4 ms·
Not to poop on this article, but isn't the point of IPA that every phoneme has "its own dedicated IPA symbol"?
by tom_mellior 7y ago
Not to poop on this article, but isn't the point of IPA that every phoneme has "its own dedicated IPA symbol"?
- zeckalpha 7y agoYes, but most phonemes are in multiple languages.
- crazygringo 7y agoActually no -- otherwise there would be thousands of them, because languages often have sounds that are very close to a sound in another language but not identical. The point of IPA is to provide a phonetic alphabet that can provide enough symbols, each covering a range of similar sounds across languages, such that for each language, every sound within that language has a unique symbol to differentiate it from other sounds within that language. E.g. "bête" in French and "bet" in English are identical in IPA: /bɛt/. But all three sounds are definitely slightly different, which is how you can tell whether the speaker is, say, American or French. The process of coming up with IPA and deciding what sounds in different languages deserve the same symbol or not involved just as much art as science, since there are tons of gray areas, especially when dialects are involved.
- hoseja 7y agoHuh. I thought IPA was universal. Bummer.
- vilhelm_s 7y agoNo, it's not a phonemic alphabet. The idea is that it should have a symbol for each phone, i.e. each sound you can make with your mouth. Different languages will then cluster those phones into different equivalence classes (phonemes), but the standard practice is to pick a representative sound from the equivalence class, and use that as the IPA letter for the phoneme. Allocating a symbol to a phoneme is is odd.