Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

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Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Solan »

... so what's the problem with not knowing it. Language classes in schools don't use it. So why would their be so much grief for a conlanger hobbyist not being familiar with IPA?


Making the conlang I've been working on for more years than I can remember is something I do for fun. I've prolly thrown away more starter versions of its lexicon and alphabet than I can remember. I've gone from 26 letters down to 20, then down to 16, 15 and then down to 13 and lately just back up to 14. In this time I have had a lot of fun but also a lot of paper tearing as I've had to recast the language completely at a point when I had over a hundred words because they didn't even look or sound like anything I was going for in the first place. Now almost every time I try sharing the conlang on a website, the very first response is to use a bunch of words I do not understand or tell me I really need to learn IPA. I'm creating a language for fun, not as a means of impressing any professional linguists or make money off it.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Ahzoh »

It's fine to not know IPA if you don't plan on showing it to others...
But the writing systems of many languages are very ambiguous, especially English.
If you try to tell us what letter is what sound based on something like "a as in apple", that is very ambiguous since not all English speakers pronounce "a" the same. It is very frustrating for any reader... linguist or not.
The IPA only serves as a universal language for indicate what sound is what and each sound has its own symbol. Whereas in English, "e" can have three sounds... that's very ambiguous.

Additionally, you won't know what is going on when you hear someone make a sound you haven't heard before.
Also, really, it just saves you time having to explain things, since most of us already know it...
Last edited by Ahzoh on 28 Jun 2015 00:49, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Solan »

I just found the following chart so I can give the IPA for the sounds of my language(tbtg). I HIGHLY recommend this for any beginning conlanger looking to get a start in IPA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_As ... or_English

I wonder why no one has pointed out this chart in any other conlang site I have been to?
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Ahzoh »

I usually use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English
It's the same thing, really...
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by kilenc »

Solan wrote:... so what's the problem with not knowing it. Language classes in schools don't use it. So why would their be so much grief for a conlanger hobbyist not being familiar with IPA?
what ahzoh said; the reason language classes dont use it cus they want to be accessible--they still you how to pronounce sounds, or at least should, accurately, so they might say "the m sound is made by closing your lips together, blowing air thru your nose, and vibrating your vocal chords" instead of "the m sound is a voiced bilabial nasal obstruent" or the "m sound is IPA [m]", but all these things mean the same thing :)

the reason people get on people for not using IPA is cus without IPA its all confusing--even inside a dialect area, everyone pronounces words differently than everyone else. so if you dont want to learn IPA, its entirely up to you of course and its sad that you feel outed because of it, but it does make understanding (and therefore enjoying your conlang a lot harder)

nevertheless, i recommend that you do attempt to learn the IPA! it might look hard / daunting at first, but it was a big step for me going outside of my english / european bubble and getting familiar with some "funkier" languages (and i learned the whole thing through wikipedia!). its actually not that hard when you get down to it--its just a chart with a few categories that almost always make sense :)

also, the "big words phenomenon" shouldnt be blamed on the people on the board or on other boards--its not their fault you dont know what theyre talking about [;)]. for a lot of people, myself included, conlanging is an extension of a passion for linguistics--so big, science-y looking words are par-for-the-course. google 'em, and youll be excited by what you can learn about polypersonal agreement or semantic space or all sorts of other stuff :)

i guess what im getting at is, its not bad at all if you dont want to be super "scientific" about conlanging and just want a casual hobby (and its a shame if you feel downplayed cus of it). but almost everyone on this board is gonna recommend that you do get a bit more scientific and learn about cool stuff like linguistics and the IPA cus that stuff is actually very interesting!! (to me, at least)

also, edit: the IPA for english is a good start, but i would recommend looking to learn the whole IPA. the IPA for english only gives you a pretty limited view of all the cool sounds the human mouth can spit out :)
eventually ill work out a good conlang :)
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by HoskhMatriarch »

Solan wrote:... so what's the problem with not knowing it. Language classes in schools don't use it. So why would their be so much grief for a conlanger hobbyist not being familiar with IPA?


