On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 18:34 -0400, Willie Walker wrote: > Hi All: > > In Orca, there is a feature to spell words out via speech synthesis. > The options include just sending each character of a word to the speech > synthesis engine as well as performing phonetic/military spelling. The > phonetic/military spelling substitutes a word for each letter. For > example "abc" becomes "alpha bravo charlie" in English. > > We currently have the phonetic/military word substitutions for the > letters a-z, and we handle this via a simple dictionary: the keys are > the single characters and the values are the words. > > I'm curious about a few things: what other languages support > phonetic/military spelling? Should we include their alphabet in a big > dictionary? Should we do something else to make this more flexible to > allow translators to extend the military/phonetic alphabet to their > language (if so, how would we do this)?
The NATO phonetic alphabet is accepted throughout most of the world, at least for official military and radio communication. But as Leonardo pointed out, normal folks in some countries may be less familiar with it, even if it is used for official communications. The Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet has a few interesting tidbits about local conventions in the sections "Additions in German, Danish and Norwegian" and "Variants". The stuff about pronouncing diacritics make me wonder about Vietnamese, which puts half a dozen different diacritics on every vowel. Clytie, are you reading this? -- Shaun _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
