There is no such thing as how a word "should be pronounced".
The word "hopilavayi" (a Hopi word meaning "hopi language") can be pronounced an infinite number of ways. There is a relatively small spectrum of what can be considered "authentic native-speaker pronunciation", roughly /hopilavaji/, but it isn't how it "should be pronounced": it is not nessecarily "wrong" to pronounce it /hUp:aIlEvEjaI/ or /xaUbaIleIveIxi/ or even /xrpbvljblvkrknlbo/, although those all most certainly fall outside of the spectrum of "authentic native-speaker pronunciation".
Some languages have a wider spectrum of ANSP than others, for example English would be much wider than Haida.
I don't dispute that recordings of pronunciations within the spectrum of ANSP would be valuable, but I believe they should be labelled as such - ie, "Native Hopi speaker pronouncing 'hopilavayi'" rather than "correct pronunciation of 'hopilavayi'" or "how 'hopilavayi' should be pronounced".
Mark
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 17:50:19 +0100, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi,
More than 125 Italian politicians have now their own soundfile. They can be found here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Italian_politician More than 2500 words pronounced in Dutch can be found here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_pronunciation
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.
We are thinking of what (sound) resources would be popular as well.. Soccer stars like Ruud Gullit ?? We have volunteers that may pronounce them in Italian, German or Dutch.
We would REALLY like to have pronunciations for soccer stars because the pronunciations of these gentlemen is often really bad. It would be a fun project to have.
Thanks, GerardM
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