Phonetic Alphabet?

[gothwalk]

What's the best way to go about learning the phonetic alphabet? I've just realised, trying to explain in text to a Canadian colleague, that trying to render a Northern Irish accent in the mundane alphabet is wholly impossible. The greeting that you'd write as "How's you?" gets mangled into "Hyee's yi-e?", and still doesn't convey either the sound or the fact that it sounds pleasant.

Comments

[trouvera.livejournal.com]

Are you talking about the International Phonetics Alphabet?

I learned a teeny tiny bit as part of my voice lessons over the last few years, but I'm not sure it will really help in your situation. If the reader doesn't know the signs and symbols the resulting texts is just as off-putting as a standard text approximation. Perhaps perusing their archives and looking for a recorded sample?

On a related aside, one of the funnies stories I ever heard was told by a school counselor colleague from west TX, who had traveled to Ireland with his wife on vacation. Apparently the wife and the innkeeper (female) spent several hours getting progressively less sober as they entertained each other with their respective accents. Of course what had started out being intelligible if odd sounding at the beginning of the evening needed significant translation by the end.