G: welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's
enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm
Gretchen McCulloch L: and I'm Lauren Gawne
and today we're going to be talking
about the International Phonetic
Alphabet. But first-- it was International
Mother Language Day in February and even
though it was a couple of weeks ago now
on February the 21st I think it's still
worth saying a belated 'Happy Mother
Language Day' to you Gretchen G: Happy
Mother Language Day to you! Which we are
wishing in our of monther languages of English, which is
kind of boring L: both wishing it our mother
languages. Do you have any other heritage
languages that you wish to acknowledge? G: I
mean technically Scottish Gaelic is
probably a long time ago a mother
language for me but my ancestors were
lowland Scots so it's a really
long time ago L: well happy Scots Gaelic
day G: do you have any other? L: my grandmaternal
language is Polish and thanks to generally typical Australian
attitudes towards non-English speaking
in the 1960s that wasn't passed on to
any of my mother's generation at all so
yeah it's still a very recent part of
our family history. I'm the only
grandchild who ever learnt enough Polish
to speak with my grandmother in her
mother tongue G: oh that's cool L: which is cool I
wish I still spoke that much G: well I
mean it's cool that you learned it, it's not
cool that no one else did L: it's probably
questionable how much Polish I remember
today. And yeah, I always like to think of my nan
and my lack of opportunities to learn
Polish on February 21st. What do you been
up to or what's coming up? G: well by the
time this episode goes out I will have
been to South by Southwest where I will
have done a panel with Erin Mckean and
Jane Solomon and Ben Zimmer L: how are you not going to
like die of fangirling at people?! G: Because I've
already met all of them anyway? L: awwww I'm so jelly
G: but they're really cool and I'm really
excited to be on a panel with them, we're
going to be talking about 'word curation,
dictionaries, tech, and the future' which
will happen by the time you guys get
this episode so you can check out the
hashtag that I'm sure will have action
on it and we'll link to that in the show
notes L: I'm really excited for
that panel I'm looking forward to it
hopefully - is it going to be
recorded? Am I going to be able to see it
as a non South by Southwest attendee? G: I
think there's going to be an audio
recording on soundcloud that South by
Southwest is going to put up online
because they've done that for previous
years. So I can't
promise that they'll do that again but
they seem to like doing it in previous
years, I don't know why they wouldn't do
it again so we'll link to that if we
have it L: yay, excellent! [theme music]
so there's a problem when you learn to spell
English, which is that it's really hard
to spell English L: it's really a lifelong
learning process as far as I'm concerned
G: it's a lifelong learning process. You
know some languages don't have
spelling bees because their spelling
systems are so consistent they don't
need them - we can only wish! So the
English spelling system is especially
ridiculous, it's got silent letters, it's got
something around 14 vowels but only five
letters to write them in. My favorite
demonstration of this is there's a
phrase that has kind of all of the
English vowels you just recite
and the phrase goes - I have to have to say it in
a non-rhotic accent because it only
works that way - the phrase goes 'who would
know aught of art must learn, act and
then take his ease'. And each of those
words has a different vowel in it L: cool! G: and
that's one way of remembering the vowels
L: that's a nifty sentence G: yeah but if you try
to write that down in English it's hard
L: with the English orthography that we
have, or the English writing
system - orthography - that we have G: and
spelling systems are also inconsistent
across different languages even
languages that are consistent in themselves
are often inconsistent when you compare
them with each other, so a language that
has, you know some languages use the
letter J for the /dʒ/ sound [as in Jane], some
languages use it for the /ʒ/ sound
like French [Jean], some languages use it for
the 'y' /j/ sound like German as in 'Jan' or
'Johann Sebastian Bach', some languages use
it for the /x/ sound as in Spanish
like 'Juan'. There's a whole bunch of
different sounds you can use the same
letter for depending on your
language L: there's a really great tumblr
post that kind of encapsulates this
variety in the ways different alphabets
that are based on the same alphabet
English is based on use their
orthographies in different ways which
we'll link to. When I first read this I
was like oh look someone's just posting
in Norwegian or Danish or something,
but then if you sit there and read it
