[Wikipedia-l] The value of Pronunciation

[Peter Lofting]

At 8:58 PM +0000 3/22/05, Arwel Parry wrote:
>Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>50 miles? Even in these more mobile days that's nothing. For some 
>communities, real experts could locate a persons' accent down to a 
>few streets.

FWIW

In England, within the first 30 seconds of someone opening their 
mouth, its still possible to place a person to within half a county 
or less purely from pronouciation.

With longer listening that picks up key marker vowels its also 
possible identify what class of person they spend their time with - 
via either community, work or travel. That is particularly true of 
immigrants who learn their English from different classes of contact.

e.g.  an Australian who lived in Canada and then moved to S. London 
bears the footprints in their accent.


Peter