Phonetic Matching

The idea that "shore" and "sure" are pronounced "almost identically" would depend pretty heavily on your accent. The vowel is pretty different to me.

Also, the matches for "sorI" and "sorY" would seem to me to misinterpret the words as having a vowel at the end, rather than a silent vowel. If you're using data meant for foreign surnames, the rules of which may differ from English and which might have silent vowels be very rare depending on the original language, of course you may mispronounce English words like this, saying both shore and sure as "sore-ee".

I'm sure there are much better ways to transcribe orthography to phonetics, probably people have published libraries that do it. From some googling, it seems like some people call this type of library a phonemic transcriber or IPA transcriber.

IPA is the most-used tool by linguistic researchers for encoding pronunciation in a standardized way. IPA is criticized for being a little bit anglo-centric and falls short for some languages and edge cases, but overall it performs pretty well. (learned from an ex who studies linguistics.)

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. And I think linguists aren't always sure about them either. IIRC, I saw a video by Geoff Lindsey suggesting Americans don't really have a /ʌ/ phoneme. Most people who have written about this write as if we do. (By the way, Dr. Lindsey's YouTube videos are some of the more interesting content I've found about English phonetics)

For other languages I have exposure to, IPA seems to make more sense. Possibly I have a bias in that they're not my native language, so I can analyze them instead of internalizing them. But also, they have cleaner phonetics, cleaner orthography, and less regional variation of phonemes.

> For other languages I have exposure to, IPA seems to make more sense.

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

The first and last of those are essentially guaranteed to be false.

> Possibly I have a bias in that they're not my native language

The more likely bias is that you just don't know very much about those other languages.

You assume too much. I'm talking about languages I'm fluent in, can read and write, etc.

You'd have to be insane to think that, for example, IPA for Spanish isn't easier than IPA for English vowels. In contrast to English, most Spanish regional pronunciations are about consonants. And the orthography is very regular. 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.

> You assume too much. I'm talking about languages I'm fluent in, can read and write, etc.

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.

> And the idea that there's less regional variation in Spanish than English is not plausible.

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.

> 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.

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.