Re: Pronunciation keys

On 1/29/07, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> wrote:
>
>    peruse /pərṓṓz/ v. read carefully

In the first place, that definition doesn't match my intuition.  Odd.  (I
consider "perusing" to be leisurely, but not necessarily careful).

In the second place, you've hit upon one of the reasons the websites use
those ASCIIfications (which are what took me aback and led to the original
message).
For one thing, Unicode doesn't provide any way to put an accent mark
centered above a double macron; doubled diacritics definitionally appear at
the far outside of the character's orbit, above (or below, if below the
base) all other diacritics, and any other diacritics necessarily go with one
or the other character, not the pair.

On the other hand, most American dictionaries use apostrophes rather than
accent marks to indicate emphasis, which would remove that obstacle. But
even unaccented, double-macronned "oo"  won't render properly in most (if
not all) browsers to date; I have yet to see any web browser that handles
combining characters properly.

(Let's try!  The Unicode sequence for a "long oo" is this:

U+006F LATIN SMALL LETTER O
U+035E COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON
U+006F LATIN SMALL LETTER O

Which looks like this in your browser: o͞o
)



 Here are some more gems: warning
> /wáwrning/, gauge /gayj/, serious /séériəss/, time /tīm/


Huh.  I've not seen a dictionary use digraphs for non-diphthongal vowels
(phonemically non-diphthongal, that is; from the Anglophonic POV, e.g. /aj/
and /ej/ are monophthongs).  Things like "aw" for /O/ and "ay" for /ej/ are
very much the province of "sounds-like" fauxnetics rather than dictionaries,
in my experience.

The AHD gives the first three words above as (wôr'ning), (gāj), and (sîr' ē
əs) - where î represents /I`/.  On the other hand, /tīm/ is perfectly
typical for "time".

motion /mṓsh'n/.



AHD has -shən there; the difference between /Sn=/ and /S@n/ is, however,
non-phonemic in any case.

The system they use is not as random as it seems, but IPA
> would be easier.

For who?  Certainly not for the native Anglophone looking up an unfamiliar
word, which would be the target market of English-language dictionaries of
English. :)

-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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