On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, A lot of so called IPA out there is created by Americans for Americans and expect that certain sounds can be expressed by the ordinary Latin characters. The consequence is that such polution makes the whole of IPA hard to use.
Consequently I argue that in order to save the usefulness of IPA at all we HAVE to be academically correct in how it is expressed. Thanks, GerardM
I disagree to an extent of the first part of you post, and agree with the second part. I actually answered an email about this situation, the ticket can be found here if you have access < https://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&Ticket...
The correspondent wasn't very, how shall I say, nice in the initial email or the reply to my response, but here's what I wrote:
"The Wikimedia Foundation projects, which include the English Wikipedia, are aimed at and have a broad global appeal. In fact, many of our contributors are not native speakers of English but use the project as a way to enhance their knowledge of English and providing translations. We actively encourage that.
The "gobbledygook" is the International Phonetic Alphabet, contrived and maintained by an international collection of linguists over a hundred years ago as a method, based on Latin characters, to phonetically pronounce even unfamiliar languages. This method of adoption across our projects allow people from around the globe to understand a pronunciation no matter their language.
We are sorry that this is inconvenient for you and diminishes your interest in Wikipedia. We do hope that you can learn the IPA from our language guides available- it's actually pretty quick to catch on to and is a common sense approach to phonetics.
You can find more information about the IPA here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International Phonetic Alphabet> which includes external links to educational tools in learning the system!
Again, we do appreciate your concerns about the usability of Wikipedia."