and you know the orthographic
conventions in different languages it
says something along the lines of 'I
wonder if English speakers will notice
that I'm writing this in English but
using the spelling conventions of my
language' G: and yeah a whole bunch of
people have certain different versions
of it there's a Finnish one which is
pretty good, there's an Irish one which
is fantastic
L: it's good because once you know what the
phrase is that gives you a feel for what
the conventions are in different
languages and for example I found the
Polish one really easy to read and then
for some of the others I was just
basically guessing because I knew what
the sentence was, and it really nicely
illustrates this problem that we have
that we all learn different spelling
conventions for different languages G: and
we're not the first people to have
noticed this problem in fact people have
been realizing this problem for quite a
long time as long as people have been
writing with different systems and it
just became especially apparent as
writing systems became standardised in the
1700s and 1800s when dictionaries are
becoming popular and people were
starting to write in a standardised sort
of way and looking at other languages
and realising that they're
standardisations were converging on
something different L: I really love that
historically there
was no consistent spelling conventions,
and so in Old English text we actually
have a good idea of the different common
literate dialects of people who
lived in Mercia or people who live in
Cumbria and because of the way that they
wrote English really reflected the way
their accent worked, and once spelling
systems became standardized that stopped
being the case G: and it also became
really difficult people for who are trying
to learn English because even if you
learn the spelling systems, when you
pronounce the words the way they look
and people look at you like "that's not
actually how it's pronounced" and you're like
"how was I supposed to remember that?"
Various people came up with various
proposals for spelling reform for either
just like a more phonetic way of writing
English in total, or for ways of
adapting English words so that it could
be used for specialised purposes like
people who are learning the language,
or people who want to write down specific
things and annotate exactly how they're
said L: and some people went for massive
'let's create an entirely new alphabet',
some people just wanted some small
reforms. So Noah Webster is probably one
of the people who had the most
impressive effect on English especially
on American English, so it was Webster
who decided to take and consistently use
conventions like 'i-z-e' instead of
'i-s-e' and using words like colour without
the 'u' instead of with the 'u' as
part of this attempt to make English
spelling more realistically reflect the
language that was being spoken G: yeah
there were other British reformers
that were trying to do this, so there was
a guy named Henry Sweet who came up with
an alphabet called the Romic /ɹomɪk/ alphabet or
the Romic /ɹɑmɪk/
alphabet, I'm not actually sure how to
pronounce the name of this alphabet,
which... L: if only was written down some where
in a consistently pronounceable script! G: if only!
He didn't seem to actually write the
name of his own alphabet anywhere in
a consistent script so that's a shame.
And that was based on mostly Roman
letters but with adaptations for sounds
that English had and Latin hadn't. And
then there was Alexander Ellis who was
apparently the real-life origin of Henry
Higgins from 'My Fair Lady' L: Really?! G: I don't
know that's what Wikipedia says L: ok
because I'm going to invoke the
supremacy of David Crystal, if that's
okay. I don't know if Crystal officially
trumps Wikipedia, but in his book called
'Wordsmiths and Warriors' he says if
Higgins is anyone it has to be Daniel
Jones who is a phonetician who is very
influential in terms of like codifying
the vowel system, so what we think of is
the modern International Phonetic
Alphabet vowel space kind of started
with Daniel Jones' cardinal vowels G: I
mean I don't know it could have been a
composite or something L: I think to be
honest that the most likely is it's,
there was a genre of gentleman academic
at the time who's very interested in
these topics and there was a lot of work
being invested in generating some kind
of writing system that accurately
reflected speech G: yeah and so they made
the International Phonetic Association
in the late 1800s, which confusingly
enough also has the acronym IPA, and they
had some meetings and they were like
yeah we need to come up with a system
for this L: so the IPA is where the IPA was
created G: yeah I hope they were all
drinking IPA but I can't guarantee
that L: in an our reenactment that
is definitely what's happening G: yeah when
