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(a)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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