Re: Pronunciation keys

On 1/30/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
...
> (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
Looks perfectly fine for me at home with Galeon using Mozilla on
Debian GNU/Linux! IE7 here at work doesn't have the right character to
show the double macron. (Although it only tests your browser if you're
using Webmail, and then it's also testing your webmail client not to
mangle it...)

> )
>
>  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.
No, they're more along the lines of what I'd expect from a
dictionary's respelt pronunciation key. In particular, "eer", "air"
and "aw" are the way I'd expect to see /I@/, /e:/ and /o:/ spelt in a
dictionary if they weren't using the IPA. I've always found the
schemes used in American dictionaries particularly confusing,
precisely because they *don't* use these sorts of spellings.

(One interesting scheme I've seen from a few Oxford dictionaries
didn't bother respelling the word unless it was completely unintuitive
like "Featherstonehaugh" (one's got a large list of proper nouns'
pronunciations, incredibly useful for English places); instead, they
just used a truckload of diacritics.)

===================

On 1/30/07, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
> Maybe they ought to release an IPA edition, but the workload to
> transcribe the entire OED would be
> onerous and probably prohibitive. Even if automated, it would need to
> be checked, item by item, by
> hand.
Actually, the current edition (3rd) of the full OED is in IPA. I think
even the second edition was in the IPA too. The IPA scheme that
they've used is somewhat revised (e.g. it uses /ran/ for "ran" because
the vowel in current RP is apparently quite close to cardinal [a]).

(The Australian Oxford dictionary uses essentially the same IPA scheme
as the Macquarie Dictionary uses, but with length diacritics, which
makes a pronunciation like /ha:d/ (hard) /bi:d/ (bead) or /kO:t/
(caught) so much easier to read than the Macq's /had/, /bid/ or
/kOt/.)

--
Tristan.