we when we all get dressed up in
historic costume (bagsies Henry
Sweet), then we will all drink IPA
L: I'm Daniel Jones apparently - no I'm
going to dress up as Cardinal Vowel, I
always thought that would be a great
linguist costume G: ah that's great! Were
cardinal vowels invented yet? L: well it was
Daniel Jones who did that, I don't know
when he was working G: oh ok good
L: I mean we'll have to have a whole episode
just talking about vowels and how they work,
but that was kind of a thing that was
figured out at the time G: yeah and they
came up with some principles for future
development of this international
phonetic alphabet and these were; each
symbol should
have its own distinctive sound and the
same symbol should be used for the same sound
across all languages L: so instead of
having the J sound sounding like /dʒ/
or /ʒ/ or /j/ or /x/ across
different languages, every time that
sound was used it would be used for
exactly the same sound G: every time that
symbol was used L: yes sorry every
time that symbol was used it would be
used for the same sound G: They also came up
with some principles that influenced
which symbols ended up being chosen for
which sounds. So they decided to use
as many ordinary Roman letters as
possible and to have a very minimal
number of new letters and to use what
they called quote unquote international
usage to decide the sound for each
symbol L: so they wouldn't, the symbol that
we have for 's' they wouldn't decide 'oh
we're going to make that the sound for
'l' because we're crazy people' G: yeah
well they didn't do that but the other
thing is, so look at the vowels, the IPA
vowels look kind of weird from an
English perspective. So the IPA uses the
letter that we think of as 'i' to
represent the 'ee' /i/ sound and uses the
letter we think of as 'e' to represent the
'eh' /e/ sound and so on. And this doesn't
make sense for English, but it does make
sense when you look at a whole bunch of
other languages like Spanish and Italian,
and the way the Roman alphabet has been
used for non European languages
generally falls along these principles
as well. So they said look even though
we're English speakers we're going to
not do the English things L: okay so they
really did go with this kind of
international general preference GL yeah I
mean they're still eurocentric, they're
still starting with European languages
and kind of working their way outwards,
but they were at least not
completely anglo-centric, which is
helpful here, because English does some
weird stuff with its sounds L: yeah so we only
have 26 letters in the English alphabet,
a few more if we kind of pull everything
that we have across European languages,
and there are so many more sounds that
the world's languages can make, so once
we've run out of kind of standard
letters where do we go from there? G: so
where we are from there is often Greek
letters or latinised looking versions
of Greek letters because those were
familiar to these creators. Another thing
that they did was they would rotate
letters. and this was partly because the
shapes are still familiar if you do that
and partly because this is the 1800s and
people were typing with metal bits of
type, and so
if you just make a lowercase 'e' and turn
it upside down you can just take your
new character and flip it and rotate it
and then you can print this and you
don't have to cast a new metal type
bit L: I have a really nice example from
Australia, so I was at a workshop the
other day and a colleague was showing me
a booklet of Kamilaroi, so it's a
language from the New England area of
New South Wales in Australia, and William
Ridley was working on this language in
1856 so this is even before the IPA was
codified and so these languages have
a sound like an English sound but you
may not notice it in English because
it's a sound at the end of words like
'sing' or 'bring', that /ŋ/ sound, but that
sound can occur anywhere so you can have
it at the start of the word as well as
at the end. So this /ŋ/ sound now has a
symbol in the IPA that looks like an 'n'
with a little tail and it's called an 'engma'
G: yeah kind of like an 'n' with a 'g' tail
shoved on it L: yeah, and he is one of the
first people who adopted this symbol for
use in his describing languages work so
1850s before kind of 1880s and the IPA
was established, but this symbol had
begun to be used for this /ŋ/ and it
makes sense because it's like an 'n' and a 'g'
squashed together, but when he sent it to
the typesetters for his booklet they
didn't have a /ŋ/ and so they just
turned a capital 'G' upside down which
sounds a bit crazy and it looks a bit
crazy it looks like it's just full of
upside down 'G's, but it meant that that
was a way that they could represent this
/ŋ/ sound. Apparently he sent it to some
other journal in Europe and they just
turned it all into a 'z' G: wow, a 'z'!
