What is the reason we don’t use the international phonetic alphabet when writing things?
In: Other
Because nobody would be able to understand it, and nobody would want to write with it?
The thing about the IPA is that it was developed to be universal. It tries to represent all sounds in all languages with as much precision as possible. This is really useful for academic work, but not so much for actual communication, for a variety of reasons:
* No language uses all possible sounds, so every language uses its own alphabet to represent the sounds it does use, which is easier to learn
* Many sounds in many languages are different from each other, but close enough that in practice they can just be represented with the same symbol and it’s fine
* Many words in many languages contain sounds that have either changed over time or are subject to some pronunciation shift that changes how the word is actually pronounced compared to the spelling. IPA would try to transcribe this accurately, but that would just confuse everyone
* People already have keyboards that have a limited number of symbols
Latest Answers