Hoi, It is much easier to have sound files that have you listen to it. I had added soundfiles to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer among others on the English WP.. I had an Italian friend do Silvio Berluscone
For whatever reason they were removed.. Dutch can be hard language to pronounce .. and as has been said, IPA is not universally understood. Thanks. GerardM
On 22 April 2010 09:11, J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov < alexandrdmitriromanov@gmail.com> wrote:
Enabling a pop-up (for example) for the IPA prononciation would be a big plus as far as I am concerned. I've never quite got my head around it, but can see its usefulness. This is particularly useful when the word is of non-English extraction: I find it an added benefit to see the word in its original form (spelling and script), notably when there is a local version of the word which has completely transformed the native version (e.g. Londres from London, Maroc / Morocco from المغرب).
Alexandr Dmitri
2010/4/22 Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.com
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."
~Keegan
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