[restalis]

Accents can be (and many times are) specified in IPA scripts, so if the speaker carries an accent that isn't in the content he/she is reading or ignores any of the explicitly specified accents, then the pronunciation is wrong.

[katamaritaco]

FWIW as well, linguists use different styles of IPA too, depending on the language families they most often work with.

Because of how it is used, IPA isn't really the 'one true standard' many would think it is.

[jdmichal]

That's the difference between a phonemic and phonetic transcription [0]. The former is bracketed with slashes (//), and the latter with square brackets ([]). To use Wikipedia's example:

Phonemic transcription of English "pot" is /pɔt/, and "spot" is /spɔt/. However, a phonetic transcription is closer to [pʰɔt̚] and [spɔt̚]. Note the addition of aspiration on the initial /p/ in "pot", and marking the /t/ as unreleased in both. But you don't need to differentiate stop aspiration in English, because they are conditioned allophones. And all final stops in English are unreleased, so you don't need to mark those phonemically either.

Basically, your first sentence is entirely correct, but your second sentence is a bit inappropriate. It serves it's purpose of a standard, but you must keep in mind that most transcriptions are not phonetic but phonemic. And a phonemic reading is not meant to be independent of the language -- there are plenty of languages for which [p] and [pʰ] are not allophones and must be distinguished in even a phonemic reading. You should be familiar with the phonemic conventions of a language in order to actually render a phonetic reading.

And even then, a phonetic reading will be dependent on things that boil down to individual speaker differences. That is, there is not any standardized, singular mapping of a phonemic transcription to a phonetic one, in either direction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

[amyjess]

Something interesting I noticed here:

> Phonemic transcription of English "pot" is /pɔt/, and "spot" is /spɔt/.

Your use if this particular IPA indicates that you speak a dialect that has undergone the cot-caught merger, which probably means your accent is from Scotland, the western half of the US, or the Boston area. If you didn't, then you'd transcribe those words as /pɑt/ and /spɑt/ if you spoke a dialect with the father-bother merger (most American accents) or /pɒt/ and /spɒt/ if you spoke a dialect without it (many English accents, including RP).

I'm leaning towards you being Scottish, since Scottish English tends to merge them to [ɔ], while American dialects with the merger tend to merge them to [ɑ].

This goes to show that IPA transcriptions are heavily dependent on dialect.

[jdmichal]

I did transcribe it wrong; it's phonetically [ɒ] for me -- cot-caught is in effect.

Though this does give opportunity to point out that even phonemic transcriptions can have dialectal differences. There is no one phonemic transcription for English, as the different vowel mergers mean that minimal pairs differ between groups. This kind of variation tends not to happen as much with consonants as vowels, which make them much harder to transcribe even phonemically. But, for example, here's a list of mergers for non-rhotic dialects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Mergers_c...

[lambdadmitry]

There is also a liiiiitle difference between RP's and SA's [i] and [ɪ] (IPA sounds are "areas", not "points"), as well as a difference in tenseness (British is generally more tense).

So yeah, IPA doesn't completely specify how things sound.

[restalis]

I am working with IPA annotated contents and I have linguists in my team. I understand your point (or at least I think I do), but I don't entirely concur. IPA tries to very accurate and thus covers all languages (even the click consonants used by some endangered African tribes). When you have this kind of precision employed in the context of a given natural language, you get the problem of having multiple phonetic transcriptions for the same word or syllable, all valid because from the prospective of a speaker of that language all sound the same. Yet, only one option is the closest to the pronunciation formally supported by a given authority. All you can do is to pick that one when you have to provide, and to just tolerate all the rest when you have to accept. I can hardly imagine something better than what IPA is already offering without loosing the neutral nature, so I'm yet to find valid critiques at IPA's address.