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

[Thomas Dalton]

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.  The Chinese
> are just as literate despite the fact that Chinese characters have only
> limited connection to pronunciation.  With English names the Chinese
> characters would work just as well.

It doesn't matter, but it is nice to be close rather than just
guessing a random possible pronunciation. There are two ways you can
read any given word, it can be a word you're familiar with (it's in
your "sight vocabulary") and you just take it in at a glance, or it
can be a word you aren't familiar with and you need to "sound it out"
(of course, once you're an experienced reader, sounding out is done
much quicker than a young child would do it). The kind of words you're
likely to not know the pronunciations of are words you aren't familiar
with, in which case being able to sound it out is useful. You can just
skip over it and just think "oh, that word again", but it breaks your
flow and slows reading down. I don't speak Chinese, but I imagine it's
similar to English is that respect - most characters will be in your
sight vocabulary and it doesn't make any difference how they're
written, you just know it as an image. Characters you are less
familiar with, you would presumably have to slow down to read. The
fact that you can't just "sound out" the word might make it harder to
learn new words when reading, I don't really know, perhaps you just
get used to it the same as we get used to the way English works.