[reirob]

I agree fully, and I wish, for written communication (chat, emails) people could use some latin/ascii based transliteration of IPA. There is X-SAMPA [1], though it's not much used yet. I think a simple input method, available on all keyboards and maybe some textual annotation for text sections being in IPA, might give this a much bigger audience. Many people are often in meetings where they don't know how to pronounce the names of meeting participants - would be really great to have an ASCII based IPA notation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA

[bradrn]

This would be a bad idea, due to inter-dialectal variation. As I said in an earlier comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070624]:

> Phonetic spelling is useless when you’ve got more than one dialect. For instance, consider the word ‘castle’. Is this [kæsɫ̩], or [kɑːsl̩], or [kɑːsu] (as it is for me), or something else entirely? Having an orthography which is not purely phonetic avoids this problem.