seeking advice

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Lyle, I'm afraid my reply is likely to amount to more of a rant than a
piece of sober advice.  Please feel free to ignore my noises.  But I have
strong feelings about these matters.

First, there is no earthly reason to switch to US spelling.  Most of the
English-speaking countries use British spelling, and all of them are used
to seeing American spelling in all kinds of publications.  There is no
reason for Americans or anyone else to object to the sight of British
spellings.  American objections to British spellings are ignorant and
parochial, and those who raise such objections should be ashamed of
themselves.  This is true in any discipline, but it's doubly true in ours.
How can somebody who calls himself a linguist get the heebie-jeebies on
seeing a slightly different variety of English?  Do such people also panic
on seeing Shakespeare or Chaucer in the original?

The choice of spelling will make no difference in Britain.  If it's really
the case that some American instructors won't use a book with British
spelling, then I guess you have to decide whether selling a few more copies
is worth kowtowing to idiots.

On the issue of phonetic symbols, stick to the IPA.  American phonetic
transcription was invented for fieldworkers using manual typewriters.
These days, when all of us can use laptops with the SIL IPA font attached,
there is no longer any point to American transcription.  This creaky old
system is an anachronism; it should be given its gold watch and a decent
retirement.  Attempts at perpetuating this antique are strictly retrograde.

Apart from being a parochial curiosity, American transcription has one
obvious and very serious drawback.  It has no agreed form, and
transcription practice varies from user to user, perhaps most obviously
with affricates and fricatives, but not only there.  There is nothing
comparable to the IPA chart to which students can turn to learn the system.


As for the differing traditions in different language areas, there is
nothing to be done about this matter in a general textbook except to ignore
it.  Local traditions vary almost without limit.  For example, specialists
in Tibeto-Burman languages, I recall learning in my student days, use
orthographic <x> to represent schwa.  All this colourful variation must be
excised in a general textbook, which needs to stick to a single consistent
transcription throughout.

And I don't think giving transcriptions in two systems is a really good
idea.  This will surely be more trouble than it's worth.  Anyway, can there
really be an instructor out there who believes that students are going to
make careers in linguistics without learning the IPA?

Cantankerous of Brighton (but American)


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk