Re: OT: Foreign Language Books using IPA

 --- Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...> wrote: > I
was browsing through the language section at
> Barnes & Noble the other
> day. I took Spanish in high school and always wanted
> to try picking up
> French, but I didn't have room in my schedule for
> the extra language class
> and the pronunciation was very difficult to pick up
> soley from a textbook.
>
> Today I got to thinking, why don't foreign language
> textbooks use the IPA
> as a pronunciation guide? The usual system that I've
> seen, where the book
> will spell the words using English spelling rules,
> is unreliable because
> sometimes a native English speaker can't even
> pronounce a new English word
> correctly without consulting a friend or a
> dictionary.
>
> Okay, so I probably already know the answer why they
> don't have such
> textbooks -- students would complain of having to
> learn a new system of
> transcribing in addition to a new language. But
> after the first time, they
> could confidently pronounce new words in any other
> foreign language
> textbooks. ... Ah well. </rant>
>
> But my real question is this: Does anyone know of a
> textbook on learning a
> foreign language (any will do, really) that uses the
> IPA rather than
> pseudo-English?
>
yes . . . hugo scots gaelic in three months. the
author writes a note saying that they've departed from
the usual hugo spelling system ( which is ugly and
impossible to understand for anyone with any knowledge
of ipa ) because of the huge number of phonemes in
gaelic and the lack of equivalents in english

and it works a dream ( except they don't give the
pronunciation for all the words, which is bloody
useless ). why they can't do it more often escapes me

bn

=====
bnathyuw | landan | arR
stamp the sunshine out | angelfish
your tears came like anaesthesia | phèdre

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