[Wikimania-l] Thanks for all the fish... and lessons learned

[Bence Damokos]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 5:26 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 00:15, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On 12 August 2011 01:10, Иванов Вячеслав <v.ivanov at amikeco.ru> wrote:
> >> Latin script may be so bewildering you know.
> >> Reading a Hungarian or a Polish name in Latin may require knowing the
> orthography rules of those languages; and for reading an English name one
> may need to ask the bearer for the pronunciation :)  And probably just IPA
> would be easier, though, yes, awkward too.
> >
> > For someone that knows IPA, IPA is definitely best. I don't think
> > anyone will argue with that. For everyone else, though, the Latin
> > alphabet at least gives us a fighting chance of getting close to the
> > right pronunciation. You can always ask "did I say that right?" and
> > get corrected. I would ask someone their name and, because it's an
> > unfamiliar name to me, I would struggle to make out exactly what they
> > said. If I could see it written down and hear it said, I could
> > probably get it right.
> >
> > The other big problem with having names in IPA is that it requires
> > attendees to know their name in IPA in order to put it on the name
> > badge in the first place. That means it's only going to work when both
> > the person whose name it is and the person reading it know IPA. That's
> > going to be a pretty small proportion of pairings.
>
> They could rely on the [[<X> phonology]] Wikipedia articles to produce the
proper IPA transcription for their name. For some languages, this is quite
easy just based on the spelling, with other languages it is more difficult.

One should note though, especially with vowels, that phonemic transcriptions
are language dependent. The Polish /ɔ/ sound is closer and more back then
the sound /ɔ/ of Hungarian (sometimes transcribed as /ɒ/), and more open
compared to the RP /ɔ/.*

As for the intricacies of Latin tranliteration, you might have noticed that
longer streets in Israel tend to have slightly differing English names on
the streets (sometimes even parts of the streets), Google Maps and
guidebooks.**

Best regards,
Bence

* Based on the vowel charts of Wikipedia; individual realisations might vary
all over in any of the languages.
** I tried OSM on my phone, but all I got was little squares in place of
street names...

Other way is to put cheap chips on the participants' badges with
> spoken name and ability to take the information with [the most of]
> smartphones.
>
> Some English transcription (not transliteration!) approximation (like
> [1]) of the names inside of the parentheses should work well, too.
> That's "IPA for those who don't know IPA". It is useful to have, for
> example, "Tomash" for Polish "Tomasz" and Hungarian "Tomas".
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pronunciation_respelling_key
>
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