[WikiEN-l] Re: Pronunciations and IPA/SAMPA

Thu Sep 11 18:41:01 UTC 2003

I tend to agree. But at some point, the effort put
into correcting this might overshoot the effort of
simply adding Vorbis audio ("speex" codec, whenever it
comes out) to each entry. 

>"What about China...all those dialects?"

Pinyin covers those-- not in a linguistic way, but a
political way.  There are far more positives for using
IPA -- namely that its compatible with SAMPA, and that
this might someday be used on WP to machine read text
-- which would be velly nice.

~S~

--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:
> Adam Raizen wrote in part:
> 
> >>You malign ad hoc pronunciation schemes, but they
> do have *some*
> >>redeeming value. You can use a single ad-hoc
> system to represent
> >>different dialects more easily than you can use
> IPA for the same
> >>purpose, since users will read their own dialect
> into the pronunciation
> >>guide for the ad-hoc system. Still, I can't
> imagine making up an ad-hoc
> >>scheme for wikipedia; IPA is probably best for us.
> >>    
> >>
> I agree with this criticism of IPA -- how can IPA
> even be remotely 
> useful for us, given that there is no one correct
> phoneme mapping for 
> nearly *any* word in the English language?  Are we
> going to have dozens 
> of different IPA entries for each word, representing
> the full range of 
> pronunciation in the English of England (including
> many dialects), 
> Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, South Africa,
> India, the United 
> States (including many dialects), etc.?  And how
> about for the range of 
> pronunciation of Chinese words within different
> parts of China, or 
> countries outside China that also have significant
> Chinese-speaking 
> populations?  The whole thing just seems pretty
> useless.
> 
> -Mark
> 
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