I contributed to the article [[Karel Capek]], including the sentence:
"For English speakers, the name is pronounced something like CHOP-ek."
Someone added:
"(or in SAMPA: ['tSApek])."
I appreciate the SAMPA addition, but I'll bet that for every English
speaker who can process ['tSApek] there are 100 (conservative
estimate, off by a factor of 10) who can process CHOPek and produce a
facsimile of his name for another English speaker.
Likewise SHO-pan, chai-KOV-sky, BAY-to-ven, TO-mas MONN, GER-teh, LOKH
LO-mond.
Capek's name doesn't get his little Czech checkmark anyway. And
without a "schwa" we couldn't give the pronuciation even of most
English words, much less foreign words.
So even with SAMPA or some other scientific system, I believe we
should retain the option, or even requirement, to render
pronunciations, as needed, in non-standard, non-scientific,
not-truly-phonetic, phonetic English spellings.
This list seems to have a bias in favor of leaping into snake pits:
tables, math formulas, SAMPA. Next, musical notation?
Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88
|From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu>
|Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 23:29:35 -0700
|
|Tarquin wrote:
|
|>I suggest we formulate a policy on using SAMPA for pronunciation of words
|>In the long run, IPA might be nicer, since paper dictionaries &
|>encyclopedias use it. However, until there's good support for Unicode,
|>sampa is readable on any browser. If at some point we can switch, the
|>two are in direct correspondance.
|
|I think that Evan Kirschenbaum's system is better for our purposes.
|
|http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/faq.html
|
|More of the common European phonemes are easy to read here,
|at a loss of the ability for precise phonetic transcription.
|But then the possibility of precise transcription is returned
|at the cost of using incomprehensible codes like <unx> ("unexploded").
|Since we'll be wanting phonemes almost exclusively, this is good.
|
|The downside is that we *don't* have a one to one correspondence with IPA,
|but it's still possible to do machine translations later if desired,
|with some ambiguity about which letters to use for phonemes.
|(There's no ambiguity in the *meaning* of the symbols, however;
|this is just the usual ambiguity in phonemic symbols,
|deciding between /k/ and /x/ for a phoneme with both allophones.)
|
|
|-- Toby Bartels
| <toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu>
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