[Wikipedia-l] Re: The value of Pronunciation

[Mark Williamson]

There is no such thing as how a word "should be pronounced".

The word "hopilavayi" (a Hopi word meaning "hopi language") can be
pronounced an infinite number of ways. There is a relatively small
spectrum of what can be considered "authentic native-speaker
pronunciation", roughly /hopilavaji/, but it isn't how it "should be
pronounced": it is not nessecarily "wrong" to pronounce it
/hUp:aIlEvEjaI/ or /xaUbaIleIveIxi/ or even /xrpbvljblvkrknlbo/,
although those all most certainly fall outside of the spectrum of
"authentic native-speaker pronunciation".

Some languages have a wider spectrum of ANSP than others, for example
English would be much wider than Haida.

I don't dispute that recordings of pronunciations within the spectrum
of ANSP would be valuable, but I believe they should be labelled as
such - ie, "Native Hopi speaker pronouncing 'hopilavayi'" rather than
"correct pronunciation of 'hopilavayi'" or "how 'hopilavayi' should be
pronounced".

Mark

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 17:50:19 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> 
> More than 125 Italian politicians have now their own soundfile. They can 
> be found here:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Italian_politician
> More than 2500 words pronounced in Dutch can be found here: 
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_pronunciation
> 
> 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.
> 
> We are thinking of what (sound) resources would be popular as well.. 
> Soccer stars like Ruud Gullit ?? We have volunteers that may pronounce 
> them in Italian, German or Dutch.
> 
> We would REALLY like to have pronunciations for soccer stars because the
> pronunciations of these gentlemen is often really bad. It would be a fun
> project to have.
> 
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
> 
> 
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