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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