seeking advice

[THOMAS D CRAVENS]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Total agreement here -- IPA is absolutely essential. (no opinion on Brit or
 American spelling conventions.)

Tom Cravens

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" <ratcliffe at TUFS.AC.JP>
Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 7:47 am
Subject: Re: seeking advice

> ----------------------------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
> shouldchange 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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>