L: yeeeah G: wow that's really bad! yeah so I
guess that's why it's good that another
principle the IPA was the look of the
new letters should suggest the sound
they represent, so once you've learned
the kind of basic ones and if you see a
couple languages and you have a sense of
what's used in other languages then you
can often guess fairly accurately what
an IPA letter is going to be like, so
it's better to have a symbol for /ŋ/'  that
looks like an 'n' and a 'g' shoved
together because that's how it's often
written in different languages, a bit like an
'n' sound, a bit like a 'g' sound. And one of
their principles was that diacritics
should be avoided where possible so
adding extra little like accent marks or
other types of small bits on top of
letters
was something that they tried to avoid
for their basic sounds, and that was
supposed to be if there's a modified
version of a sound, but not for like
basic sounds in general. So in the
current IPA you still get these rotated letters
which must make the IPA very difficult
for people who are dyslexic, you get small
capitals, you get Greek stuff like the
Greek letter theta is used for the 'th' /θ/ sound,
and the runic and ultimately Icelandic
sound /ð/ so the symbol that looks like
an 'o' with kind of a cross above it that
is from Icelandic that used to be in
English before the Normans came, that got
borrowed back in, so borrowing from other
established systems because then you
could just go to Iceland and grab some
of their metal type bits, I don't know, or
go to Greece and get some from them L: it's
something that was a problem with the
original metal type but it's also been a
problem for a long time with modern
software. So for a long time computers
didn't really have fonts that expanded
beyond the kind of really basic font set
of like English and French and some
diacritics and some special things and
so you have some older software and if
you look at older digital documents you
have you know people using capital 'A' for
particular vowel sounds, vowel characters
in the IPA that are symbols in the IPA
that aren't in regular type or you know
schwa would be a capital 'E' for example
G: yeah you can even see this on some old
websites, people will use a different
system that only uses the basic 26 plus
capitals to do the extra stuff or maybe
some places use like an 'at' sign @ to
indicate a schwa, so because we've also
had a different version of this encoding
problem with technology L: so it's not
just the metal type it's also modern
computing G: it's also the byte! It's the type
and the byte! L: type and the byte have been a
problem, it's getting better G: it's
getting better thanks to Unicode,
thanks Unicode! So yeah so their first
version from 1887 was designed to work
for sounds in English, French, and German
because that's what they were doing at
the time, and it's a bit weird compared
to the modern IPA because we're used to
seeing it as a chart and they just gave a
list of symbols and keywords that stuff
was found in in various languages, so
they'd say something like okay this 'a'
symbol is going to be like the sound in
English 'father' or this symbol is going
to be like the sound in German 'Bach'
and they just give the key words like
sometimes you see in the front of the
dictionary and then
later, so they kept on working on it in
the late 1800s and then by the year 1900
they expanded, published a version that
included Arabic and other languages
sounds were found in those and they
finally publish it as a table for the
first time L: so why would it be in it
table, for people who aren't familiar
with the International Phonetic Alphabet?
