Re: Pronunciation keys

As usual, please excuse the bad line-wrapping and other brain damage
from my ISPs webmail...

----- Original Message -----
From: Carsten Becker <carbeck@...>

> And yes, this book was
> published by OUP -- I wonder why they don't use proper
> IPA... you'd expect that from a publisher of scientific
> books, at least I would.
The OUP, as well as being scientifically prominent, is also ancient
and venerable. You don't just mess
with the fundamental principles of such an august institution as the
Oxford University phonetic
spelling system (many Brits only real exposure to any kind of phone(m|
t)ic spelling) without serious
backlash (potentially even armed uprising ;-)

Despite being rather unusual, the system is fairly well tuned to a
broad phonemic description of
dialect-neutral British English, verging it's true toward the RP of
150 years ago, but not so badly so
that it's impossible to instinctively overlook it.

The macronned letters have the values English school children are
(were?) taught to think of as the
"long" forms of the vowels (in my mind, the i-umlauted forms, but
that's a discussion for another
thread), namely Ej, i:, Aj, @U, ju (also the names of the letters).

The two "double o" digraphs, with long macron and long breve,
represent sounds in BritEng, u: and U
respectively, commonly spelled with double o, and U is the shorter
(and *feels* markedly shorter),
justifying the breve.

Some of the other glyhps are less memorable, but they're fairly self-
consistent.

Yes, they *should* use the IPA (for linguists), but there's the
Principle Of Least Surprise in play,
and there are many more non-linguists than linguists in this world,
and if they're English, they're
used to at least one of the Oxford dictionaries (probably the Concise,
but I have no stats to back my
gut up).

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.



Paul