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(a)gmail.com>
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
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&Ticke…
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
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