G: so the cool thing about the table, so our
English alphabet that you learn as
a kid, 'ABCD' is in no particular order
that's just the order it is, that's just
for historical reasons but the table is
ordered based on how the sounds are
produced. So sounds get produced with
constriction in various parts of the
mouth and with different degrees of
constriction once you're in that place
L: so it's a nice feature based table of
all the kind of combination of features
in particular places G: yeah exactly and so
if you superimpose a mouth
onto that table, it looks a bit weird
but you can kind of do it and you kind of
see where each of the sounds is produce a
little bit L: so it's the left edge of the
table for people who are familiar, I
think i have a link somewhere to an
audible IPA chart so you can click
on the sounds and hear what they sound
like, but the ones on the very left side
are all produced with like just the lips,
and the very front of the mouth, and then
the ones at the very right edge are
kind of all the way back at the far back
of the mouth, and that's things like your
velar sounds like /g/ get made
with that soft bit there or your uvula like
right down in the very far back in the
mouth G: yeah so it goes from your lips to
like through your mouth along the roof of your
mouth and  back into your throat
and the weird thing about this
version from 1900s is that it's a mirror
image of that so it has 'p' and 'b', your
labial sounds on the right instead of on
the left L: oh no that would confuse me so much G: you
can see an image of it on Wikipedia, it's
all like typewritten, we'll link to that L: wow
awesome G: but it looks really
weird and they also have the vowel chart
and the consonant chart on the same chart
L: right, okay! G: they just have like a really wide
section where the vowels go L: how weird! G: yeah,
which is something that changed later
L: so there's now a table for the
consonants, there's a few consonants that
don't even fit, and then there's a vowel
chart that's a separate thing, but it's
very similar principle like it starts at
the front of the mouth and goes back
G: yeah and what's cool is that the version
that we use today is actually very very
similar to the version that was
solidified in 1932 it's which was quite a while ago,
you know there were some
adjustments made in 1989 and then
after that it's just like 'oh well we
need to add this one symbol because we
found some languages that use it' but
pretty much it stays very similar for
quite a long time once it's established
L: nice. So it goes from left to right all
the different places in the mouth, and
then from top to bottom there are
different ways just looking at the
consonants, the ways to pronounce
different consonants so you have like a
stop so the very plosive like
/b/, /k/, /d/, /t/ - we call them stops - along one
row and your nasal sounds so your /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ sounds
along one row, and in that that way G: it
kind of goes in order of how much you
need to drop your jaw. So if you think
about the sounds in the top row your
mouth is the most closed when you're
making like a 'p' or a 'b' you have to
literally close your mouth for a second,
you have to close your lips to make those sounds,
whereas if you're making a sound like
'r' /ɹ/ you don't have to actually close
anything you're letting the sounds kind
of come through so the 'r' /ɹ/ sounds are
near the bottom, but the /p, b/ sounds are near the top L: I
mean that's the thing I found super neat
about it when I was studying the IPA in
undergrad was just how elegantly it
captures all these different parameters
in one table G: yeah just to realize that
someone has thought this through, thinking
'ok what are all the permutations you
could put your mouth in and which ones
people actually use and let's organize this'
L: and English just uses one subset of it
G: yeah, but every language is going to pick
some subset of the sounds in this table
or if it doesn't we have to add
something so one of the cool things that
you can do with the IPA because it's
based on different positions the mouth
can be in. So Lauren Ackerman who has a
blog 'Wug Life' has made a table of emoji
with their mouth positions as if they're
making sounds in the IPA so you could
look at this table and she has things
like you have surprised emoji has kind
of a round mouth and so that's like an
'oo' /u/ sound because you have to round your
lips for that and the 'ee' /i/ is kind of like
a smile, and it is completely ludicrous but
also great L: these are the important things that
linguists do with their downtime G: yeah
and the other cool thing you can do with
the IPA is because you can use it to
represent mouth sound is you can write
beatboxing in IPA, because beatboxing is
done with the mouth L: oh yeah, that must look
amazing! G: it looks so cool I have a
picture of it, of a chart that some
beatboxing linguist
researchers made L: that is awesome G: so we'll
link to that too G: I mean we both both
have a lot of love for the International
Phonetic Alphabet, obviously it's
something we engage with a lot in all
variety of linguistic work. I think it's worth
mentioning though that like, it's
not... it's really annoying sometimes. G: yes!
L: particularly as I mentioned in terms of
that font encoding on computers is
still a problem, you still occasionally
will get proofs
back from a publisher for a journal
article and all the engma, they're
all mysteriously like really ugly still,
we haven't quite got there with them
being part of the font set for every
single font G: yeah it can be hard to write
on a normal keyboard L: yeah it's also really annoying
to write on a normal keyboard sometimes.
