The Worst Spelling Reform Idea of All Time

An introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Written and Created by Me.
Art by kvd102

Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Rubýñ - Spanish
Pasquale D'ambrosio - Italian
DrWhoFanJ - IPA transcription (English UK)

[notoriouswhitemoth]

There's also the simple fact that spoken language changes a LOT faster than written language

[vroomoon]

The only time I've ever come across IPA is through my best friend, who is an opera singer. She's fluent in IPA because it allows her to sing in practically any language.

[cgaran]

If everyone in the world started using the IPA, after enough time, both graphic and phonetic aspects of any symbol may be slightly altered by the needs of each individual culture, making it not universal.

[masterimbecile]

“Ja ja ja ja ja ja”

Either comes from an amused Spaniard or an enthusiastic German.

[KuraSourTakanHour]

Many languages, particular Chinese, would actually become ambiguous and harder to understand with IPA, not the other way around

[mistersir]

You missed the best reason: how large a keyboard would one need?

[cadextheclock]

Remembers seeing some linguistic/orthography subreddit where whenever someone made an English spelling reform there'd always be someone saying "wAɪ̯ NɒT dƷʌSt JuːZ Aɪ̯ Pi Eɪ̯"

[ummmmmmmmmmmnmmmm]

IPA would be like if a musical scholar thought "our musical notation system only applies to the 12 tone scale. Other countries use 5 tone scales or even 22 tone scales. To account for this I've created a new way of writing music where every note is written as its frequency in hertz and the amount of time that note is played is written in milliseconds above it. Techniques are all represented by a unique symbol, for example pizzicato is represented by the letter д with an umlaut and rotated 135 degrees clockwise. Also, "pizz" is written below it in italics to avoid confusion. The musical score also comes with a golden record which when played in a projector will display a semiotic representation of a string being plucked as well as a spectrogram and a diagram of a hydrogen atom. This is just to show that we are an intelligent species to any alien species that may come across these musical manuscripts"

[nou]

the thing about the IPA being ugly kinda makes me wanna try and make """cursive IPA"" now

[Creeper_]

I actually had the same idea of “Why can’t we just use the IPA?” sometime within the last 2 weeks. Then this video came into my recommendations, and made a lot of good points.

[theidioticbgilson]

west african languages: i'm gonna pretend i didn't hear what i clearly just heard

[skyworm]

The IPA isn't even used consistently within English. It depends on the context and how narrow and updated a convention is. It's also not narrow enough to transcribe a lot of phonetic differences between languages.

[topazbutterfly]

The IPA is way too technical to be used on large scale. Sure, I once terrorized my friends on a groupchat using only the IPA for like a week, but imagine using it everywhere. The IPA is a good method to supliment language learning, but the actual writing system carries on history. I personally think English spelling is okay as it is, and this comes from a person that had to learn words one by one, like logographs since primary school (that is how we learn English in Romania). I cannot imagine English, French or Greek without the horrible historical spellings.

Also, there are languages that didn’t have any written form, so linguists decided to write them in the IPA officially. So the IPA is actually used on a large scale to write some endangered languages.

[piezkool]

I showed this to my speech pathologist mother, who said she had never seen "don't" written like it is in the thumbnail. She guessed you would have a British or Australian accent.
Also she said she used to write letters to people in IPA just to see if they could figure it out.

[GeneralNuisance]

As someone who has to interact with phonetics fairly frequently, Vocaloid SAMPA, specifically whatever modified version of XSAMPA Hatsune Miku's English bank uses, is about 27 times worse than IPA. I hate XSAMPA so much.

Being a vocal synth user is a punishment unlike any other I have learned many phonetic systems against my will. Vocaloid SAMPA, Delta (which is a modification of Vocaloid SAMPA's English transcriptions, meant to be easier for Japanese speakers to read), Arpabet, CMUDict for French (this SUCKED bc its only meant for European French and I speak Canadian French), CZSAMPA (a modified version of Vocaloid SAMPA based on written English and the GenAm accent), Erable French (I modified CMUdict for Canadian French, gods preserve us), the IPA I need for English and Japanese, voice synths are a special type of hell sometimes

[orinrin]

related to the dialects thing, but even if everyone somehow spoke the same dialect
how would you account for micro differences in speech
“oh no i accidentally added a tiny bit more height to this vowel and now i have to add a different diacritic”
of course simply calrifying you only need a phonemic transcription would help
but yeah dialectal differences as you said

[junupbox]

Even if we switched every language to IPA, all it does is tell us how to pronounce words in any language, it doesn’t encode any meaning so if we came across a post in another language, all we knew is how all the words sound, not the actual contents of meaning.

Also, I enjoy IPA as both a guide in Conlang making *and* singing international songs for choir.

[wonderstruck.]

Erasing written language would also erase cultures. Many writing systems (Chinese, Arabic, etc) have a rich art of calligraphy. And some cultures have deep pride in their writing systems, like Korea’s Hangul.

[chasebrower]

Another part of the problem is the incompleteness of IPA. Some languages (especially East Asian languages) include pitch in the pronunciation of words. Two words with an identical IPA representation can mean different things simply because the pitch structure of the word is different (for example, in Japanese).

[videogamescoverftw]

I think the issue in IPA is with it being meant for language analysis. IPA lists 68 different vowel sounds however most of these are not used in most language and many sound very similar to up to 5 other vowels as well as almost always being mutually exclusive to these similar sounds in a language. For language analysis these sounds may have nuances that need to be separated into different categories but as most of these sounds are mutually intelligible and/or indistinguishable, you could reduce these sounds to 20 or less letters. Consonants tend to have less similarities though and these 54 sounds can only be reduced to around 40-45 (there are some sounds that seem the same to me but are not in any languages i speak so I'm unable to give a precise guess), but at most we could easily make a simplified IPA with around 65 characters and separated into families of sounds (represented by a common letter of the family understood by most languages) so that if a sound doesn't match what someone wants to portray they can say what family its part of and use placeholder diacritics (which should not normally be used in this font) to show manner and place of articulation.