Making the conlang I've been working on for more years than I can remember is something I do for fun. I've prolly thrown away more starter versions of its lexicon and alphabet than I can remember. I've gone from 26 letters down to 20, then down to 16, 15 and then down to 13 and lately just back up to 14. In this time I have had a lot of fun but also a lot of paper tearing as I've had to recast the language completely at a point when I had over a hundred words because they didn't even look or sound like anything I was going for in the first place. Now almost every time I try sharing the conlang on a website, the very first response is to use a bunch of words I do not understand or tell me I really need to learn IPA. I'm creating a language for fun, not as a means of impressing any professional linguists or make money off it.
You should still learn IPA though, for the reasons other people said. It also gives you more interesting things you can do with your phonology instead of just using English sounds and phonological rules. I don't want any [ɹ] or t- and d-flapping in my language! On the other hand, I have some pharyngealized vowels and final obstruent devoicing and other things in my language that are different from English.

I also don't see "letters" as really being a part of language at all. Some languages aren't even written, or have only started to be written very recently, and some languages have switched between different writing systems. I could write English with German orthography, but that wouldn't make it German. Hier is Pruf ow dätt. Yes, the orthography part can be fun, and yes, writing can be important, but what letters you use has nothing to do with your language itself.

Making languages is more fun when you know what can be done with them. I'm not trying to bash you, as I haven't even seen your language, but there's something to learning about languages when making one.
Last edited by HoskhMatriarch on 28 Jun 2015 01:04, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Solan »

Ahzoh wrote:I usually use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English
It's the same thing, really...

Thank you! Now I finally got what I needed to get the IPA symbols for the sounds I am using!

AEGHILIAN A E G GN H I L M N O R S Sh T V (B F)
IPA a: ei g gn h i: l m n oʊ r s ʃ t v (b f)
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by elemtilas »

Solan wrote:... so what's the problem with not knowing it. Language classes in schools don't use it. So why would their be so much grief for a conlanger hobbyist not being familiar with IPA?


Making the conlang I've been working on for more years than I can remember is something I do for fun. I've prolly thrown away more starter versions of its lexicon and alphabet than I can remember. I've gone from 26 letters down to 20, then down to 16, 15 and then down to 13 and lately just back up to 14. In this time I have had a lot of fun but also a lot of paper tearing as I've had to recast the language completely at a point when I had over a hundred words because they didn't even look or sound like anything I was going for in the first place. Now almost every time I try sharing the conlang on a website, the very first response is to use a bunch of words I do not understand or tell me I really need to learn IPA. I'm creating a language for fun, not as a means of impressing any professional linguists or make money off it.
Obviously I don't know the nature of all this 'bashing', but I can offer a comment on their response. Just on the very slight chance you weren't already aware, everyone else in these communities is also making languages for fun! Even the folks who are getting paid to do this are doing it because it's fun to do! As far as I know, no one at all does this to please or impress professional linguists (that a rather large number of conlangers áre professional linguists is neither here nor there!). That's like brushing your teeth thrice a day to impress your barber. Myeh. The only reason they're carping about you not using it is that they want to experience and appreciate your work. They can't do that if you don't provide a good frame of reference for how your language sounds or works! Idiosyncratic and ad hoc grammatical apparatus are rarely received well.

Same goes for the big words. The point of this art, apart from having fun, is to make beautiful art. To do that, you need to know how the bits fit together. All of those bits and all the ways they fit together are encoded in technical jargon. Learning that jargon makes it much easier to talk about and describe your work; it also puts everyone on the same page. There is nothing worse than watching two people argue over something conlang related simply because one of them is using a non-standard definition of a word or has no idea what things are actually called. Very frustrating for everyone involved!


But, to answer your question: there is nó problem at all with keeping yourself ignorant of IPA and general linguistics vocabulary. That is -- no problem for us! I agree with Ahzoh 100%: if you don't want to talk about your conlang, there is no need to learn the community jargon. If you do remain so ignorant, then you will simply create néedless friction between between yourself and everyone else who is interested in talking to you about your language, asking you questions about how it works, etc., etc. Sooner or later, people will tire of asking you questions or discussing your languages with you because they know you have no idea what anyone's talking about. This is never a nice thing to see happen!

