On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Peter Jacobi <[email protected]> wrote:
> You forget an important point. enWP has many readers and contributors with > English as second language. They usually use IPA as reference how English is > pronounced and have been taught English this way. So effectively IPA is more > native to them than all these ugly English pronunciation guides. > > > Regards, > Peter I honestly find that hard to believe; nothing I've seen written about IPA on this list, or on the [[IPA]] article, suggests that it is widely used for any purpose outside academic linguistics. More importantly, the pronunciation guides are necessarily most useful for those whose English is already fluent. Their purpose (on en.wp) is to guide the pronunciation of non-English words spoken in English, and accessibility to English speakers should be the standard by which they are judged. Perhaps IPA is an elegant, ideal pronunciation guide - but very few readers can make sense of it, so using it (and demanding uniformity in its use) is largely pointless. Nathan _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
