Improving upon CUBE

what is CUBE?!

yeah i think i haven't even written about that on this site yet.

after that,:

As a passionate teacher, I am always seeking for sensible ways of systematizing and simplifying information and knowledge so that it's more easily learnable and memorable.

If a system demonstrates the information correctly and clearly, the student can grasp the concepts properly, and with a sensible conceptual understanding, the student can properly interact with the knowledge, apply it to their learning & skill training, and store the knowledge on a stable construct.

My first foray into the weird world of cynicism of Academia Linguistica was through Geoff Lindsay's videos on youtube. He and a Hungarian linguistics professor undertook their own enormous project re-analyzing the phonetic & phonemic structure of modern English, namely the "standard"ish accent of central southern England.

In brief, what they found is that the standardized transcription method for transcribing English into IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet, not beer) is grossly inaccurate. Not simply regarding accents, but rather that several vowels, "long vowels" and "diphthongs" are fundamentally incorrect — and this is a key factor in why students from certain countries struggle with developing a functional English accent.

For example, "long i" is standardly written as /iː/.

What does this tell us?

It tells us the position in the mouth, and it tells us that it's elongated, and it tells us that it is a static position — that you should not move your mouth during pronunciation of this vowel.

It turns out that English vowels are somewhat bendy, and feature subtle motions and compressions.

Japanese, for one, does not have this.

Japanese speakers pronounce clean, motionless vowels, so when they see English IPA showing /iː/, that's exactly what they do. This is true for many other languages as well.

"Long i" is actually an /ɪ/ followed by a palatal compression, the tongue pressing into the hard palate.

But find me anyone who knows that.

Of the few people who even know about the IPA, the majority live in the assumption that the IPA is gospel. They will see /hiː/, parse it as "he", but will assume that the /iː/ is the truth. This even harms native speakers who are using the IPA as a teaching device or using it for themselves to study another language.

CUBE has a bunch of alterations, which of course the creators see as corrections.

I agree with most of these alterations, but some of them I still find to be inaccurate. The alterations in the consonant transcription are kind of correct, but only in concept, and only when the word is isolated. My preferred alteration method (honestly it is the only way that I think is right) utilizes the superscript h, /ʰ/ to mark aspiration (breath) on a consonant. I've written a reasoning tree on why the CUBE alteration method is problematic, which I'll add here when I get the chance.