The phonological raincloud

I started reading an introduction to Hebrew a couple hours ago. (I’ve decided that my half-hour of language study each morning will be dedicated to Hebrew for the next couple of months. I’m itching to read the Old Testament in the original.) Now, the book looked nice at the outset, but somehow I overlooked one fault that bothers me about a lot of language texts.^* It’s the phonological transcriptions.

You see, most language texts try to use descriptions that make sense to the layperson, and so they give you such piffle as “it’s a long e,” but you don’t know if they mean an [i:] or an [e:] or something else entirely. It’s a muddle. I do of course try to interpret their meaning into something understandable — something precise — but usually I just feel like I’ve wandered into a phonological raincloud. I want IPA. I want precision, with clear, linguistic descriptions that don’t overlap. Is that really too much to ask?

Now, I do realize that most language texts are not aimed at linguists, and that’s okay. But the least they could do — this should be mandatory across the board — is include IPA so there’s no kerfuffle about what on earth they mean. I’m sorely tempted to take up writing languages texts if only to fix this remedy. Or at least to issue addenda to existing texts to explain it clearly.

Speaking of phonology and phonetics and such, any language learner who’s serious about their stuff really should learn the basic phonological descriptions, because it makes a huge difference in coming to terms with the sounds of a new language. And if you don’t have the sounds down, it’s rather hard to make the language stick. To really succeed at it, you have to drink the language down whole, and that means sounds, vocab, grammar and syntax, culture, and all the other trappings that come with being human.

Anyway, I’m going to spend some time in the library tomorrow trying to find a decent Hebrew grammar. With IPA. :)

* I promise I’m not nearly as ornery as this plethora of pet peeve posts makes me look. :)

Are you learning ancient or modern Hebrew? What grammar were you reading? Let us know what you come up with.

In my Hebrew classes we used A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew by Weingreen, which is old and I wouldn’t recommend it because I think pedagogy has progressed since then. I passed the competency test by devouring Basics of Biblical Hebrew (Pratico and Van Pelt) the weekend before, which seemed much friendlier. After I graduated they switched to Introducing Biblical Hebrew by Ross, which gets good reviews on Amazon, but my brother wasn’t impressed with it when he took the course. Something about typos in the paradigms and rote memorization rather than explanation.

In my opinion really good Hebrew intro grammars are rare because Hebrew is just a hard language to learn. But that’s just me. There are Hebrew people and Greek people, and I’m definitely a Greek person.

Ben,
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a huge fan of IPA. It was such a relief for me to learn it because I could finally write things out phonetically without trying to use some sort of clumsy English orthographical equivalent. It gives me such peace of mind to know that when I’m listening to General Conference, for example, and someone uses a slightly different vowel in a word, I can transcribe it and refer to it later.

I do think everyone should learn IPA, even if that just means learning the symbols for sounds used only in English. We so often use reference books that have such varying and oftentimes unique sound representations. Just think how much easier it would be if dictionaries, foreign language textbooks, and pronunciation guides (such as the one in the Book of Mormon) all had a standard way of representing sounds.

Incidentally, if everyone did learn IPA, how do you think that would change things? Would we be more conscious of our and others’ pronunciations? Would we include in-text transcriptions in novels when trying to write “in dialect”? Hmm…

Andy: Ancient, using Lambdin’s grammar for now. I’ll look into Pratico and Ven Pelt’s text and see what I think. And I agree that there are Hebrew people and Greek people and Latin people. I’m a Latin person, so Greek hasn’t had quite as much allure to me (though eventually I’d like to read it fluently), and I’m not sure yet where Hebrew falls on the spectrum.

Katherine: Perhaps we should start an IPA Awarement Week (or Day, or Month). It really is something that every educated person ought to know, if only so they know their own language better. And in this increasingly globalized world, where no culture is an island, it would also help with learning other languages. Yes, everyone should know IPA. And if they did, I’m not quite sure what kind of a ripple effect it would have. Typographically, I think in-text transcriptions would probably be too jarring — more meant for footnotes, really. (I’m talking about novels, mind you; nonfiction would be fine.) Language texts would sure be better, I know that much. :)