[Wikipedia-l] The value of Pronunciation

[Stan Shebs]

David Gerard wrote:

> 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.

It used to be said that an experts in English could get to within
50 miles of a person's birthplace just by listening to the dialect.
Dunno if that's still true in this more mobile age. In any case,
supplying the life background of the speaker is critical, just
like identifying the location of a picture, and I hope everybody
is doing that for uploaded pronunciations.

Stan