rone at ennui.org (roger n. tospott) writes: > David Dyer-Bennet writes: > We need a good system for representing the pronunciations in text > form. For various reasons I don't think the IPA is a good choice -- > mostly that the people looking up these pronunciations won't be > familiar with it, and it presents a rather large learning curve. > > What do you mean by "IPA"? International Phonetic Alphabet. I think it's what professionals use when they're dealing with these issues. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet>. > I like the pronunciation guide at m-w.com; it seems fairly simple and > effective. But probably not public-domain. Actually it's more complicated than I really wanted; I notice a number of cases where they can't even find an English word to illustrate the sound. And what's with arbitrarily reversing the symbols \o\ and \ä\ -- they seem to be used to indicate the opposite of what makes sense (the o used to indicate modified a sounds, the a used to indicate the common o sound). Although this may be one of those situations where we should make it as simple as possible, and no simpler; I may be trying to make it simpler than is possible. But the big thing that bugs me about IPA beyond the complexity is that they don't use any of the obvious associations, they always find some weird way to do it. This is probably to make it less English-specific; but since my audience is specifically English-speakers (the web site isn't in any other languages), that's a drawback for me. Hmmm; I suppose it might be possible to use the MW system by reference, not copying anything. Maybe. Or maybe I'll have to invent one in the end anyway. -- David Dyer-Bennet, <dd-b at dd-b.net>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <noguns-nomoney.com> <www.dd-b.net/carry/> Photos: <dd-b.lighthunters.net> Snapshots: <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <dragaera.info/>