[WikiEN-l] Re: morphophonics for wikipedia

Thu Jul 31 02:30:23 UTC 2003

Timwi wroteth: I always thought this system looked
really un-pro-FESH-un-al.

ROFL. This *should be the absolute last word on the
"American system" for pronunciation, but Delirium
said:

"I thought it was fairly universal myself -- it's in
every major  dictionary I've used, including some of
the results at  www.dictionary.com. "

Well- the point was that this way of doing it was
"Americentrist" -- which Mark, you actually *validated
somewhat - nothing personal. Its easy to forget the
international, ie non-English thing if your not used
to thinking this way.

My final thoughts on the subject before actually doing
something about it: 
1. SAMPA, though based on IPA was designed for machine
readability -- not for human readability.
2. The notion of a human-usable phonetic schema rests
on the fact that most of the world - whether its
Latin, pinyin, romaji, cyrillic, and just plain
non-Anglo English -- the Roman alphabet is ubiquitous
and differs rather little in terms of the way its
used.
3. Jimmy's point is on the right track. -- a schema
for  using Sampa-like input, which is then simply
changed to more readable characters -- these would
probably be have to be as ubiquitous as possible as
well -- as long as they borrow from the better ideas
out there, and could still have a 1:1 conversion to
sampa (eugh!)

-S-

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