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There is more to a language than knowing how to pronounce each individual letter. You can easily see it if you take any modern language, write a text in it down
by usrnm 2y ago
There is more to a language than knowing how to pronounce each individual letter. You can easily see it if you take any modern language, write a text in it down in IPA and ask a linguist unfamiliar with the language itself read it. It will still sound very alien to a native speaker. And this is with a live language we have full knowledge of.
- int_19h 2y agoThe result of this exercise depends largely on how accurate your IPA transcription is, because that is very much a scale. More often than not, what you see is a phonemic transcription rather than a phonetic one, which then does indeed require knowing how the actual phonemes are pronounced in a particular language. But with phonemic translation using the entire assortment of IPA diacritics, if your linguist is familiar with other languages that happen to have the same sounds, they could do a fairly decent take.