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Re: Pronunciation keys

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Monday, January 29, 2007, 20:32
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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T. A. McLeay <relay@...>