Phonetic Matching

None of that takes anything away from what I said. The more likely bias is that you don't know much about the languages you're referring to. Whether you can read or write them doesn't even speak to these questions.

"Cleaner phonetics" doesn't have a meaning. And the idea that there's less regional variation in Spanish than English is not plausible.

> If you give me the correct spelling of any word and a short description of where the speaker is from I can give you the IPA with remarkable accuracy, a task that would be very difficult for English.

Do you usually notate that [d] and [t] in standard Spanish are generally dental rather than alveolar?

IPA is almost never used with a concern for the phonetic accuracy of the symbols. It's almost always used to indicate phonemes. You can even read John Wells arguing vehemently that correct IPA for English should use the symbols "e" and "r" because those are familiar to people who use the English alphabet.

I didn't say there was not variation. I said there was less of a specific type. Specifically there are not phonemic vowel variations as in English. In terms of consonants, some regions have extra consonant phonemes such as /θ/ or /λ/. Some have a tendency to omit some consonants in some positions. Every other difference is around which allophones get expressed preferentially.

> Do you usually notate that [d] and [t] in standard Spanish are generally dental rather than alveolar?

Typically I've seen it notated that way between [] but not between //. It's an articulation detail rather than phonemic.

This is honestly a not very intelligent point, you're just doing trivia on Spanish phonetics now. I know these things too. They're not at all relevant to my point.

Here are your exact words:

>> But also, they have cleaner phonetics, cleaner orthography, and less regional variation of phonemes.

>> You'd have to be insane to think that, for example, IPA for Spanish isn't easier than IPA for English vowels.

If you don't want to defend what you've said... don't just pretend that you said something completely different.

I might also ask whether you're sure that the different varieties of Spanish actually exhibit less variation in their vowels than the varieties of English do, as opposed to the impact of this variation being muted by the much smaller count of vowel phonemes.

As for this:

> I've always found IPA to be deeply confusing for English, because different accents have different historical vowel mergers, so I am never sure about vowels.

> If you give me the correct spelling of any word and a short description of where the speaker is from I can give you the IPA with remarkable accuracy, a task that would be very difficult for English.

Those two claims directly conflict with each other. The second one is more correct, in its first half. If you know your target dialect, you can produce conventional IPA for any given word. The orthography of English usually makes this easier by preserving information about the historical pronunciation of the word. If what you want is to produce IPA for an English word without knowing the dialect it's going to be pronounced in, that's no more possible in Spanish than it is in English, and you've already noted this fact.

> This is honestly a not very intelligent point, you're just doing trivia on Spanish phonetics now. I know these things too. They're not at all relevant to my point.

What point? What do you think you're complaining about, if not trivia on English phonetics?

Try articulating an actual problem with the use of IPA for English that, in your opinion, doesn't occur in every other language.

> Specifically there are not phonemic vowel variations [in Spanish] as in English. In terms of consonants, some regions have extra consonant phonemes such as /θ/ or /λ/. Some have a tendency to omit some consonants in some positions. Every other difference is around which allophones get expressed preferentially.

Going purely from Wikipedia...

> For those areas of southeastern Spain where the deletion of final /s/ is complete, and where the distinction between singular and plural of nouns depends entirely on vowel quality, it has been argued that a set of phonemic splits has occurred, resulting in a system with eight vowel phonemes in place of the standard five.

Yes, in Andalucía the vowel that precedes an aspirated /s/ changes to a different allophone of the vowel. It doesn't cease being an allophone of the vowel. If you ask a speaker who aspirates or omits their /s/ they'd say there's an /s/ there. That's why the /s/ can fully re-emerge if there's a vowel after it. It's not a phonemic difference, it's more like the /s/ is difficult for them to articulate in that position and that fact sometimes bleeds into the vowel, similar to /r/ for UK speakers of English. I think most dialects of Spanish do something like this with /s/ in that position, it's just a lot more frequent in Andalucía or the Caribbean and a few others.

I came close to mentioning this exact phenomenon but I didn't want to lengthen my comment on really "in the weeds" shit that isn't very relevant.

There's also the fact that in northern Mexico, I've heard the allophones they select for vowels are pretty different from most of the rest of the Spanish speaking world. I didn't mention it because I already said ... No phonemic difference.