Re: Pronunciation guides for non-linguists

Gary Shannon wrote:
> --- Fabian <fabian@...> wrote:
> http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml
>
>>covers US and
>>UK English, plus a few words in other languages.
>
>
> Interesting, but waaaaaay too detailed. There are
> loads of different vowel sounds in the table, any one
> of which would be acceptable for a given Elomi vowel.
> Elomi has only five vowel sounds, and as long as the
> speaker is tolerably close that's fine. All I really
> want out of the table I'm trying to build is to get
> the speaker of any L1 TOLERABLY CLOSE to the 16
> primary vowel and consonant sounds in the first part
> of the table.
>
> Anything more precise than tolerably close is way
> overkill for this application. See
> http://fiziwig.com/pix/imupix01.html
True, but you have to bear in mind that any real attempet at describing
teh vowels of a real language is going to be focused on the sounds of
that language, and would have to include all teh sounds of that language
to be taken seriously. English has between 20-30 vowel sounds, depending
on dialect. Your best bet is to use that list as a guide, pick the
sounds you want, drop the rest, and make your own list.

For example, in Demuan, the letter "A" has /V/ as the core vowel, but
/Q/ and /@/ are acceptable pronunciation.