Our man in Brussels wrote:
Dylan wrote:
I don't understand why there's so much focus on this system at all when included in the course are recordings of native speakers saying everything.
It's not a big deal. I'll probably mostly ignore it, like most people seem to. The amount of complaints it draws could be because it's one of the first things presented to the reader and it doesn't make much sense. When someone's planning on spending a year working through a book, it kinda tarnishes the first impressions.
The main use I've had for phonetic transcriptions is to verify whether two similar sounding noises in the recordings are the same or different. (And if they use IPA then I can verify if the sound I heard is the same or different to a sound I know from English or another language.)
Yeah, I've found it pretty useful for the same reason. And I guess if you're familiar with lots of other languages, the IPA would be useful for comparisons- good point.
One thing that puzzles me a little is that I've seen people on this board distinguishing between the sounds made by broad dh and broad gh, whereas Ó Siadhail makes no such distinction, at least not in his transcription. Does anyone know anything about that? I sure can't hear a difference between them but then that's a very difficult sound for me to get a hold of.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
