[WikiEN-l] IPA issues

[Nathan]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Peter Jacobi <peter_jacobi at gmx.net> wrote:

> You forget an important point. enWP has many readers and contributors with English as second language. They usually use IPA as reference how English is pronounced and have been taught English this way. So effectively IPA is more native to them than all these ugly English pronunciation guides.
>
>
> Regards,
> Peter

I honestly find that hard to believe; nothing I've seen written about
IPA on this list, or on the [[IPA]] article, suggests that it is
widely used for any purpose outside academic linguistics. More
importantly, the pronunciation guides are necessarily most useful for
those whose English is already fluent. Their purpose (on en.wp) is to
guide the pronunciation of non-English words spoken in English, and
accessibility to English speakers should be the standard by which they
are judged. Perhaps IPA is an elegant, ideal pronunciation guide - but
very few readers can make sense of it, so using it (and demanding
uniformity in its use) is largely pointless.

Nathan