Dragaera

Pronunciation Guide

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Tue Oct 28 14:33:04 PST 2003

On 21 Oct 2003, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

#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>.

Yes, it is.

#> 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.

Where? The only such instances I see on http://m-w.com/pronguid2.htm are
symbols that modify the preceding symbol: [^y] for palatalization and
[^n] for nasalization.

# And what's with arbitrarily
#reversing the symbols \o\ and \&auml;\ -- 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).

By "modified a sounds", do you mean the vowel in "caught" (for those who
pronounce it differently from "cot")? That is no more a modified "a"
sound than it is a modified "o" sound; don't be misled by English
spelling. Similarly for a-umlaut.

#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.

Obviousness, or its lack, is in the mind of the beholder. That is, what
is obvious and natural to one person may be totally bizarre to another.

#	 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.

It IS "International", and unlike ASCII it was not invented by and for
English-speakers with no conception of other languages. See
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html . In that URL, and in the
following quote, "IPA" means "International Phonetic Association"

	>>>

The IPA is the major as well as the oldest representative organisation
for phoneticians. It was established in 1886 in Paris.

The aim of the IPA is to promote the scientific study of phonetics and
the various practical applications of that science.

In furtherance of this aim, the IPA provides the academic community
world-wide with a notational standard for the phonetic representation of
all languages - the International Phonetic Alphabet (also IPA).

	<<<

#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.

Don't. Or don't do it without asking a professional. Most people aren't
aware of the differences between their own speech and other people's.

Let's take a poll.

 1. Do you pronounce "Don" and "dawn" the same?

 2a. When you read question 1, did you react "Huh? Doesn't everyone?"

 2b. ... or did you react "Huh? Does anyone?!"

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
   Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel