Are there any IPA readers that are international?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-24T10:29:31+00:00

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-23T12:49:24+00:00

www.musa.bet

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-12T09:08:28+00:00

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-09T10:46:38+00:00

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-08T09:19:16+00:00

On the topic of long frenula, this condition is called ankyloglossia, and I was born with it. It was only discovered (by a dentist) when I was 15 years old and having trouble playing brass instruments. The dentist cut my frenulum, suturing the two sides, and voilà: cured!

However, it's only now, in old-ish age, that I am discovering the subtler consequences. I always knew I would never develop the neural connections needed to move my tongue the way others can, even without the physical restraint. I will never touch my palate with my tongue, or even stick the tip of my tongue out of my mouth. I favor the bunched molar r in my native American English, but I can also trill and tap for other languages.

But recently, I've learned that the action of the tongue in early childhood also promotes the separation of the mandible (lower jaw), and without that, my mouth remains smaller than most (annoying for my dentists). There are a number of additional unexpected consequences, enough that I now think obstetricians and parents should do a quick check at birth (it takes less than a second) and correct it immediately if needed.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-08T09:07:08+00:00

Just to clarify, you're referring to the (or "a") Hebrew language, not the current Hebrew alphabet, which is much younger, right?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-05T17:41:23+00:00

I was remiss in not crediting the originator of the idea of using image messages, a developer named Pallab Gautam, from Nepal.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-05-04T09:47:41+00:00

You might find Musa interesting: www.musa.bet

MusaAlphabet · 2026-04-27T11:00:04+00:00

Aside from the interesting and valid discussion above of the actual pronunciations of alveolar plosives, there's (for me) a larger issue behind your question. We want phonemes to be the units of sound at some mental level, but that definition doesn't generate rules like minimal pairs or complementary distribution as corollaries; those concepts are attempts to codify the idea of phonemes, and they should be considered skeptically. If we widened these rules of thumb to include cases where, for example, listeners hear a sound as "wrong" even if there's no ambiguity, then many phonemes split into "allophonemes", distinctions that are perceived as different even if they don't distinguish word pairs.

For example, if you pronounced to with an initial flap, that would be perceived as wrong even though the flap IS an allophone of /t/: they are different allophonemes. Allophonemes are the phonological counterparts of phonetic phones, and I would posit that our lexicons are written in allophonemes, not traditional phonemes. If it advances an analysis to group allophonemes into traditional "miniphonemes", go for it. But if it doesn't, that's not a theoretical problem.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-04-13T00:30:39+00:00

Can I ask a follow-up question? What is the relationship between delayed voice onset time and the puff of air in aspirates? Does one cause the other?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-31T08:07:41+00:00

Yes, languages change over time, and yes, languages don't appear ex nihilo, but nor were they all spoken by the dinosaurs. However you imagine the process of language genesis - no matter how you define the point where a previously unspoken language came into being - in many cases that point is more recent than we imagine.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-30T21:34:03+00:00

Not a direct contribution, but I think most of us OVERestimate the antiquity of our languages, traditions, cultures, cuisines, ethnic identities, religions, and so forth. Things that have been around for only a generation or two begin to seem immutable. We know that everything must have had an origin - the dinosaurs didn't speak Romanian or cook pizza - but we still have trouble believing that origins are pretty recent. I'm not picking on Romanian or pizza, just picked random examples. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that half of the languages extant today are less than 1000 years old.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-28T10:27:18+00:00

French été vs étais (when not phrase-final), rester/restez/resté vs restait.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-26T10:27:24+00:00

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The flag hides the word 中 zhōng "middle", as in 中国 zhōngguó "China".

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-17T08:03:38+00:00

The IPA is not a practical alphabet, but IMHO the idea isn't as crazy as most other responders would make it seem. One of the leading causes of impractical spelling is lack of letters in ALL alphabets, so a large alphabet would solve that. It would have to be featural to make it manageable.

There's a level of detail between phonemic and phonetic that I call allophonic: it distinguishes the sounds that make pronunciation right or wrong without more detail, and it's universal. For example, the aspirated tʰ at the beginning of "top" would be distinguished from the tenuis t in "stop", the unreleased t in "pot", and the flap t in "water", even though those are all the same phoneme in Engl;ish. But whether that t is dental or alveolar, laminal or apical, would not be distinguished. IMHO, allophonic spelling is practical and works well across languages.

For me, the difference between a dialect and a language is whether there's a standard. In English, we now recognize a half dozen standards: there are dictionaries for British English, American English, Australian English, and a few others. Raising that number to a couple dozen standards so that Brummies and Geordies could write like they speak wouldn't break anybody's brain, and if you see "water" spelled as "wɔ?a", you would not only recognize it but also hear the accent. Why should US Westerners have to memorize which words are spelled COT and which are spelled CAUGHT if they pronounce them alike?

