seeking advice

[Robert R. Ratcliffe]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>  The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is
> probably subject to even stronger feelings:  some suggest that the
> book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent
> examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage.  What do you
> think?  What is your opinion here?

To me this is like the author of a physics textbook asking if he should
change his metric measurements to feet, inches, ounces, quarts, etc. for
the American edition. If mount A is 974 meters and mount B is 2984 feet,
can you tell which is higher? If location A is 34 celsius and location B
is 93 fahrenheit, which is hotter? Consistent representation is a
foundational principle of scientific methodology, and the IPA is one of
the most basic and important tools we have. People who don't know how to
use it should not be doing linguistics on any level. If professors are
offering historical linguistics courses to students without linguistic
background, the IPA should be taught in the first week. There is no
alternative to it-- especially when we are talking about comparing
languages. There are of course various "traditions" of research in
particular languages or language groups with their idiosyncracies and
peculiarities. But none, as far as I know, has been systematically
codified, much less adapted to apply to all languages across the board.
The only reasons not to use IPA are 1) when the orthography is the
evidence (as often the case in historical linguistics) 2) dead languages
(like Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Geez, etc.) where there is
controversy about actual pronunciations and the use of IPA implies a
degree of certainty which is not possible. Sorry, maybe I'm a bit of an
IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument against it,
just pure academic inertia.

Looking forward to the new edition.

Best Wishes

____________________________________
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Asahi-machi 3-11-1, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534 Japan
ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp

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