[Wikipedia-l] The value of Pronunciation

[David Gerard]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> The idea is that you cannot reliably pronounce a word as it it should be 
> pronounced just by seeing the characters when the word originated from 
> another language. By making these resources available, it is clear how 
> they should be pronounced in the original language. Having 
> pronunciations available is important because they help people study a 
> language and, the wikipedia articles are a great resource to learn a 
> language; they are short, cover a subject well and many of the related 
> words related to a subject can be found in the article.


This could be nightmarish in English - accents are widely variant and
in Britain are used as markers of social status to a ridiculous degree.
This is of course highly politicised. I confidently predict ten or more
sound files per word.


- d.