QR codes are a good lown-cost idea too, as some Wikimaniacs have implemented their own this year. On Aug 12, 2011 11:33 AM, "Milos Rancic" millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 00:15, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com
wrote:
On 12 August 2011 01:10, Иванов Вячеслав v.ivanov@amikeco.ru wrote:
Latin script may be so bewildering you know. Reading a Hungarian or a Polish name in Latin may require knowing the
orthography rules of those languages; and for reading an English name one may need to ask the bearer for the pronunciation :) And probably just IPA would be easier, though, yes, awkward too.
For someone that knows IPA, IPA is definitely best. I don't think anyone will argue with that. For everyone else, though, the Latin alphabet at least gives us a fighting chance of getting close to the right pronunciation. You can always ask "did I say that right?" and get corrected. I would ask someone their name and, because it's an unfamiliar name to me, I would struggle to make out exactly what they said. If I could see it written down and hear it said, I could probably get it right.
The other big problem with having names in IPA is that it requires attendees to know their name in IPA in order to put it on the name badge in the first place. That means it's only going to work when both the person whose name it is and the person reading it know IPA. That's going to be a pretty small proportion of pairings.
Other way is to put cheap chips on the participants' badges with spoken name and ability to take the information with [the most of] smartphones.
Some English transcription (not transliteration!) approximation (like [1]) of the names inside of the parentheses should work well, too. That's "IPA for those who don't know IPA". It is useful to have, for example, "Tomash" for Polish "Tomasz" and Hungarian "Tomas".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pronunciation_respelling_key
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