4 ms·

When I first started my career a senior dev told me a funny story about 2 competing standards for some obscure technology. There was no clear winner and the com

When I first started my career a senior dev told me a funny story about 2 competing standards for some obscure technology. There was no clear winner and the community couldn't decide what did so what did they do? They created a new standard no one used.

asveikau 7y ago
I don't understand how that relates. The international phonetic alphabet is pretty widely used in its niche. Read any decent article about phonetics, phonology, historical linguistics, and you'll see it.
gizmo686 7y ago
Is there any competing standard to the IPA?
- kragen 7y ago
  English-language dictionaries and the reading textbooks I used in elementary school in the US in the 1980s use a different standard. A much worse one. And in ASCII-only media, there is X-SAMPA. eSpeak uses a variant of X-SAMPA; recent versions support IPA too, but only for output, and the conversion is lossy. Mandarin phonetics are often written with bopomofo, especially in elementary school, and Japanese people often use kana for writing down pronunciations—universally for elementary-school kids learning kanji, but sometimes even in contexts so inappropriate it's self-sabotage, like learning English pronunciation. And of course many languages have sufficiently systematic orthography that you don't need a separate convention for indicating pronunciation, except for linguists investigating dialect variation or foreign-language students. But these are really marginal cases. The IPA is where it's at.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Some English kids’ dictionaries used diacriticals on the vowels to represent the actual quality of the vowel irrespective of the vowel written. This has the advantage of carrying pronunciation and spelling simultaneously.
  - frenchy 7y ago
    > English-language dictionaries and the reading textbooks I used in elementary school in the US in the 1980s use a different standard. Perhaps I'm being too nit-picky, but that's actually more just like an alternate English alphabet than it is a phonetic alphabet. The goal of a phonetic alhpabet is to map symbols any sound that is distinguishable in any language, not simply the ones that are distinguishable in English. X-SAMPA is a lot more like the IPA. It's basically an incomplete encoding of IPA in ASCII. It's a little hack to get around the insufficiencies of inputing characters into computer devices.
- frenchy 7y ago
  There's the Americanist phonetic alphabet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation), which saw widespread use in North and Central America in the early parts of the 20th century. I think it's mostly been replaced by the IPA. For the most part, those funny little phonemic notations that dictionaries come up with are just alternate alphabets, and not intendend to be a standard phonetic alphabet.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  For Uralic linguistics, there is the Uralic phonetic alphabet[0]. While relatively few new texts are ever created in it (partly because all the dialectal fieldwork was already done in the late 19th/early 20th century), it is the transcription used in all the standard references that linguists in this subfield still use and cite today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet
jchw 7y ago
Good ol’ XKCD 927 in action.

asveikau 7y ago

I don't understand how that relates. The international phonetic alphabet is pretty widely used in its niche. Read any decent article about phonetics, phonology, historical linguistics, and you'll see it.

gizmo686 7y ago

Is there any competing standard to the IPA?

kragen 7y ago
English-language dictionaries and the reading textbooks I used in elementary school in the US in the 1980s use a different standard. A much worse one. And in ASCII-only media, there is X-SAMPA. eSpeak uses a variant of X-SAMPA; recent versions support IPA too, but only for output, and the conversion is lossy. Mandarin phonetics are often written with bopomofo, especially in elementary school, and Japanese people often use kana for writing down pronunciations—universally for elementary-school kids learning kanji, but sometimes even in contexts so inappropriate it's self-sabotage, like learning English pronunciation. And of course many languages have sufficiently systematic orthography that you don't need a separate convention for indicating pronunciation, except for linguists investigating dialect variation or foreign-language students. But these are really marginal cases. The IPA is where it's at.
- mc32 7y ago
  Some English kids’ dictionaries used diacriticals on the vowels to represent the actual quality of the vowel irrespective of the vowel written. This has the advantage of carrying pronunciation and spelling simultaneously.
- frenchy 7y ago
  > English-language dictionaries and the reading textbooks I used in elementary school in the US in the 1980s use a different standard. Perhaps I'm being too nit-picky, but that's actually more just like an alternate English alphabet than it is a phonetic alphabet. The goal of a phonetic alhpabet is to map symbols any sound that is distinguishable in any language, not simply the ones that are distinguishable in English. X-SAMPA is a lot more like the IPA. It's basically an incomplete encoding of IPA in ASCII. It's a little hack to get around the insufficiencies of inputing characters into computer devices.
frenchy 7y ago
There's the Americanist phonetic alphabet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation), which saw widespread use in North and Central America in the early parts of the 20th century. I think it's mostly been replaced by the IPA. For the most part, those funny little phonemic notations that dictionaries come up with are just alternate alphabets, and not intendend to be a standard phonetic alphabet.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
For Uralic linguistics, there is the Uralic phonetic alphabet[0]. While relatively few new texts are ever created in it (partly because all the dialectal fieldwork was already done in the late 19th/early 20th century), it is the transcription used in all the standard references that linguists in this subfield still use and cite today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet

jchw 7y ago

Good ol’ XKCD 927 in action.