WTF with IPA

IPA excites me. Not India Pale Ale (though liquor in general does make me rather joyous), but the International Phonetic Alphabet. To the average English major, IPA is sheer and utter hell. I, however, find IPA to be borderline orgasmic.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of it, pop over to the Wikipedia page on IPA. Yes, I realize that it is long and winding and full of subsections. And no, we're not going to cover everything in that article. I just wanted to show you that it's important enough to have a big Wikipedia article, and that it's more important than India Pale Ale because wikipedia.org/IPA goes to linguistics, not booze. Though frankly, I enjoy both.

My god, these are vowels?

So wtf? Why the hell should you give a shit about some oversized alphabet full of symbols that are nowhere to be found on your keyboard and manage to look like a toddler Photoshopped some Russian font? Because IPA, much like meters and liters and grams, is a benchmark for linguistics. That does not mean that we (and by we, I mean me and the other geeky linguists who know IPA) use this assortment of symbols to measure languages, however they do allow us to transcribe sounds accurately.

Again, wtf? Why do you care about transcribing sounds? Transcription is handier than you think, or at least... I think that you think. Aside from it's very common application in speech pathology (speech pathologists often use IPA to transcribe a child's speech and then work off of the errors to improve said kid's speech), IPA is fucking wonderful when you need to learn a foreign language.

It avoids that god-awful attempt of a pronunciation guide that you'll find in a French phrasebook. Let's pretend you're in France. You need to know how to ask for some train tickets. You're in Marseilles, and you need a nice round-trip ticket to Paris (in French, you'd ask, "Un aller-retour pour Paris, s'il vous plaît." Now, here's what your phrase book will tell you:

an ah-lay ruh-toor poore pah-ree, see voo play

Say that to the average French citizen, and you'll get some dirty looks and possibly a ticket for Lyons instead of Paris. Now, if phrase books would just fucking use IPA, you would see this:

œ̃ a.le ʁə.tuʁ puʁ pa.ʁi si.vu.ple

Ok, still, wtf? You still probably can't read that. And I'm not suggesting that you spend tons of time learning IPA (it took me a while, I admit), but I am suggesting that you don't write it off as an annoying part of your BA in English literature.

I suppose the point is, IPA is rather kickass for us linguists (or whoever the hell else uses them), and it's damn useful when you need to disambiguate English words in the dictionary (assuming the dictionary uses IPA) or pronounce something from your phrasebook so you can get that pork-kabob you want from that Parisian street vendor (though honestly, any meat that is coming from a cart is pretty sketch to me; enjoy it at your own risk)