IPA in spreadsheets (was: antedating "hobo" 1885)

[Tom Zurinskas]

Lots of luck with your world of wingdings, Nathan.  Meanwhile there's a real world out there.  It doesn't do wingdings or Unicode.  In fact newspapers as well as the US Govt for phonetics use a workaround notation because academics have failed to provide a useful English friendly one.

I could care less (but don't) about your guesses.  supply them with data and your saying something.  Meanwhile check out IBM's Writing to Read system of the 80's.  Even k-1 kids can handle English friendly phonetics.

Do me a favor and retain your guesses to wingdingland where I hope they might do some good.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
see truespel.com




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> Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 23:25:18 -0400
> From: Nathan.Sanders at WILLIAMS.EDU
> Subject: Re: IPA in spreadsheets (was: antedating "hobo" 1885)
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Nathan Sanders
> Subject: Re: IPA in spreadsheets (was: antedating "hobo" 1885)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On May 28, 2009, at 10:36 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>
>> Heck of a point, Nathan. But looking at anything in wingdings
>> doesn't look so good. Does it? And using only "letters of the
>> alphabet" as truespel does shouldn't be much heartburn to other than
>> the wingdingers.
>
> Oh, it's certainly a minor issue. I'm just trying to help you correct
> the inaccuracies and emptiness of some of your claims about Truespel.
> "Spreadsheet-friendly" and "email-friendly" just aren't all that
> meaningful in a Unicode world, and your continued use of these
> expressions betrays your technological naivete.
>
>> You're right about the multi-letter phonemes. You have to adjust
>> for that in the search or filter process.
>
> It's a huge adjustment to make and requires more than basic knowledge
> of search string syntax (which varies from program to program).
>
> Since I regularly search transcriptions, "not search-friendly" is, in
> my opinion, a significant (essentially insurmountable) drawback for a
> transcription system.
>
>> True it's a pain in the butt, but the notation is at least English
>> friendly enough for kids to learn and that's the key.
>
> As far as I know, there are no kids on this list (and if there are,
> they presumably already know how to read). Truespel may or may not be
> useful for helping children learn to read (I suspect not, since it's
> just a second system for them to learn on top of regular English
> spelling), but it's certainly completely inadequate for serious
> linguistic usage, especially for describing dialects (the nominal
> topic of this list!).
>
> You might have better luck peddling Truespel to elementary school
> English teachers (or perhaps home-schooling parents), not to linguists
> or other professionals who need transcription systems to represent
> finer phonetic distinctions than Truespel can make.
>
> Nathan
>
> --
> Nathan Sanders
> Linguistics Program
> Williams College
> http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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