The inability to avoid exact phonetic representations would actually be beneficial, imo, because a fluent writer of IPA could then represent their native accent exactly, and a fluent reader could recognize that accent and imagine the author’s voice more accurately while reading. It would be useless for deaf people, though—but all written language reforms are, unfortunately.
Being able to represent accents accurately is definitely a benefit! I’d love to pick up a book and be able to gather information about the writer’s cultural background by the way they pronounce words (and without the “mangled” spellings that implies under the current system).
Likewise, I’d like to have the option to write in a neutral voice in order to avoid privileging one group of speakers in the canonical spellings (think, those used in government documents and the like). British and American English both have accents that imply socioeconomic status, and I’m sure that’s true of other languages as well. Being forced to write in a specific accent could needlessly alienate some readers who don’t identify with the group that speaks that way.
As for deaf people, there are many who learn to speak! Phonetic spellings would make that process much easier for learners who can’t get the immediate feedback of clearly hearing themselves and others pronounce words. Once they learned how to produce the sound each character makes, they could know how to pronounce words just by reading them; an even stronger version of the benefit hearing people get from phonetic systems!
The inability to avoid exact phonetic representations would actually be beneficial, imo, because a fluent writer of IPA could then represent their native accent exactly, and a fluent reader could recognize that accent and imagine the author’s voice more accurately while reading. It would be useless for deaf people, though—but all written language reforms are, unfortunately.
Being able to represent accents accurately is definitely a benefit! I’d love to pick up a book and be able to gather information about the writer’s cultural background by the way they pronounce words (and without the “mangled” spellings that implies under the current system).
Likewise, I’d like to have the option to write in a neutral voice in order to avoid privileging one group of speakers in the canonical spellings (think, those used in government documents and the like). British and American English both have accents that imply socioeconomic status, and I’m sure that’s true of other languages as well. Being forced to write in a specific accent could needlessly alienate some readers who don’t identify with the group that speaks that way.
As for deaf people, there are many who learn to speak! Phonetic spellings would make that process much easier for learners who can’t get the immediate feedback of clearly hearing themselves and others pronounce words. Once they learned how to produce the sound each character makes, they could know how to pronounce words just by reading them; an even stronger version of the benefit hearing people get from phonetic systems!