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21
Reading phonetics and phonology
Despite the word ‘international’ in its title, the International Phonetic
Association was for many years a European association, with very little influence
outside Europe. Even within Europe, because the Association’s alphabet was
not finally established until 1899, it had competition from local phonetic alphabets
used in Europe by dialectologists and in the Americas by anthropologists
and linguists writing down the languages of the New World. Some of these
alternative phonetic alphabets have persisted until the present day, others have
gradually been replaced by the International Phonetic Association’s alphabet.
As late as 1991, Brink et al. were using the Dania transcription symbols (though
they also give IPA ‘translations’ for their symbols in an introductory section).
In any case, until very recently, using a phonetic alphabet involved almost
insuperable problems. Although printers were in principle capable of setting
IPA symbols, they frequently did not have the symbols in all type sizes, they
were unused to setting them and many were not very good at it, symbols had
to be entered by hand in typescripts and were frequently difficult for printers
to read (with the inevitable result that there were many typographic errors in
transcriptions). While in principle these problems were lessened by the advent
of micro-computer-based word-processing in the 1970s (or, for most of us, the
1980s), in practice it took a lot longer for suitable fonts to be available to all
potential users. It is only since the mid-1990s that the pressure has been
removed for writers to restrict themselves to the symbols of the Roman (possibly
Roman and Greek) alphabet, for technical reasons.
There were also less technical reasons for avoiding IPA symbols. Many publishers
felt that readers had enough difficulty coping with a single alphabet, let
alone two, and so chose to mark pronunciations with a system of respelling,
using easily available characters from the keyboard (but giving them specific