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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KasunKDP" data-source="post: 20080211" data-attributes="member: 494097">problems with IPA1. There are two problems here with the IPA system. First, the IPA symbol  for the low central vowel is hard to draw, and it’s all too easy to draw  in a way that makes it very hard to interpret afterward. This vowel  sound is so common as to be near-universal in the world’s languages, so  it’s particularly unfortunate that the IPA transcribes it with such a  user-unfriendly symbol. The lower-than-æ front vowel, by contrast, is  absent from many, many languages.2. Second, and worse, everyone who hand-prints an a with something that looks like the IPA low back unrounded vowel symbol [ɑ]  has a life-long habit of equating that hand-printed vowel with the  printed letter “a”. The habit is hard to break, which makes confusion  all too predictable when (for instance) one is typing up fieldnotes.</blockquote>

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