4 ms·

aɪ ˈwʌndə wɒt aɪ piː eɪ wʊd lʊk laɪk ɪf ɪt wɜːr ɪnˈvɛntɪd təˈdeɪ ˈprɒbəbliː nɒt laɪk ðɪs

• bradrn 5y ago
  > I wonder what IPA would look like if it were invented today? Probably not like this. I agree! I’ve heard that IPA was optimised for movable type, a medium in which it was easy to reverse and flip letters — thus we get e.g. ʌ,ɐ,ə,ɘ,ɔ,ɟ etc. (This, incidentally, is why you can write text upside-down using Unicode.) This can be contrasted with e.g. Americanist notation, which was optimised for handwriting: š, ȼ, ƛ etc. are easier to write than the IPA equivalents ʃ, t͡s, t͡ɬ. I’m not sure what a phonetic alphabet invented today would look like though — probably it would look something like X-SAMPA [0], restricted to mostly ASCII characters and making heavy use of uppercase, punctuation and digraphs. (A_i j}:z It r\e:li:, ba_"t It lUks lA_ik DIs.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA