[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] IPA issues

stevertigo stvrtg at gmail.com
Thu Apr 22 00:11:05 UTC 2010


On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> A lot of so called IPA out there is created by Americans for Americans and
> expect that certain sounds can be expressed by the ordinary Latin
> characters. The consequence is that such polution makes the whole of IPA
> hard to use.
>
> Consequently I argue that in order to save the usefulness of IPA at all we
> HAVE to be academically correct in how it is expressed.

Quite. We need to make the distinction between exonym and endonym
transcription. Endonyms come first, and exonym-repronunciations are
noted as such. But likewise we can't get too stuffy about pronouncing
words according to native phonologies, clicks and whirrs and so forth.
:P

-Stevertigo



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