Also especially in the vowels, like I
get a bit of like IPA anxiety when I use
IPA and share it with people publicly
especially for long passages of
text it's not always that easy to
transcribe things G: yeah and as fluent
writers we've gotten used to the
Byzantine nature of the English spelling
system and we we also know how to talk,
but thinking about how you talk in a
more conscious way to say 'what sound am
I saying there, what sound am I saying
here' it can be hard to write extended
passages in IPA. I know if I make a blog
post that has an English sentence or two
in IPA, I'll inevitably get some
corrections from a linguist or something
that says I think you're probably producing
this sound here and I'm like oh yeah
you're right because there's no spell
check for IPA L: yeah and also even if there
were a spell check, you and I would
produce different IPA transcriptions for
our own pronunciation of things G: yeah and
you know we're pretty good with
understanding people's different
pronunciations of things when we're
hearing them, because I guess humans have a
lot of evolutionary practice at that but
reading things we have a fairly
standardised system and so I remember
when I was still a young linguist back
when John Wells's phonetic blog was
active and he's a well-known British
linguist who's involved in
some of the history of the IPA and he used
to keep a blog and he would sometimes
write full posts in IPA and they were
really interesting for me to read to
practice but I also found them very
difficult because he would be transcribing his
own accent and he was British and so he
wouldn't write all these 'r' /ɹ/ after
vowels that I would, so I had to figure out
where all these /ɹ/ were supposed to be.
I'd end up reading his post out loud to
myself and hearing the British accent
being like oh yeah this is what he's
trying to say
L: you would be saying it in his accent? G: but
I'd be saying it in his accent because
you can write someone's accent, which
is the cool thing but also the more
challenging thing about reading it L: there's
also, linguists talk about like broad
IPA and narrow IPA transcription so like
you can do a kind of rough-and-ready,
mostly correct but actually if you are a
phonetician and you're looking really
closely at how people actually
articulate things you discover all kinds
of things that you need to transcribe to
capture the correct and accurate
transcription but which people don't
hear kind of consciously or would find
really weird when you've represented it
to them G: yeah or don't notice L: and there's often
like phonological processes, like when
you tell people that the vowel that they
use in the middle of 'handbag' is actually,
for native speakers if they say it
quickly, it often becomes 'hambag' G: 'hambag',
like a ham sandwich L: yeah, like a bag-o-ham.
If you've write it out in IPA people are
like that's incorrect, and you're like 'well that's
what you said' G: there's a fun story about
that, so English speakers also often say
'sammich' instead of 'sandwich' because the
'm' the like the nasal sound becomes
like the 'w'. Except for Anglo-Italians; so
in Canada there's like Italian
Torontonians and Italian Montrealers
and they have a particular, at least people who
grew up in that communities often have a
particular accent. So in that accent they
say 'sangwich' instead of sammich' because
in an Italian the 'w' sound is
kind of more velar whereas in
English it's more labial and so it
like pulls the nasal along with it to
be a different sound L: and when you start
transcribing things in really close IPA
you can see those distinctions, it's really
cool G: yeah and we often just reduce the
vowels in words that were saying quickly
or in the small unimportant function
words we often reduce the vowels all
to schwa or something like that L: I still
remember in in my undergraduate class
learning that English vowels will
often go to being this is schwa,
this /ə/ sound in unstressed syllables and
I just it made me realize that for a
certain set of words that's why I was
really bad at spelling them because you
sit there and you're like 'is it amu... amuni
ammunition?'. Is it that, like is that I
mean is it ammunitiON or I mean is it ammunitiAN and it's
not a great word but it's the first one
that came to mind but like for these
vowels where you're like, because it's unstressed and it's a
schwa, any of the vowels that it could
possibly be become that, you have to
memorize what the spelling is because
your pronunciation doesn't help you. And
that's why I tell people I'm bad at
English spelling, not my fault it's the
fault of my stress system and orthography!
G: well the other thing is is sometimes
English orthography gives you useful
cues to distinguish between certain
words or when a suffix who's added sometimes
the stress changes and you have to
recover vowels that are kind of there
but had turned into schwa, so if you
take a word like 'electric' which becomes
'electricity' in some senses it's weird
that it's spelled with a 'c' and not with
a 'k' or an 's' because 'c' is completely
redundant, it always makes a different
sound but it does reflect that when it's
'electric' with the 'k' sound and then
when you add an '-ity' to it, the 'k' sound
becomes an 's' sound because that's what
happens with 'c', but it doesn't happen with
'k' or the vowels also change 'electric',
'electricity' you get different sorts of vowels.
So it's kind of useful to have some of
this stuff there that was
historically there and has changed in it's
sound but it creates this extra layer of
complication and it's you know, you can
get used to speed reading because a word
always looks like the same spelling
whereas if you had to speed read a whole
bunch of different accents then you'd
like meet someone and you might be
harder to speed read,
but then again it's harder to learn it
if you have an accent that's less
similar to the spelling system L: we still love
it for all of the occasional detriments
that occur G: we still love it and it's
still useful to have it as an option to
write something very specifically I find
if I'm meeting somebody and I haven't
heard their name before and I can
write it in IPA and then I can pronounce
it correctly when I'm talking back to
them, people like that L: that's handy. The journal
of the Phonetic Association, or journal of
the International Phonetic
Association, used to accept articles
written in IPA, which blows my
mind. So people would write about some
feature of phonetics and they would do
the whole thing in the IPA and I think
it very quickly became apparent that
that was more labour both to produce and
to consume than it was like any
benefit in doing that for many of the
reasons that we've already mentioned
G: like 'hi I'm going to write about like
long vowels in Sussex' or something and
like that whole thing would be in IPA L: yes
I think academics clearly had more time on
their hands 50 years ago.
G: I mean to be fair I have played IPA
Scrabble, which is like Scrabble, but you
do it in IPA L: you just kind of argue for your
own pronunciation or do you have to do it
in your own dialect? G: yeah so the way that
I've done it is I combined IPA Scrabble
with descriptivist Scrabble, which is a
little bit like those bluffing games,
so as long as you can convince other
people that it's a word then it's a word
L: ah I like that G: yeah because like
dictionaries are arbitrary authorities anyway,
and so you know you can use whatever
means you have at your disposal to
convince people that it's a word and of
course choosing an obvious word like dog
or something is going to be easier to
convince people than saying L: blergh?
G: something.. blerg is a word and 'honestly
it means a color kind of like gray and
blue at the same time' but you can try!
L: there are heaps of cool things people have
done with the IPA including someone has
made a set of IPA Scrabble G: yeah so I
posted on All Things Linguistic a set of
frequencies and scores that you can use
for IPA Scrabble tiles because I made it
with a friend in undergrad and we had
figured this out, we just cut out bits
of cardboard to make them, and then some
undergrads at Yale came across this and
decided to get their friend who has like
a wood cutting machine to cut these out of
these gorgeous wood tiles and they sent me
some photos which I've also posted, you
can see those, they're amazing, so yeah so
someone has made a wooden IPA set that I
still have not played but I think it'd
be really cool L: IPA characters also make for
popular tattoos because they're quite
beautiful so I like I've definitely seen
a schwa tattoo and I've seen a glottal
stop which is a little bit like a
question mark - it's our logo! G: it is also
our logo. Do people get whole words in
IPA or like phrases in IPA tattooed on them? L: mmm I
haven't seen any but if anyone has we
will definitely be interested in seeing it
G: if you know any IPA tattoos please send them
to us L: well I've seen a couple but not that long
G: there's also a whole version of Alice in
Wonderland that's published in IPA, so
this takes us back to the Journal of
Phonetics, and she's like
talking to the Mad Hatter and so on
and it's all in IPA. The weird thing about
this particular version is that this
publisher decided to also have capital
letters L: huh, interesting G: and of course they
had to make capital versions for all of
the IPA letters L: wow that's commitment
G: because you know if you think about it
capitals are redundant,
they don't add any extra phonetic
information to a sound, so the IPA
doesn't use them and sometimes the IPA
uses small cap versions of a letter to
indicate a different sound because it's
an extra symbol. And so instead
this person decided that no, if I'm
going to write it as a book I'm going to
make capitals and so yeah it's very
interesting the table there L: yeah,
there you go. My IPA nerd craft activity
was to cross stitch the consonant chart,
did that quite a few years ago and
it's a very useful adornment in the
office when you just need to quickly
refer to some of the symbols. I also,
I was going to do the vowel chart
but the modern vowel chart is very very
complicated and messy which is why i
went with Jones's much more elegant
original cardinal vowel G: ahh so you did a simplified
