[WikiEN-l] Re: morphophonics for wikipedia

Wed Jul 30 01:58:03 UTC 2003

Tarquin saith:
>Everyone tries to invent their own phonetic system when they're in their 
>teens. I did.
>But reinventing the wheel is generally a bad idea.
>if every dictionary & encyclopedia has its own system, then it is not 
>transferable, and the reader has to relearn for each book they open.
>Let's stick to something that is universal: IPA / SAMPA.

I've seen IPA/SAMPA used in Wikipedia articles and didn't like it. The
former uses too many non-ASCII characters to make it easy enough to use
and the latter uses weird ASCII signs that make the word @n"rid at bl
[unreadable] and l33t-like for those who don't know the system.

The system used in practically every school dictionary I've seen
(except for Merriam-Webster's) is simple: prime mark after accented
syllable (doubled for two accents in one word), flipped e for
schwa, breve (curve) for short vowels, macron (line) for long vowels,
diaresis or circumflex for vowels of far and fur, line across th for
voiced and no line for unvoiced. This last one is the only thing not
representable in Unicode; everything else is s&#301;m'p&#601;l &#275;n&#601;f' for us to use.
(If those words came out garbled, either your mail client or mine doesn't
support Unicode. That was 73 12D 6D 27 70 259 6C 20 113 6E 259 66 27 hex.)

Even better is the limited letters-only system used in textbooks that aren't
dictionaries: complex words are repeated in identical-sounding imitations
(I-mi-TAY-shuns). If this latter system is formalized (FAR-muh-liyzd) it
may be simpler than SAMPA for those who don't have the time to learn it.

Geoffrey Thomas / j&#283;f'r&#275; tä'm&#601;s / JEF-ree TAH-muhs
geoffreyerffoeg at yahoo.com 

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