Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 07:35:54 -0700, Philippe Caquant
<herodote92@...> wrote:

> For ex, I would suggest that they would include at
> least, say, 12 columns of examples, each of them being
> reserved to one natlang: English, US English, French,
> German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Hungarian,
> Japanese etc. Then in every cell one would give 2 or 3
> examples of that sound in that language, if possible
> in different positions inside a word (ex: 'S' in
> French: chimie, déchirer, hache)
The problems with this (which you yourself seem to gloss over as if
they'll magically solve themselves as long as nobody looks directly at
them) are, first picking the twelve lucky languages (which could easily be
the work of a lifetime, to identify twelve languages with are both widely
known, and which between them show all the sounds of the IPA), and second
dealing with dialectical differences. I, for instance, know enough French
to know what a nasalised vowel sounds like, but could not tell you the
difference between a Parisian and a South-Western French <r> without
seeing it written in IPA, which would probably also require more than a
few seconds' searching on the Internet.

You suggest that anyone willing to learn the IPA should first master
several dialects of a dozen languages. I propose that the easiest way to
do so, would be to learn the IPA beforehand rather than afterwards.




Paul

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