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Story Time
for basic phonetic literacy
I'll tell a bit of the story and then explain what you're looking at.
So in 2002 in Tamil Nadu it dawned on me that phonetics charts could skip the literacy assumption and the Latin vocabulary and just have columns and rows labelled by articulatory and mechanical drawings, comprehensible to any motivated and intelligent -- but illiterate -- person. That's the whole idea of this project.
So I made some drawings, wrote up some web pages collected some data, and although 75% of guesses based on those initial drawings were already correct, my feeble appeals for cooperation went unanswered. As I am perhaps too socially motivated, the project languished.
Finally retired, able to work without permission or pay, I visited South Asia in 2022, where Professor Yadav, the national linguist of Nepal, explained to me that while 64 languages in Nepal have been written down, another 64 languages there are today still unwritten. This re-sensitized me to the wider significance of this project: it need not be limited to teaching illiterate Tamil speakers the Tamil alphabet, but rather could be expanded through the IPA to all unwritten languages of the world: being previously unwritten is no obstacle to writing a language using the IPA.
Indeed, illiterate speakers of every language could learn valuable basic phonetic literacy from it, the best foundation to learn any existing script.
The ambition here is not so much a grandiose imperial vision for the International Phonetic Alphabet, but rather a hope that the ignored uneducated in the remotest corners, all of them, as soon as urgently possible, might be given at least something which could start them on the path of literacy, rather than leaving this billion humans literally untouched, so to speak, in the vain hope that someone, someday, will decide to do a Master's degree in each remote village, or that the SIL will pick their language for the next Bible, so that literacy resources for a given language may develop. Such hopes are vain except for a few lucky cases, and something is needed for the vast remainder.
So I worked on the instrument a bit more; still the opinions of others was allowed too great importance. People asked me with great sincerity, why would illiterate people want to learn to read? As if they wouldn't. American anti-intellectualism is a very culturally specific quality. Read my next trip report, if you also wonder.
So this January 2024 in Delhi during 40 minutes standing on the side of a random 4-lane road, I was able to sufficiently explain and individually hand out about 130 copies of an early version of my instrument to comprehending, serious, and grateful passers-by.
Some recipients held the page upside down, demonstrating complete unfamiliarity with Roman-type alphabets even though 80% of signs on the streets today in India are English written in Roman letters.
Others asked, repeatedly and seriously, where is the money, what are you charging?
I asked random people and they said, This is unnecessary: There are no illiterates in Delhi, this is the national capital, we have universal public education, everyone around here is literate. Perhaps it is mere pride: it is embarrassing to be from a city that has any illiteracy, so people don't want to admit it. The pretty airline counter clerk, after I asked if she personally knew any illiterate people, looked at me like I was dirty, with some combination of uncomprehension and disgust.
But against such claims in Delhi, I place my experience on the street and at the airport.
Everybody in Delhi is literate, they said. Then I went on the street and put the instrument in people’s hands, and they hold it upside down. Not everybody, not the overpass panhandler selling plastic gewgaws, not this particular rickshaw driver, one out of the three I encountered, not everybody wanted it. But two of the three rickshaw drivers, and every bicycle deliveryman riding past, every pedestrian, at the airport every taxi driver, and the one janitor and the eight wheelchair attendants all got the point, understood what I was giving out as Very Important, and wanted to keep their own copy. Such the handsome well dressed young man looking for taxi passengers at the airport, holding the page upside down, looking at it very carefully, studying it to make sense of the thing (yes I turned it around for him). From this experience I estimate 1/3 of Delhi residents are illiterate enough to benefit from basic phonetic literacy.
In short there is huge demand, if the instrument were to be effective.
Oh on the contrary, someone said, Why would anyone want to learn to read? Indeed a policement told me, a certain boy's parents "didn't want him to learn to read". A retired banker hearing this said the policeman is protecting the local labor market, which depends on the negotiation position of the literate over the illiterate. This effort may be locally revolutionary.
Should we be deterred? No.
Since January I have put every spare hour into improving the instrument. Draft 2 went before 12 phoneticians at the University of Washington Phonetics Laboratory meeting 4/5/2024, which yielded 10 refinements and a correction ([R] for [ʁ]). It seems to be good enough, for now. It's time to prove it works, and roll it out.
And that's the story. If that was fun, you can read the trip report too.