I contributed to the article [[Karel Capek]], including the sentence: "For English speakers, the name is pronounced something like CHOP-ek." Someone added: "(or in SAMPA: ['tSApek])." I appreciate the SAMPA addition, but I'll bet that for every English speaker who can process ['tSApek] there are 100 (conservative estimate, off by a factor of 10) who can process CHOPek and produce a facsimile of his name for another English speaker. Likewise SHO-pan, chai-KOV-sky, BAY-to-ven, TO-mas MONN, GER-teh, LOKH LO-mond. Capek's name doesn't get his little Czech checkmark anyway. And without a "schwa" we couldn't give the pronuciation even of most English words, much less foreign words. So even with SAMPA or some other scientific system, I believe we should retain the option, or even requirement, to render pronunciations, as needed, in non-standard, non-scientific, not-truly-phonetic, phonetic English spellings. This list seems to have a bias in favor of leaping into snake pits: tables, math formulas, SAMPA. Next, musical notation? Tom Parmenter Ortolan88 |From: Toby Bartels &lt;toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu&gt; |Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 23:29:35 -0700 | |Tarquin wrote: | |>I suggest we formulate a policy on using SAMPA for pronunciation of words |>In the long run, IPA might be nicer, since paper dictionaries & |>encyclopedias use it. However, until there's good support for Unicode, |>sampa is readable on any browser. If at some point we can switch, the |>two are in direct correspondance. | |I think that Evan Kirschenbaum's system is better for our purposes. | |http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/faq.html | |More of the common European phonemes are easy to read here, |at a loss of the ability for precise phonetic transcription. |But then the possibility of precise transcription is returned |at the cost of using incomprehensible codes like <unx> ("unexploded"). |Since we'll be wanting phonemes almost exclusively, this is good. | |The downside is that we *don't* have a one to one correspondence with IPA, |but it's still possible to do machine translations later if desired, |with some ambiguity about which letters to use for phonemes. |(There's no ambiguity in the *meaning* of the symbols, however; |this is just the usual ambiguity in phonemic symbols, |deciding between /k/ and /x/ for a phoneme with both allophones.) | | |-- Toby Bartels | &lt;toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu&gt; |[Wikipedia-l] |To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: |http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l |