Re: Pronunciation keys

Dictionary pronunciation keys have their own separate tradition of phonemic
transcription, and that would be fine if they would stick to it instead of
using the bastard ASCIIfication, as you said.  Although there's some
discrepancy between dictionaries around the symbols for sounds like FOOT (
e.g. u with overdot, double o with breve, u with circumflex) and GOOSE (u
with diaresis, double o with macron - even u with macron, although that's
usually reserved for the onglid version).

I also realize that phonemic symbols are somewhat arbitrary.  But in an
introductory text that's trying to teach what a given language (probably)
sounded like, it seems silly to introduce an entirely new set of symbols or
sound-symbol correspondences.  I don't care if you pick /a/ or /ɑ/ or /ʌ/
for the "ah" phoneme, but I see no reason to choose /â/...  or /ƃ/ instead
of /β/, or /þ/ instead of /θ/, or, my personal favorite, /ɡ/ (not to be
confused with /g/!) for /ɣ/.