Phonetic Transcription For The Masses

The other night I was chatting about work and other business with this fellow I met, and linguistics came up of course, and he seemed to be familiar with several aspects, particularly Phonology. Apparently, he did some acting work, and he had to learn phonetic transcription, so he would be able to imitate dialects, and presumably to pronounce other things he might not be sure of. He gave a few casual names for characters, but sadly I don't remember them. Phonology might not be my favorite area of linguistics, but I guess he found it quite unpleasant.

Unpleasant as it might be, I'm always glad to see people learning about phonetic transcription, because I really do think that it's something useful to know. Especially because English does have such a poor relationship between spelling and pronunciation (well, if you learn a whole lot of rules about etymology and such, it's pretty predictable), I find it to be relatively practical. It's always the worst when I'm trying to figure out a pronunciation for a word and I need to read the dictionary format, or something like gahb-LEE-uh or something that I can't quite figure out the nuances of.

At the university I am at, they have elective seminars on IPA in case students want to brush up or get ahead of the curve, but maybe one day they'll work them into some kind of general classes. It's also a shame that most classes, for undergraduates at least, seem to spend a class or two early (or even more!) on going over IPA. It just seems wasteful; they should spread that joy around.