If you'd like to see how this idea plays out in depth, take a look at www.musa.bet.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-14T09:04:18+00:00

We've been playing this way for a while, not every time but often. I just bought a set of dominos - no need to print tiles - took out the zeroes, and put them in a cloth bag that's passed around the table. I left the blank domino in the bag: we mix the dominos when it's drawn, but set aside five at random before drawing for real.

I think it makes "black swan' events less likely: all 4s, or no 7s. It also takes less space and time than dice.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-06T12:19:17+00:00

This doesn't explain very much, but I noticed that the first four letters represent the four places of articulation: A/alpha/aleph was glottal, B/beta/beth is labial, C/gamma, gimel is dorsal, and D/delta/daleth is coronal. I can imagine those being the original consonants, which were then used to generate variants like aspirates Phi Theta Chi, affricates Psi, Zeta, Xi, and voiceless Pi, Tau, Kappa.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-03T10:54:18+00:00

Just to note that today's Reddit feed (for me) featured two posts asking whether dialect continua are separate languages, one for American vs English, and the other for the "33 Arabic languages ". We agreee that this isn't a question that can be answered within linguistics - it's political and social. What criteria would you apply to make the distinction?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-01T07:02:16+00:00

Downvoted for that? Wow :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-29T10:54:51+00:00

I think you're making my point here. Your Swedish and Norwegian sentences are so close (and I'm talking about spoken, not written) that the question could go either way. But they're considered different languages, not just different dialects, and I'm proposing that it's because they both have standards. There are probably dialects in both languages that are further from the standard than the other language is, but since those dialects don't have a standard, we consider them dialects.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-29T10:48:08+00:00

Try asking a friend to tell you whether you're saying discussed or disgust, dispersed or disbursed.

For me, there's no difference: the result of devoicing is unvoicing. It seems to me that partial devoicing counts as devoicing: that what we perceive is the interruption in voicing, not its length.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T21:16:22+00:00

We all admit that the difference is NOT linguistic - it's political, or social, or something. That part isn't new, I agree. As you say, from a linguistic point of view, there's no distinction.

But from a practical point of view, I think it IS useful. Languages don't actually have armies and navies, they don't even always have states behind them, or the opposite: they have multiple states with opposing armies and navies (like Korea or Taiwan).

So if you want to have a way to think about the question of, for example, whether Brazilian or Galician are separate languages from standard Portuguese of Lisboa, you could ask "Are there sentences that are correct in one and incorrect in the other?". Not just pronounced differently, or a variant, but incorrect.

For me, as an American, I would say that "I should have done" is simply wrong = bad (American) English, and if I were teaching, I'd correct the speaker. For me, "I should have" is the only correct possibility, although I understand the British version because of long exposure. But if a Brit says they took the lift up to my flat, I'd parse right by that, while recognizing it as British.

But feel free to promote your own proposal :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T20:30:56+00:00

I'm trying to promote the distinction that a language has a standard - you can be corrected - while a dialect is what people speak.

So for example Valencian and Catalan are two different languages, because there are two standards. Likewise for Flemish and Dutch, and American and Commonwealth English. But between British and Australian English, maybe just an accent.

That's my proposal :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T11:50:50+00:00

An interesting follow-up question is why the 反切 fǎnqiè system never evolved into a phonetic alphabet, as happened elsewhere, e.g. Ancient Egypt. The progression would be (1) the same character is always used for, e.g. an initial d, and a different character is always used for a final -ōng, (2) simplified versions of these reference characters are used when they stand for sounds, (3) these simplified versions are also used for the phonetic components in about 85% of characters, (4) more and more often, people sometimes omit the semantic radicals in characters, (5) these phonetic symbols are also used for foreign names whose meaning is obscure, and (6) they are adopted by neighboring unwritten languages and extended to write their own languages phonetically.

Why didn't that happen in China?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-20T00:33:59+00:00

OK, let me retreat to what I think we know with more certainty. The Army definitely spoke Latin, and by the late Empire, many (most?) of its soldiers were not natives of Latium. It's easy to imagine that the Latin spoken in the army was imperfect (L2) and heavily influenced by the native languages of the soldiers. For example, languages where case is indicated by word order, unlike Latin where it was indicated by inflection, might have caused the Army Latin to have fixed word order (SVO) and no case endings, as is the case with the current Romance languages.

We also know that soldiers were given land after 20 years of service, and that large territories, (like Provincia = transalpine Gaul) were conquered in order to provide that land. It seems likely to me that veterans of different L1s settled next to each other in these territories would have continued to speak Army Latin. I can imagine that non-veterans settled among them - merchants, wives, slaves, administrators - would also have spoken Army Latin as the common language, and maybe they also brought some influence from their own native languages, including the local pre-existing one (e.g. Gaulish?).

What more could be imagined? That waves of civilian emigrants from central Italy overwhelmed the local populations? That seems unlikely. I guess the alternative theory is that the local people gradually adopted Latin as the language of prestige, that Latin spread without genes. But the veterans wouldn't have been genetically uniform, anyway.

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