version L: yep I'll put links to those in the
show notes G: and you also did a cookie
cutter right? L: oh yeah! I  made a schwa cookie cutter
for Christmas last year,
just what you need, and it's a 3d
printable cookie cutter so you can also
download that design and print your own
and make your own gingerbread schwa or
shortbread schwas G: that's great. There's
also an IPA version of the game 2048,
which came out when the when the game 2048 was
popular so that's the one where you like
slide the tiles around and you try to
combine to make bigger and bigger things
and so you start with a schwa and then
you combine them to make an engma, which
makes no sense phonetically, and then you
combine them to make an esh. Again so this
won't teach you anything about phonetics
L: but it goes into more and more elaborate
and less frequent forms G: yeah it does get
to more and more elaborate stuff, like
you end up with like a click or
something, a glottalised bilabial click or
something like that L: right, it
doesn't officially teach you anything
about the IPA but it is a good excuse
for a distraction G: you should not do it
if you're a student and you're about to
write an exam on the IPA that is not a
good way to procrastinate L: official warning! G: instead you should
play IPA scrabble L: much better way! G: which
will teach you some more about the IPA
L: or read Alice in Wonderland G: there's also a fun
sketch from the sketch comedy show
John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, which is
a sketch where some characters encounter
some skeletons and the skeletons are
pirates but these skeletons cannot tell
you that there are pirates because they
don't have any lips, so they cannot
produce the 'p', sound so they call
themselves 'kirates', L: Awww
G: and the characters
who encounter them are very confused, like
'what are you?' 'we're kirates, I said we're kirates!'. Anyway I am
probably not doing it justice but you
should listen to it I couldn't think to how
to do that L: excellent G: although they don't
make the point which I kept thinking was
like 'well if the don't have any lips, they probably
don't have any tongues either, so they probably
can't produce any sounds because they're skeletons'
L: the probably don't have any kind of
pulmonic air flow ability G: like all they
can do is clack L: yup, Morse code? G: yeah! So
skeletons can communicate with us in Morse
code, there we go L:  yeah. I was going to say
sign language just because like I seem
to want to mention sign languages
because they're always cool G: oh yeah please do
L: it's also worth pointing out that like
obviously the IPA is for all spoken
languages if you haven't figured that
out by this point in the podcast, I'll just make
that abundantly clear. So for all oral
languages. In individual sign languages
people talk about like phonemes
and morphemes in terms of hand shapes so
there are some hand shapes that are
possible in some sign languages that
don't occur in others and so you have a
similar kind of basic feature sets that
you can refer to in in sign languages
but because it uses a more complex modal
articulation system and it isn't just
limited to the mouth then it's a bit
more complicated cross sign
linguistically but they do have  their
own kind of equivalent of phonemes or
phonetics G: there's a couple different
standardised sign transcription
systems, I don't know if any of them have
caught on at an international level in
the same way to the IPA has, I mean to be fair
there there are other phonetic
transcription systems that aren't the IPA,
it's just the IPA now has caught on more
than the others. But you can transcribe
sign, there's a couple different ways of
doing that and there's also, so sign
languages have alphabets that they use
to borrow words in from spoken languages
among other functions and there are sign
equivalence of at least some IPA
characters because I've been to
linguistics conferences and seeing
interpreters signing talks and they will
sign a particular IPA sound when the
person who's giving the presentation is
talking about that particular IPA symbol
L: there you go G: yeah I cannot recite any of them for you
but I remember noticing it and thinking 'huh,
ok I guess that's what they're doing L: man awesome! [theme music]
L: for more Lingthusiasm and links to all the
things mentioned in this episode go to
Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us
on iTunes, Google Play music, SoundCloud
or wherever else you get your podcasts.
You can follow at @Lingthusiasm on
Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I tweet and
blog as Superlinguo
G: and I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and
my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com.
Lingthusiasm is created and produced by
Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our
producer is Claire and our music by The Triangles.
Stay Lingthusiastic!
