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Essay:Screw IPA
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This essay is an original work by Thunderkatz. It does not necessarily reflect the views expressed in RationalWiki's Mission Statement, but we welcome discussion of a broad range of ideas. Unless otherwise stated, this is original content, released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 or any later version. See RationalWiki:Copyrights. Feel free to make comments on the talk page, which will probably be far more interesting, and might reflect a broader range of RationalWiki editors' thoughts. |
- Note: I would've named this essay "Fuck IPA" but I couldn't remember if we have naming standards or shit like that.
- Note: Except for the fucking absurd amounts of swearing, I'm serious about every point in this essay. And some of the swearing.
Fuck IPA. Seriously, it looks like dogshit. Let's look at a random example: Hercule Poirot. According to Wikipedia, you pronounce it like so: /ɜrˈkjuːl pwɑrˈoʊ/ WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN? A sizable portion of those letters aren't even fucking Latin. How the fuck do you pronounce a miniature hourglass? Fuck IPA.
Fuck IPA. I shouldn't have to learn a goddamn foreign alphabet just to be able to pronounce a few fucking words on Wikipedia. Eyjafjallajökull? Pretty tough to pronounce. Well guess what. IPA makes it fucking harder. [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatl̥aˌjœkʰʏtl̥] What the fuck is that shit? Oh, and guess what else. That's the fucking ICELANDIC IPA. There isn't even an English IPA pronunciation for that word, apparently. "But I thought the I in IPA stood for international." Tough titties, bitch. MOST LANGUAGE GROUPS HAVE THEIR OWN GUIDE. You know what that means? IPA ISN'T FUCKING INTERNATIONAL, unless you count the fact that the fucking English pronunciation is in a FOREIGN FUCKING ALPHABET. Also, that means to pronounce all the Polish places, you have to also learn the fucking Polish IPA. And if you then want to pronounce the Irish places, you have to learn the fucking Irish IPA. THERE SHOULDN'T BE A PRONUNCIATION GUIDE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE ON A FUCKING ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA PAGE. Fuck IPA.
Fuck IPA. How hard is it to make a pronunciation guide that's intuitive and takes only a basic knowledge of the language the article is written in? I did it in like 10 minutes last night while trying to go the fuck to sleep. <high pitched whiney voice>Oh, but you won't have all the different fricative intricacies and complex plosives of IPA. Also, morphologies, glottis, and suprasegmentals. Phonation diacritics</voice> That doesn't fucking matter. YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BE A FUCKING LINGUIST TO FUCKING PRONOUNCE THE GODDAMN WORDS ON THE ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA. Fuck IPA.
That is all.