seeking advice

[Cecil Ward]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Johanna Nichols wrote:

> So I vote for picking something readable and typable and close to common
> practice

Johanna said it herself, "something". The problem is what is the "something" to be, it’s as vague as that.

Johanna Nichols' advice is sensible, but I disagree, speaking as a victim of various old textbooks where I had a devil of a job trying to guess what the system of transcription in use actually meant. Even if an author makes some arbitrary non-standard choice, how is the reader meant to interpret that choice and be confident about their understanding of it.

So as a novice student, and victim, rather than an expert, my plea is "Enough. Stick to IPA. Finally its time for clear standards."

Johanna is right about the practical problems of making use of IPA and Unicode, but I suggest that we should be finding ways of making them more usable, rather than just accepting the inadequacies of old technologies. After all, outside of academia, Microsoft Windows NT and its successors have been completely Unicode-based for ten years (down to the currently shipping Windows Xp product), so the excuses for not using these technologies are already getting more slight.

Do authors really want to spend time *explaining themselves* and do users really want to spend time studying these definitions/explanations?

Regards,

Cecil Ward.