There's an International Phonetic Alphabet for transcribing speech literally.[1] Automation is now available. Languages to IPA, IPA to various languages, text to speech, speech to text, evaluation of pronunciation.

[1] https://easypronunciation.com/en/english-phonetic-transcript...

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alex0015 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The IPA still relies on convention to transcribe sounds. There's plenty of academic papers out there describing lesser studied languages and, if those conventions don't yet exist, the papers often contradict each other.

A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.

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retroflexzy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad.

This is, for better or worse, what is being done to incorporate aboriginal names into things like streets and bridges in places like Vancouver.

- [stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stal%CC%95%C9%99w%CC%93as%C9%9...) - [šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street](https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/musqueamview-street-signs...)

I see the practicalities of adopting this IPA-lite form, but it's a struggle to use, even though I've previously been trained in IPA.

	▲	alex0015 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's not quite what I meant by unusably bad, though that does have its own set of challenges for sure. I was just in Toronto for the first time and appreciated the designers of the Ojibwe Latin alphabet for pulling it off without diacritics. What's happening with your example is just that the symbols chosen for the phonemic transcription are non-Latin so they're unfamiliar to read aloud and harder to type for non-speakers. What I meant was if we all wrote with all of our individual idiosyncrasies of speech without converging on a prescribed standard (a writing system separate from speech transcription). "Amnu ge sum'm frum upsterz, gimmi u sek" but even more so, with IPA characters for all the 40-odd individual sounds of my dialect of English - then you write your response in the same level of phonetic detail. Exactly what a writing system shouldn't do.

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paxcoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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