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dictionaries - American refusal of the IPA: why?


Are there any historical or political reasons for the rather consistent refusal of the International Phonetic Alphabet on the part of American academics?


Did Mark Twain's home-made-English-spelling-centred phonetic rendering of regional pronunciations set a trend?



Answer



I don't know, but here's an interesting quote from Abercrombie's book Fifty years in Phonetics.



In America phonetic notation has had a curious history. Bloomfield used IPA notation in his early book An Introduction to the Study of Language, 1914, and in the English edition of his more famous Language, 1935. But since then, a strange hostility has been shown by many American linguists to IPA notation, especially to certain of its symbols.


An interesting and significant story was once told by Carl Voegelin during a symposium held in New York in 1952 on the present state of anthropology. He told how, at the beginning of the 1930s, he was being taught phonetics by, as he put it, a "pleasant Dane", who made him use the IPA symbol for sh in ship, among others. Some while later he used those symbols in some work on an American Indian language he had done for Sapir. When Sapir saw the work he "simply blew up", Voegelin said, and demanded that in future Voegelin should use 's wedge' (as š was called), instead of the IPA symbol.



When I used this quote in my dissertation, I got the following interesting response from a committee member:



Sapir probably knew how hard it is to see the difference between esh and s-wedge in handwriting. This is the main reason Howie Aronson cited in a class ... relating it to the tradition of doing fieldwork versus creating nice printed books. Like other IPA propagandists, Abercrombie seems to want to link this to American exceptionalism, infelicitously conflating "Americanist" with "American". Fortunately, you don't use "esh" but, rather, curly-tailed c...



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