Re: New Try from a New Guy

On Sun, 15 Dec 2002 14:42:14 +0000, Joe <joe@...> wrote:

>Heh.  I speak something very similar to standard British English, so I have no
>problem with it. But you can't expect everyone to know the IPA, so what else
>are you going to use?
Ideally, you'd want sound samples. A lot of language learning books these
days come with cassettes. The problem with that approach is that when these
books are sold separately, it doesn't do you much good to read "listen to
the examples on the cassette" when you don't have it. And this lets them
get away with even vaguer descriptions of the sounds.

I use IPA, examples from English and other languages, and audio samples on
my Tirelat page (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Tirelat/script.html). Even
this isn't ideal, since IPA is still only an approximation, and I speak
Tirelat with an accent (since I don't have any native speakers to correct
me). But recording and uploading sound samples takes time, and not all web
browsers are set up to display IPA. And listening to a sound doesn't give
you much help in trying to produce it (although it helps to let you know if
you're on the right track in following the descriptions of the sounds,
especially tricky ones like vowels and diphthongs. Listening to the Dutch
"ui" diphthong on a tape, it doesn't sound quite like what I expected from
reading descriptions in books.)

I've always preferred books that make an effort to describe how the sounds
are produced, even if they don't use technical terms. The Klingon
Dictionary actually does a pretty good job of this, although it ends up
being more verbose than it needs to be. Compare "Klingon D can best be
approximated by English-speakers by touching the tip of the tongue to the
roof of the mouth at a point about halfway between the teeth and the velum
(or soft palate), that part of the roof of the mouth that is rather gooshy"
to the more technical "Klingon D is a voiced apical post-alveolar (or
retroflex) stop", or more briefly, "/D/ -> [d`]". I think you could get
away with "Klingon D is similar to English 'd' in 'day', but with the tip
of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth".

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