[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] IPA issues

[J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov]

Enabling a pop-up (for example) for the IPA prononciation would be a big
plus as far as I am concerned.
I've never quite got my head around it, but can see its usefulness. This is
particularly useful when the word is of non-English extraction: I find it an
added benefit to see the word in its original form (spelling and script),
notably when there is a local version of the word which has completely
transformed the native version (e.g. Londres from London, Maroc / Morocco
from المغرب‎).

Alexandr Dmitri





2010/4/22 Keegan Peterzell <keegan.wiki at gmail.com>

> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > Hoi,
> > A lot of so called IPA out there is created by Americans for Americans
> and
> > expect that certain sounds can be expressed by the ordinary Latin
> > characters. The consequence is that such polution makes the whole of IPA
> > hard to use.
> >
> > Consequently I argue that in order to save the usefulness of IPA at all
> we
> > HAVE to be academically correct in how it is expressed.
> > Thanks,
> >     GerardM
>
>
> I disagree to an extent of the first part of you post, and agree with the
> second part.  I actually answered an email about this situation, the ticket
> can be found here if you have access <
>
> https://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=4739987&ArticleID=5383349&ZoomExpand=0#5383349
> >
>
> The correspondent wasn't very, how shall I say, nice in the initial email
> or
> the reply to my response, but here's what I wrote:
>
>
> "The Wikimedia Foundation projects, which include the English Wikipedia,
> are
> aimed
> at and have a broad global appeal.  In fact, many of our contributors are
> not
> native speakers of English but use the project as a way to enhance their
> knowledge
> of English and providing translations.  We actively encourage that.
>
> The "gobbledygook" is the International Phonetic Alphabet, contrived and
> maintained by an international collection of linguists over a hundred years
> ago as
> a method, based on Latin characters, to phonetically pronounce even
> unfamiliar
> languages.  This method of adoption across our projects allow people from
> around
> the globe to understand a pronunciation no matter their language.
>
> We are sorry that this is inconvenient for you and diminishes your interest
> in
> Wikipedia.  We do hope that you can learn the IPA from our language guides
> available- it's actually pretty quick to catch on to and is a common sense
> approach to phonetics.
>
> You can find more information about the IPA here
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International Phonetic Alphabet> which
> includes
> external links to educational tools in learning the system!
>
> Again, we do appreciate your concerns about the usability of Wikipedia."
> --
> ~Keegan
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
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