36.2931, FYI: Ease of Acquisition: Comparing Musa to the IPA

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2931. Wed Oct 01 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2931, FYI: Ease of Acquisition: Comparing Musa to the IPA

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Date: 29-Sep-2025
From: Peter Cyrus [pcyrus at musa.bet]
Subject: Ease of Acquisition: Comparing Musa to the IPA


The Musa Academy is offering to sponsor a study comparing the ease of
learning the Musa Alphabet to learning the IPA.
The Musa Academy is a Public Benefit Corporation dedicated to the
development and promotion of a Universal Alphabet.  You can read all
about the Musa Alphabet at www.musa.bet.  One particular use of Musa
is to transcribe pronunciation, for example in dictionaries, reference
material, educational material, phrase books and tourist guides, maps
and signs, in the press, and even in academic linguistics.  In that
role, which we call the Universal Phonetic Alphabet, it’s described at
www.upa.bet.
Musa offers several advantages over the IPA, but the most important is
how easy it is to learn, to remember, and to use.  The difficulty of
the IPA is its fatal flaw, the reason it’s not more widely used.
Since Musa is completely featural and somewhat iconic, it’s much
easier.  But how much, exactly?  We don’t know, and we’d like to find
out.
The proposed study should focus on the simplest and most important
task of a UPA: to guide unprepared readers to a correct pronunciation
of names, words, and short phrases, both in English (e.g. comfortable,
hyperbole, anemone) and in foreign languages (e.g. Reims, München,
Gijón, Kyiv, Guìzhōu).  Because learning material for both the IPA and
Musa is most available in English, it’s OK for the study to be
restricted  to English speakers, both native and L2.
The main challenges in designing such a study are measuring the
quality of the subjects’ pronunciations, choosing how the two
alphabets are learned, and measuring the effort involved.  If you have
good ideas on how those challenges can be handled, you’re a good
candidate to conduct this study.
Your proposal should include methodology, budget, and schedule, and
should plan to include subjects from a variety of backgrounds.  You
will retain all rights to publish.  Of course, the Musa Academy will
furnish all the Musa resources you need.

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Phonetics
                     Writing Systems

Subject Language(s): English (eng)




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