[WikiEN-l] Pronunciation guides

[Ray Saintonge]

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.
>
>English words act as symbolic placeholders which contain an idea within the
>shape -- just as Hanzi does.  This, despite the fact that shape of English
>words of course, is entirely designed to represent the phonetic -- these
>shapes in and of themselves make no attempt at representing the thing
>itself --unlike Han ideographs.
>
>So theres a tradeoff with each.  English, though the lingua franca -- is not
>in the majority in terms of how its vowels are used.  Its this difference
>between American English and the older and the
>more widespread Latin/Balto-Slavic vowel sounds that exemplifies the bulk of
>any disagreement.  I mean, if you cant agree on what an "a" sounds like, you
>cant really continue.
>
>This is where English, I think is in the minority, and will typically tend
>to reject like the metric system any attempt at mundification.  So typically
>English sounds arent it - and neither are SAMPA eugh!  (There was an
>interesting booktv talk on the origins of the American units system, btw --
>and why today people in the US look at the metric system in a xenophobic and
>skeptical way)
>
>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. In the end,
>the sonic descriptors are practically irrelevant when they get into too much
>detail -- regardless of how accurately you interpret the signs, youre still
>going to speak the foreign word with your particular accent.  And its going
>to be wrong.  The merits of the Roman alphabet are that its fairly standard,
>covers quite enough ground -- is modifyable in slight ways (ie pinyin,
>romaji.... SAMPA eugh!)
>
>Still, where phonetic descriptions are used, some direction toward an
>international standard is a good idea.
>
I would basically agree with this analysis, complete with the hostility 
toward SAMPA where I find many of the supposed pronunciations to be 
counterintuitive.  In many respects it really doesn't matter whether 
Bremen rhymes with layman or lemon as long as the listener knows what 
you are talking about.  Any attempt to find the '''right''' 
pronunciation for a word is bound to end in failure.  The best we can 
hope for is that ambiguities in a word like "lead" will be resolved.

Ec