[WikiEN-l] Pronunciation guides

[Toby Bartels]

Stevertigo wrote:

>LD and I were talking about this at length. In attempting to sort out some
>basic rules for phonetic schemes, it occurred to us that though phonetics
>are important, they would tend to default to majority accents - which are
>irreconcilable ethno-political fodder.

For giving the pronunciation of English words to English speakers,
I prefer abandoning phonemic transcription for morphophones.
A morphophone is a concept such as .long-i.,
which doesn't specify what sound .long-i. is,
only that it's the same sound as in "lie", "fight", "file", "fire", etc.
To get a specific sound (either phoneme or phone),
you'd have to specify an accent (a dialect or even idiolect)
and possibly also a context (the surrounding morphophones).
But the translation should be unambiguous for any combination.

For example, in transcribing "fire", we can give .f.long-i.r.,
and we don't have to argue whether it's pronounced /fai@/ or /fair/,
because the rule is that .r. between a long vowel and the end of a word
is /@/ for some people but /r/ for others, and that's just fine.
(And for some people, it depends on how the next word begins,
whether a vowel or a consonant, and that's fine too.)

Of course this has the same problem as a phonemic transcription,
that ASCII isn't much up to the challenge of rendering .long-i.,
but we'll likely have this problem with essentially any solution.

>I challenge anyone to show us here a scheme that is both easy to read (SAMPA
>eugh) and gives all the sonic description that these attempt to.

Well, I still prefer Evan Kirschbaum's ASCII IPA to SAMPA's. ^_^


-- Toby