Gerard Meijssen wrote:
The idea is that you cannot reliably pronounce a word
as it it should be
pronounced just by seeing the characters when the word originated from
another language. By making these resources available, it is clear how
they should be pronounced in the original language. Having
pronunciations available is important because they help people study a
language and, the wikipedia articles are a great resource to learn a
language; they are short, cover a subject well and many of the related
words related to a subject can be found in the article.
This could be nightmarish in English - accents are widely variant and
in Britain are used as markers of social status to a ridiculous degree.
This is of course highly politicised. I confidently predict ten or more
sound files per word.
- d.