Brion Vibber wrote:

Tarquin wrote:

...

And for that matter, how does the writer pronounce the word "chop"? AmEng and BrEng have different vowels for that word.

I would expect that same difference to be reflected in their *anglicized* pronunciation of "Čapek". Am I wrong?

IANAB (I am not a Brit), but I think that you are wrong. But this doesn't invalidate your ultimate point; it just means that the guide should say "CHAHP-ek" instead.

My vote is for listing English "phonetic" crap (with an eye to including both Midwestern American and BBC accents, which means in part NO SHORT "o"S), SAMPA (or better yet, Kirschenbaum's system as mentioned earlier), IPA in numbered HTML character entities that reference UNICODE, and recording in OGG (or whatever). If this is too long, then I'd drop SAMPA first (ironically enough).

See [[Clitoris]] for an example: it has a link to [[SAMPA|pronounced]], a SAMPA representation (correctly in [phonetic transcription brackets]), an approximation in English orthography, and a wav file (should it be an ogg?).

How are the phonetic brackets correct? *I* don't pronounce it that way! But change it to phonemic slashes, and suddenly I do. Unless we're describing distinct dialects, brackets will always be wrong.

-- Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia-l@math.ucr.edu