@dancingtreefrog One thing using þ and ð would do is make it easier for English people to grasp Welsh pronunciations—Welsh uses <dd> for /ð/ and <th> for /θ/, so they're both <th> in English spelling. It would make it obvious which is which.
@timtfj I remember learning the International Phonemic Alphabet when taking literature at university. The idea of an alphabet aimed at recording the actual "as pronounced" sound of any language appealed to me. Of course, it has difficulties with differences in pronunciation, which translate to different spellings, even within the same language. But I thought the *idea* was great.
@dancingtreefrog @timtfj
I'm not in that field at all but wasn't the point of having a phonetic alphabet to precisely have different spellings when ... pronounced differently?
@benjamin @timtfj Understood. I think part of it was to capture "the sounds the speaker actually used" vs "the official sound of the language".
I just think it makes studying individual words more difficult if you have to adjust for how a speaker in one part of the UK (for instance since the UK is jammed full of dialects) from the same word as spoken by someone else in the UK.
Sometimes I think the real purpose was so singers could sing any language without understanding a word they said! 😉
@dancingtreefrog @benjamin Well I'm not an expert either, but the phonetic alphabet is used a lot in writing about things like regional accents or pronunciation changes over time.
There are different levels of precision too—phonemic transcriptions that indicate speech sounds but not what accent to say them in, or stricter transcriptions that try to show the exact sound made.
@dancingtreefrog @benjamin Talking of different accents, I had a weird experience at university when a new student I'd not spoken to before came into the shared kitchen and said "Have you got a cap I can borrow?", which I was baffled by. "A *cap*?" "No, a cap! You know, to drink out of . . . ! " He meant a cup, but I'd misunderstood by thinking I'd hear a Northern accent when actually he had a strong London one.