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

[hkim.livejournal.com]

Explain it using the word 'situation'.

Same way's I always demonstrate a Kiwi accent using the phrase 'fish and chips'.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

After the sound it just produced, I'm going to have to take my tongue out back and shoot it.

[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.

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

This is a great resource for it, but it’s something that’s difficult to pick up without face-to-face instruction from someone who knows it well, at least if your own accent isn’t RP or unspecific-North-American.

One thing that may help you in this case is that a lot of the dialectal variation in English is a matter of changing diphthongs (double vowels); so I might say [noʊ] for “no” while an Australian might say [noy]; I can’t reproduce the exact thing you describe there in my mind's ear, so no actual transcription from me this time, I'm afraid :-( . (Even that would be of limited usefulness if your Canadian friend can't read it.)

[ex-agname.livejournal.com]

You can use this!
http://www.eduquery.com/archives/ipa.htm

If you can find the appropriate keystrokes for generating the symbols (or have a lot of patience copy and pasting), that is.

[piratejenny.livejournal.com]

This is why I couldn't do the learning Irish CD. I needed a class with real people to help out with that. Of course, it only works with one dialect. (And I'm taking a break until the fall semester anyway, due to work insanity and summer hours.)

[ailbhe]

Haigh naigh braighn caigh.

[silme.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know the best way to teach it. I learned some of the international phonetic alphabet back in high school when we were being taught some linguistics in Spanish. Did you know that are about six ways to say the letter 'm' in Spanish? Add an additional one for n, since it can have the tilde over it. I didn't know it either, and I think I've forgotten most of it since it was back in the '70s when I learned it, but it was a very useful way to learn how to say things correctly.

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

Another thing is that Nina probably knows the basics already, since in civilised countries it's used as an important part of language teaching, and since good dictionaries published in Europe (including the UK) use it as the pronunciation guide, and I'm quite certain she hasn't been working on a "ask-Drew-every-awkward-thing" principle in learning English. Which is not to say she knows all the crazy stuff, like how to transcribe a glottal stop, or an ejective click.

[pagesandpages.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know what "Caigh" means?