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Michellekj
Joined: 11 Jan 2013 Posts: 6
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Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 4:00 am Post subject: Standard orthogrphy vs phonetic alphabet. |
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| Why do linguists use a phonetic alphabet as opposed to standard orthography? What would be a variety of answers in this forum? |
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Sally Olsen
Joined: 08 Apr 2004 Posts: 1229 Location: Canada,France, Brazil, Japan, Mongolia, Greenland, Canada, Mongolia, Ethiopia next
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Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 1:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Seems quite obvious that a phonetic alphabet can describe many languages with the same orthography to be compared and accurately understood by many people who know that phonetic alphabet. Why are you interested? |
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fluffyhamster
Joined: 26 Oct 2004 Posts: 2974 Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
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Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 6:42 am Post subject: |
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| As Sally says, you can transcribe any language regardless of its orthography if you use IPA instead. IPA is also a good way of showing the pronunciation of words that may have a difficult or ambiguous pronunciation e.g. I read a book everyday - Past or present tense for the 'read'? IPA would disambiguate which context. IPA is also a fallback for learners, especially when no native speakers are available - the learner can look words up in dictionaries and find out how to pronounce words from the transcriptions provided. |
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