Hey guys =)

So I'm new to all this...and I'm not exactly sure if this is the appropriate location for this post. If it's not, feel free to move it.

But anyways.

I'm a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) major, so I take a lot of classes in linguistics. One major part of linguistics is IPA, or the International Phonetic Alphabet. Since learning IPA (I'm no master, I'm still learning it), I have been able to use that in creating names. So I was wondering if anyone else has any experience in using this to create character names?

I think this might be the correct location.

Yes, this is the right place.

That sounds like a neat method to aid in coming up with names.

I've never heard of this, but it sounds interesting.

Yeah, sure! So, one of my character's names is "Alleyni"
So, to show pronunciation, I would write it in IPA:
[^leini:]
I attached a few charts for anyone who's interested in trying IPA...take a look if you're interested =)

Chart 2

IPA chart 3

I love using IPA! It's a really handy way to write down the pronunciations of names I make up, especially when I make up names that use sounds not in English. Also, if I'm reading a fantasy novel and the names are too boring, I can just start pronouncing them as if they were written in IPA and things get much more interesting.

The only problem with using IPA is that then you kind of get it into your blood and wind up spelling names IPA-style instead of in ways that make their proper pronunciation clear to normal, non-IPA-using English speakers. For instance, I recently named a planet Drisije. I asked a few non-IPA-users to read out the name, and they said "dri-seej" or just "drissy". But I meant for that j to be pronounced like the English y, and for the e to be pronounced as an ay sound...just like they are in IPA...resulting in "dri-si-yay", or ['dɾɪsɪje] in IPA. But alas, I hate how "Drisiyay" or "Drisiyai" or even "Drisiye" look. I like that IPA-esque "j" and "e".

I have used the IPA very much, learning new sounds, and, because I examine other languages a lot, IPA is indispensable for finding out unambiguously how another language is actually pronounced.
But my family and I have discovered simple, distinguishable sounds that are not in the IPA, for instance, consonants made through the nose.

Also, not all of the IPA characters, even the most commonly used ones, are typable with my keyboard.

I am planning on making a phonetic system of my own that uses only keyboard characters, and has a more useful selection of sounds.

I think this is because the IPA is only supposed to include sounds that are distinguished in human languages. There are plenty of other sounds that humans can make, but as far as we know they're not actually used contrastively in any natural language. So people using the IPA for speech pathology, for instance, use some extensions to it for transcribing disordered speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensions_to_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet


You may want to look into X-SAMPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA) for this - it's a system of writing IPA just using ASCII characters. It looks really ugly, but it works!