• Rogue@feddit.uk
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    17 days ago

    How does one actually read these? Wouldn’t phonetic spelling be infinitely more digestible?

    • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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      16 days ago

      I don’t see a reason to spell it phonetically when it is a real word (forge in esperanto). A phonetic spelling would also only be more digestible to readers who know the language the phonetic spelling is tailored at (phonetic spelling is language specific as different languages use different ways to represent different sounds).

      ĝ is simply the english sound of the consonants in the following words: “john”, “gem”, “jar”. And j is pronounced as the y in “yes” and “yoink”

      The diacritic would clear up confusion, because “g” without the diacritic has different sound (like the g in “gamma”, “girl”, “go” in english). The diacritic as a bonus would also makes it clear that it isn’t supposed to be pronounced it as if it were in english, because english does not use the ^ diacritic. It would also extinguish my annoyance at seeing a misspelled word being used as a trademark.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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        16 days ago

        A phonetic spelling would also only be more digestible to readers who know the language the phonetic spelling is tailored at

        Indeed, it would be digestible to 1.5 billion people instead of 100k.

      • Rogue@feddit.uk
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        15 days ago

        Is anyone able to read IPA without that key? This is where I get lost. It’s an entire new language for a very specific thing so I can’t imagine anyone but language scholars finding it useful

        • Elsie@lemmy.ml
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          15 days ago

          yeah I can read without the key, it’s not that hard, and it’s not a new language, it’s just a script that unambiguously maps phonemes to “letters”.

        • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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          15 days ago

          The ones used for English? Sure. When it comes to other languages I certainly don’t know all of them though.

          Though, that is at least partially due to me learning English as a second language so I’ve looked at these a lot in dictionaries.

    • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip
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      16 days ago

      There’s no universal “phonetic spelling.”

      Every language and its user have unique accent and they will intreprete phonitic spelling differently.

      • Caveman@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        There is one, it’s called the IPA or International Phonetic Alphabet and is used mostly by linguist. The IPA spelling changes based on dialects within the same language and if you know all the letters and are able to pronounce them you could in theory read a text written in IPA and the listener could understand it.