IPA: How does this daggone thing actually work?

[Fiery Diamond]

So I was in another thread where I got a little off topic. We got to talking about writing things how they were pronounced, which has two huge issues: 1) not everyone pronounces things the same way and 2) there's no good way of representing sounds. Now, the second issue should be solved if we go research the International Phonetic Alphabet, the IPA, right?

Wrong.

Using example words is never really sufficient for knowing how something like IPA symbols are meant to be pronounced, so I figured I'd go looking for actual audio recordings for IPA vowel sounds (since vowels are more difficult to convey than consonants in the English language; we actually have a relatively small assortment of consonants and a large assortment of vowel sounds compared to a number of other languages). Should be simple enough - find a site with audio, listen for sounds I want to represent, know what symbol to use.

Yeah, no.

As an illustration of my difficulty, behold: three pages on the same website with different versions of an audio chart for IPA which, if you listen, don't actually agree with each other to the extend of sometimes having drastically different sounds for the same symbol of even switching what symbol has a particular sound.

Oldest Chart
Chart 2
Newest Chart

So, here's my issue: if you can't even find a definitive IPA audio list, how is IPA able to be used? So many of the sounds that have different symbols are indistinguishable to my ear (or nearly so) that you can't possibly "just pick whichever one seems right." Furthermore, if there aren't any audio lists for merged sounds (like the vowel sound in "light" or the one in "laid" or the one in "loud"), how am I supposed to pick correctly for those?

And then there's the fact that there are other simple vowel sounds i can't find on those charts, like the vowel in "hope".

[Crow]

Came expecting discussion about beer; left disappointed.

[Razade]

Came expecting discussion about beer; left disappointed.

Dark ales are better.

[Eldariel]

So, here's my issue: if you can't even find a definitive IPA audio list, how is IPA able to be used? So many of the sounds that have different symbols are indistinguishable to my ear (or nearly so) that you can't possibly "just pick whichever one seems right." Furthermore, if there aren't any audio lists for merged sounds (like the vowel sound in "light" or the one in "laid" or the one in "loud"), how am I supposed to pick correctly for those?

And then there's the fact that there are other simple vowel sounds i can't find on those charts, like the vowel in "hope".

Well, for starters, speaking a language other than English would make your life much easier; so if you've learnt anything else in school, try figuring it out through those instead (assume a rough letter-to-IPA sign correspondence for most Indo-European languages). Learning IPA through basically anything else is much easier, since most languages have letters for most of their sounds while English does not - English has 25 letters (and a couple of combinations signifying certain sounds) but around 40-50 phonemes depending on dialect. Second, yeah, mostly speakers of languages that make distinctions between given sounds can naturally tell them apart; we gradually become desensitised to differences that do not occur in our native language around the age of 3-4. It's possible to learn them at a latter age (indeed, one can reach native-like command in a language learnt before the age of 13), but it doesn't occur automatically. But yeah, don't worry about not being able to tell all the sounds apart: I can't do it in spite of being conversational+ in 7 languages and a "professional" in the sense that while I'm a linguist, not a phonologist, I still use this toolset frequently and in the context of languages that might not even have a written form other than one based on IPA.

The pronunciation of "light" is simply spelt "laɪt". That is, the assimilation values and the diftong properties are approximated by writing the two consecutive vowels. "Laid" would be "leɪd" and "loud" would be "laʊd" or thereabouts in standard pronunciation. At least to my ear, "light" sounds like consecutive occurrences of "a" and "ɪ" so this sort of spelling makes intuitive sense to me. Hope would likewise simply be "hoʊp".

That said, vowels are a continuum: sadly IPA only has signs for the archetypal vowels (there's too much absolute variation as well as individual variation to properly nail it down to the T). Generally, manifestations of said vowels tend to fall a bit off from the archvowels but sometimes they're spelt using the closest approximation with signifiers describing, in which direction the pronunciation differs (not in English, granted).

[Winter_Wolf]

Came expecting discussion about beer; left disappointed.

I don't even like IPAs but I was also disappointed this wasn't a beer topic.

[The Great Wyrm]

English has 25 letters

Isn't it 26?

[Eldariel]

Isn't it 26?

Right, true. Okay, so 26 letters for 40-50 sounds.

[Aedilred]

Isn't it 26?

W doesn't count. Shifty letter, never trusted it.

[Maelstrom]

W doesn't count. Shifty letter, never trusted it.

Don't forget about 'Y', don't get me started there! Can't even figure out if it's a vowel, consonant, or even an 'I'! Then come along ye olde pretenders and replace the stately Þ with the horrid 'Y'!

Oh, and yes, I must admit, I, too, came looking for beer :guilty: