A couple different things we talked about in our class yesterday inspired this post. First, in our group discussion about possibilities for an end-of-unit project, we came up with the idea of inventing our own written system. That got me thinking, questioning...how would I go about that? What qualities of a written system make it effective? What would the perfect written system be like? Then when we were discussing the civilizations we've been studying, we talked about how some of the languages that never developed their own written system were eventually written down using some other writing system. From this I've concluded that the best writing system would be one that can record in any language. I've also conclud
ed that this ultimate writing system has actually already been developed! It's called the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), and it's been around since 1886, when it's earliest form was developed. The IPA was standardized across all languages in 1888 and continues to be revised occasionally, with the most recent update having taken place in 2005 (source).
In my mind, IPA is the ideal writing system because it is so straightforward. There is a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds. In other words, there are no sounds represented by a combination of letters and no letters that represent a combination of sounds. The wonderful thing about this is that there are no spelling exceptions!! You never have
anything like the -ough in standard English that Dr. Petersen talks about - where that one combination of letters has so many different pronunciations (tough, though, through, cough).To record all these sounds separately definitely does require more symbols than written English uses. This means that when you type IPA, you have to go to the insert symbols section of your word processor or use an online keyboard. Not so long ago, some IPA symbols were often just handwritten into texts. This image is from a text published in 1990.
Isn't that fun? If you tried the exercise, please comment and let me know what you think of IPA. Do you agree with me that it's a fantastic writing system? If not, why not?
Totally tried the exercise! I did the sentence "Chemistry makes me want to take a nap, but I can't because I have band practice soon." It was pretty fun...and interesting. I like that you don't have to worry about the silent e's at the end of a word with IPA and that the problem of the c being a s or a k is finally solved! Question, though: would everyone first have to learn English to write in IPA anyways?
ReplyDeleteI've seen it adapted to represent other languages, but mostly used by English speakers to transcribe foreign words correctly.
ReplyDeleteI wish I'd had this in French class. Those people ehave no idea how to spell things right.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (or En-tur-nash-ee-nul Fo-net-ick Al-fa-bet, spelled semi-phonetically, seems so useful, Alicia! It's great that other languages, like Spanish, have a lot of words that are spelled phonetically. For example, in English it's 'PHilosophy' but in Spanish it's Filosophia). Those darn ph's have always confused me, but after reading about the IPA, all the tricky combinations of words and their pronunciations, it makes a little more sense.
ReplyDeleteJenna: just to clarify, learning IPA is about learning what symbols represent what sounds. You can use it in any language. The chart I showed is specific to English only in that it only shows symbols for sounds used in English. The complete IPA has a symbol for every sound used in all languages.
ReplyDeleteI think that this system makes so much more sense than English. I met countless people on my mission who struggled and fought to learn just a little bit of English that would help them get a job to support their family. Having a system such as IPA would help people in those situations drastically and would help them improve the quality of their lives.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Scott that this language is much more logical than English. But the question is does that make it more effective? I was talking to Alicia about this with Japanese as well. Does a language's complexity make it any less effective as a language? I believe that both English and Japanese are very complex languages which as Scott said make them hard to learn. But I believe that they don't necessarily "make less sense" as a language than the IPA system. Because although they are quite difficult to learn, once learned they can effectively express and convey many more emotions and much more eloquently than basic, easy to learn systems.
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