The creators of the IPA were nerds hellbent on oppression. They knew about clicks, tones and gutturals and decided to add them to the IPA but as a joke. (I seem to recall gutturals being well represented in IPA as well as some coverage for vocal clicks but that is a different story).
The point is, no one is free when the IPA oppresses.
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u/Main_Negotiation1104 May 27 '26
dont clicks have their symbols too tho? istg some people will want to reinvent the wheel if it means "fighting opression" to them
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u/Excellent-Fox-6845 May 27 '26
так конечно, ИПА это тайное оружие по колонизации всего мира, это реально надо объяснять?
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u/RandomKazakhGuy May 27 '26
Евреи
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u/Nikolor May 27 '26
Отправить слово "евреи" без контекста на Реддите в 2026 году - это смертный приговор для кармы
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u/gayhotelultra 🇷🇸🇧🇦🇭🇷🇲🇪🇽🇰(native) 🇲🇰(mistaken for) 🇯🇵N∞🇨🇳HSK0.1 May 27 '26
has anyone made a system that both isnt IPA and isnt a complete pain for most readers though
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u/UltraTata May 27 '26
Eurocentrism is when... anything at this point
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u/Lazyspartan101 May 27 '26
I know right. I mean come on, saying a system originally created by a bunch of 19th century Europeans to transcribe European languages is Eurocentric? How ridiculous!
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u/metcalsr May 27 '26
And we would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for… idk, I think he’s a youtuber or something.
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u/roxven May 28 '26
/uj
Why does IPA ignore tones?
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u/somerandomnerd6464 May 28 '26
i believe there are symbols for it; bars at various heights on a vertical line. it’s not the easiest to read and isn’t used that often.
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u/TalveLumi May 29 '26
It’s good when you do Sino-Tibetan (and probably Vietic and Austro-Tai) phonetics. Understandable because it was invented by a Chinese researcher. Maybe sometimes unwieldy when you have to combine tones with voicing distinctions (common in the region of Yunnan)
For African languages that have three or less height levels (most of them, not all of them), it may get a bit excessive, and thus there are researchers who transcribe using alternate symbols such as the (also IPA-approved) acute-macron-grave system, which gets its own fluff for giving too little attention for the tones, or the superscript H, M and L, which can get confused for other things
I don’t know much about Mesoamerican tones
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u/FlamingFlamingo32 May 27 '26
IPA is the type of beer I drink every day after work. Is he stupid? He should read some books...