Toby Bartels wrote:
The wav file is fine (although it disagrees with the bracketed transcription). But it's obvious that this is just one person's pronunciation. Sure, it's obvious that the bracketed transcription is just one dialect, but why are we trying to claim more precision than is justified? There's no way for a recording to give less precision than the sound of a single, unique, ultimately unreproduceable utterance, but there's an easy way to make a phonetic transcription give less precision, and that's to use slashes to indicate that the transcription is phonemic.
Even that may be too precise for a language as broadly varying as English, but it should do in this case, and in many others.
And what dialect is that bracketed transcription supposed to be anyway? Or is the lack of aspiration on the [k] a mistake?
Alright, you caught me; stick with the phoneme slashes.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)