Yeah and sadly the ipa isnt good for much more. You will get much farther actually describing a sound than just using ipa. In 99% of cases even pretty basic ipa usage is enough to describe most languages on a phonemic level and even to compare between languages with inventory for example but the reality is that our mouths are analog which means it can produce an infinite amount of different sounds within hard limits. If you “speak perfect ipa” and try to pronounce narrow transcriptions you will end up with an accent because youre not pronouncing the exact phones just their ipa approximation. Over all this means it still succeeds as there will not be any conflicts where one symbol describes two contrasting phonemes(tho you could argue there kinda are such situations but i couldnt bring up an example) its just that ipa isnt really meant to be used on an exact phone level. But yeah ipa politics is insane so people will kill eachother over these. Just look at ɧ, thats a clusterfuck.
I mean you also make a convincing argument cause i think theres meny cases where a language has its own ides about whats a phoneme and what isnt, and the pretty artificial approach of “just looking at minimal pairs” is often pretty nitpicky. As for ɧ, there are three reasons for why it exists. First, sweden is very much a first world, western, rich country, so if they have a unique feature its going to have a high chance that its implemented in a standard. Second reason is the dialectal variation that you mentioned, in some dialects it reduces to quite simple phonemes like /ʃ/ for example. Third reason is that experts arent even really sure how its produced(yeah i know, wild). Like they literally dont know how its articulated. But yeah.
![[REUP FROM REDDIT] Uh... I guess that's one way to do it...](https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/f07672f8-34e4-4220-9661-cc5826fe5b3a.gif){kind=link}
Yeah and sadly the ipa isnt good for much more. You will get much farther actually describing a sound than just using ipa. In 99% of cases even pretty basic ipa usage is enough to describe most languages on a phonemic level and even to compare between languages with inventory for example but the reality is that our mouths are analog which means it can produce an infinite amount of different sounds within hard limits. If you “speak perfect ipa” and try to pronounce narrow transcriptions you will end up with an accent because youre not pronouncing the exact phones just their ipa approximation. Over all this means it still succeeds as there will not be any conflicts where one symbol describes two contrasting phonemes(tho you could argue there kinda are such situations but i couldnt bring up an example) its just that ipa isnt really meant to be used on an exact phone level. But yeah ipa politics is insane so people will kill eachother over these. Just look at ɧ, thats a clusterfuck.
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I mean you also make a convincing argument cause i think theres meny cases where a language has its own ides about whats a phoneme and what isnt, and the pretty artificial approach of “just looking at minimal pairs” is often pretty nitpicky. As for ɧ, there are three reasons for why it exists. First, sweden is very much a first world, western, rich country, so if they have a unique feature its going to have a high chance that its implemented in a standard. Second reason is the dialectal variation that you mentioned, in some dialects it reduces to quite simple phonemes like /ʃ/ for example. Third reason is that experts arent even really sure how its produced(yeah i know, wild). Like they literally dont know how its articulated. But yeah.