Why I do love the International Phonetic Alphabet

Apologies for not blogging recently. The entry into 2008 has been quite a busy one for me. Anyway, a quick little post today on Sally Thomason's comments on language log the other day, titled Why I Don't Love the International Phonetic Alphabet. (Also cross-posted at Phonoloblog.)

I've never been a fan of Americanist transcription. In fact, that was one of my annoyances with Michael Kenstowicz's Phonology in Generative Grammar (as well as the fact that I find feature theory quite irritating).

Thomason notes that the IPA doesn't go in for diacritics much. That's for good reason! You need the diacritic space free so you can use all the IPA's real diacritics - such as those for voice, syllabicity, nasality, and so on. She notes that she much prefers the Americanist [š] over IPA [ʃ], because:

For linguists who got A’s in penmanship in grade school (if there’s anyone still alive who ever got grades in penmanship), this might work just fine when they’re transcribing data from speakers or from tape recordings. But I’m not one of those people, and there’d be a real risk that my [ʃ]’s would turn out looking like [s]’s and vice versa, and that’s a bad thing when you’re trying to figure out a language’s phonological system.

I've never encountered such a problem. Admittedly I've never done any fieldwork, but I write my <ʃ> as a large letter, taking up the entire vertical line space, elongated and curly, whereas my <s> is only half-height, short and fat.

Her other IPA gripes are the use of the letter <c>; affricate vs plosive+stop representation; and issues with the low central vowel. The last one I can agree on, that the IPA as it stands is inadequate to deal with these issues without elaborate notation. (However, as Eric Armstrong points out in the comments, [ɐ] really isn't that hard to write, it just takes practice.) However, with the first two, I have to disagree. IPA can cope with all the issues raised. I think Thomason has provided good reasoning for why strict 100% adherence to IPA standards is not always the best option, especially within a field of a particular group of languages. But for the majority of cases, the IPA works just fine - leaving only a small minority of times when you have to (or want to) specify what you're doing (e.g. "I'm using [č] instead of [tʃ] because ..."). Bottom line is, be specific, be clear, and say what you mean.