[html4all] pronunciation, homophones, and homographs

[Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)]

Robert J Burns wrote:

> Thanks for the reply. That's certainly a point-of-view I'd like to  
> hear form.  suppose in many ways English has a greater need for a  
> separate phonetic alphabet than other languages, 

Not really : consider Chinese (Pinyin, BoPoMoFo) and
Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana) -- when a language is based
on ideographs, a phonetic alphabet is /essential/ for descriptive
/ pedagogic purposes ...

> but when someone  
> wants to encode phonemes from languages other than their primary  
> language, it makes sense to me that they would want to use graphemes  
> derived from their own familiar primary language.

Yes, that is the idea I wanted to bounce off my Chinese friends.
It is not /certain/ that they are in any way unhappy with the
IPA as-is, so I would be interested to learn their point of
view.  (They are all teachers of Chinese as a second language).

  One example I can
> think of is even the use of a Latin Letter H for an unvoiced glottal  
> fricative which matches how that letter is often used in English.  
> However, for someone whose primary language is Spanish a Latin letter  
> J may make a better mnemonic. Likewise for speakers of Arabic, Urdu,  
> Korean, Hebrew, etc. 

Agreed.

Using appropriate mnemonic graphemes for each
> language makes the use of a phonetic alphabet easier and more likely  
> to be widely adopted.

Less certain of that : the IPA has /very/ widespread takeup.

> Another important issue is that phonetic alphabets change over time —  
> sometimes swapping one grapheme for another in the representation of a  
> particular phoneme. By encoding the phonemes themselves (and not the  
> graphemes representing the phonemes), the changes to a phonetic  
> alphabet can be handled by updating fonts while maintaining the text  
> document completely unchanged. 

Agreed.

Similarly, a user can change from one
> phonetic alphabet to another simply by changing fonts (like from the  
> IPA to the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet).

Also true.

  Also, input systems can be
> localized to the users needs so that a user may use their usual  
> keyboard or a character input palette depicting the graphemes familiar  
> to their primary language even while the input system is actually  
> inputing phoneme characters and not grapheme characters.

A good point.

> Finally, I think this could lead to better international interchange  
> of phoneme text. Every user can view a phoneme text document in the  
> phonetic alphabet they're most familiar with. 

OK, but what we need here is evidence that the IPA as-is is not
the phonetic alphabet with which some users are most familiar.
I suspect that Chinese / Japanese academics are very familiar
with the IPA, whilst "normal" Japanese / Chinese citizens are
far more familiar with Katakana/Hiragana/Pinyin/BoPoMoFo.

> For others, they simply hear the synthesized  
> speech uttering the phonemes.

This last point is important, but can that not already
be accomplished using Unicode/IPA ?

> As I said before this is a departure for Unicode that I expect would  
> face some resistance. Unicode has, up until now, been focussed  
> exclusively on encoding graphemes as characters: they might have  
> trouble even thinking about a character as a phoneme (and not a  
> grapheme). However, I think this is a natural evolution for Unicode  
> and since it wouldn't need to use any of the precious basic  
> multilingual plane code points, it shouldn't be much of a burden to  
> devote maybe 512 code points to phonemes out of the 800 thousand code  
> points still available for assignment in Unicode.

Definitely unsure you can express the world's phonemic collection
in 512 slots !  But the departure (for Unicode) is so radical
that I fear it is doomed from the outset, which is (a) why I'd
like the input of non-Latin native speakers, and (b) to consider
whether (if they agree that the IPA is sub-optimal) whether we
can find a way to express phonemes without requiring a change
to Unicode.  Remember that both the IPA and Unicode have a
/very/ well established user-base; we are even more of an
edge-case than Flicker in this context :-)

** Phil.