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@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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