[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Suggestion: Pronunciation on all names

[Andrew Gray]

On 18/01/2008, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > IPA is great for giving precise pronunciations, but simpler methods
> > are great for people that just want a general idea so they can read
> > the article (unpronounceable words can make it hard to read something,
> > even silently - it disrupts the flow).
> Mispronouncing a word when you are reading silently doesn't matter.
> Nobody can hear you.  If you insist on having the pronunciation for
> every word that you read you must be a very slow reader.

My usual experience is that people stumble the first time, decide on a
pronunciation, and file it away. As you'd expect, this is very common
among children who read voraciously and somewhat in advance of their
peers - they encounter a word they never hear spoken, so guess the
correct pronunciation.

This then causes gales of hilarity in later life when they happen to
use the word in conversation for the first time, and discover everyone
else has a different pronunciation of it...

(Examplar: is it "web two" or "web two point oh?" It's a term pretty
much everyone will encounter in text long before in speech, and I
noticed at a conference last year that there was a fairly even divide
- and pretty random distribution - between which way people parsed
it...)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk