msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:
On Sat, 16 Jul 2011, Peter Dyballa wrote:
like "hay" (or some other form of money) or different, like in German for
example? (That's the reason IPA was invented: it's completely clear.)
I think the point Michael was making is that because Cherokee is already
written in a phonetic script, transliterating it into a different phonetic
script the students don't know and don't need to know and requiring them
to learn that on top of the script they actually want to learn, would be
counterproductive. Bear in mind that the audience for his project is not
linguists who might already know IPA, but language learners.
I have some sympathy with this perspective, but as one who
has tried to learn spoken Chinese through the medium of
pinyin, I know only too well that such representations
can convey at best only a vague approximation to the truth.
The IPA has its drawbacks, that is true, and is more intended to
convey intra-language differences than inter-language, but it is
still almost certainly the best way in which to present the sounds
of a language to an audience with no previous familiarity with
the sounds of which it is composed.
In Michael's own examples :
ᏌᏊ: Sah-Gwoo
ᏍᎪᎯ: Skoh-Hee
the "ᏌᏊ" and "ᏍᎪᎯ" elements are fine for native speakers
familiar with the sound system, but the broad transcription
into "Sah-Gwoo" and "Skoh-Hee" does leave a great deal to
be desired, as Peter Dyballa suggests.
Philip Taylor
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