On 18/01/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@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...)