I am glad you found the IPA articles at Wikipedia! Great resource with sound files and everything.
Solan wrote:I wonder why no one has pointed out this chart in any other conlang site I have been to?
I'd be interested in knowing what "conlang sites" those are! To be sure, folks on Conlang-L would point you to the IPA post haste. Frath Wiki has its own article on the IPA: http://www.frathwiki.com/IPA with a link to the WP article. Folks here at CBB also point folks out to it as well. IPA is one of the most basic tools the community inhabitant conlanger uses (and its use is one of the social graces he develops quickly when he joins with a community for the first time!).

I guess it could be folks on the forums you had checked out already are ignorant of the IPA. But I find that hard to believe, unless they are entirely parochial.

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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by elemtilas »

Solan wrote:
Ahzoh wrote:I usually use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English
It's the same thing, really...

Thank you! Now I finally got what I needed to get the IPA symbols for the sounds I am using!

AEGHILIAN A E G GN H I L M N O R S Sh T V (B F)
IPA a: ei g gn h i: l m n oʊ r s ʃ t v (b f)
Okay, I'll bite: what does "GN" sound like? I didn't see [gn] in the chart. Is it [ŋ] or is it [n] followed by [g]? Or something else?

Also, looks like all the vowels are long -- not short ones at all? Neat! How did that come about?

If Aeghilian is the language's name, what does the "Ae" sound like at the beginning of the word? Like [a:] followed by [e] and or is it a diphthong? Or something else?
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by elemtilas »

I see....ZBB...

So, what exactly constituted all the "bashing"? I was rather expecting to see little more than a greasy streak left over after the flames died down! He seems to have gotten very good general advice all things considered.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Salmoneus »

A small piece of advice?

When somebody uses a "big word" (and this is inevitable - all hobbies have their own jargon terms), there are (at least) two possible responses:

a) "I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with that term, could you explain what you mean by that?"
b) "I'm constantly amazed by how you people keep demanding that I learn all these strange words when I'm only doing this as a hobby I'm not trying to make money out of this why should I have to do any reading or learning and why can't you just use normal words..."

If you use the first response, you may have something explained in a way you can understand, or at least be told enough that you know you're not interested in understanding it.

If you use the second response, then quite aside from the issue of tone (it comes across as ungrateful and makes people less likely to want to help you in future), you're putting the burden on everybody else. If we have to use words you understand, that means we have to a) guess what you do and don't understand, and b) translate everything we want to say into words you'll understand. That's a lot of hassle for us, since the reason these words exist is that it makes it a lot easier to say things. "The way that letters are used to represent the meaningful units of sound" is more of a mouthful than "orthography", and "postalveolar sibilant" is much easier to say than "a sound where the tongue comes close to the region of the upper part of the inside of the mouth located just behind that sort of ridgy bit, but does not completely block the flow of air from your lungs through your mouth, and in particular where the upper surface of the tongue forms a narrow groove or channel that directs the flow of air very forcefully forward". And the effect is likely to be unsuccesful: either we will underestimate your ignorance and still use words you don't understand, or we will overestimate your ignorance and be patronising to you.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Curlyjimsam »

The problem with people not using IPA in general is that it can be quite hard to know how the language is actually pronounced, and it's quicker for people who are familiar with it to process "<u> = " rather than "U stands for the 'oo' sound in 'food'" (plus the latter runs into problems with dialect variation and things, i.e. not everybody pronounces food the same way).

But there does seem to an element of snobbery going on here in people's responses to your lack of IPA - it's possible to make very good guesses for what you mean by almost all of your sounds, so there really isn't all that much lack of clarity. But people are often very quick to criticise stuff like this, presumably because it requires relatively little actual knowledge or thought and nevertheless is a good way of conveying one's sense of superiority.

The IPA isn't that hard to learn, I don't think, and in any case I would disagree that you need to learn it - for the purpose of presentation of a single conlang, it's enough to look up the sounds you need. Even for more advanced purposes, it's perfectly fine just to learn the most frequent symbols and refer to the chart whenever one comes up you haven't committed to memory - I must have been using the IPA for a decade, and I still have to look up things like pharyngeals. Of course it still helps to have a feel for what sort of sound a symbol is likely to refer to so you don't have to search through the whole chart (e.g. a symbol based on h is likely to be toward the right end of the consonants chart, one based on e somewhere in the middle of the vowel chart).

Knowledge of IPA would allow you to discuss in more detail the fine details of how your language sounds - variations in sounds in different contexts etc. - but to be honest that kind of thing is in no sense "necessary" and it's fine if you don't do it. For most of my languages I've only thought about the most common sound values of the letters I use to give a general impression of how they would sound, and I don't think that's problematic.

J.R.R. Tolkien published the sounds of his languages in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings without using the IPA, and nobody (to my knowledge) criticises him for that.

On a note of actual technical advice, I suspect the IPA values you want for your vowel sounds are actually (very straightforwardly) [a e i o u]. These are the usual values for these sounds in a language like Spanish which has such a system, a little bit different from English whose vowel system is rather messed up from a cross-linguistic perspective.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Keenir »

Curlyjimsam wrote:J.R.R. Tolkien published the sounds of his languages in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings without using the IPA, and nobody (to my knowledge) criticises him for that.
1. He is dead.
2. People do mispronounce words in his languages -- such as Celeborn.
3. When was the IPA released in its modern form?
4. Didn't He avoid much of the difficulty of being IPA-less, by using Old English, Latin, and addressing how sounds are produced?
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by MrKrov »

Keenir wrote:3. When was the IPA released in its modern form?
The tender year of 1888.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Lambuzhao »

Well, back then there was certainly Visible Speech

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/visiblespeech.htm


Which was basically just another kind of Tengwar. :roll:
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by clawgrip »

I've found IPA to have a fairly gentle learning curve, with the most basic letters often clearly representing the most common sounds. You can start there and then slowly build your knowledge of the weirder symbols by seeing them used for languages you already know. Eventually you can learn more and more and you will see that there are occasionally patterns in the shapes of related letters.

X-SAMPA on the other hand, is something I've never learned and have little motivation to learn. Half of it seems to me to be just random assignments of ASCII characters.
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Thakowsaizmu »

clawgrip wrote:Half of it seems to me to be just random assignments of ASCII characters.
Well, the idea was to be able to represent everything just using ASCII
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Lao Kou »

clawgrip wrote:X-SAMPA on the other hand, is something I've never learned and have little motivation to learn. Half of it seems to me to be just random assignments of ASCII characters.
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In my day, we weren't able to just willy-nilly copy/paste IPA symbols or download IPA keyboards. We had to use Kirshenbaum IPA, by criminee, and we liked it!

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That was supplanted by SAMPA/X-SAMPA, which at the time seemed to me much of a muchness and just meant yet another system to learn when it became all the rage and clinging to Kirshenbaum planted a giant anachronistic "L" on your forehead, but it may have had some minor tweaked advantages, IIRC. Now we're back full circle to IPA. :roll: One can appreciate your lack of motivation to learn X-SAMPA. For my money, it is to IPA what Wade-Giles is to pinyin. These days, the only reasons I see for being familiar with it is if you want to hop in the Wayback Machine and read sites of yesteryear or if you're stuck (or think your viewer is stuck) at a device that can't technologically handle IPA. There may be other reasons?
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Re: Ive been bashed alot for not being fluent in IPA....

Post by Ànradh »

Lao Kou wrote:There may be other reasons?
I ended up learning it because I found the easiest way to transcribe larger pieces of text into IPA was to use this converter. I just type the sentence as X-SAMPA into it and then no longer have to worry about combining diacritics, unicode, or copy and pasting a few hundred characters. Originally, I used Wikipedia's X-SAMPA page as a reference, but I rarely need it now.
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