Hi John,
Nothing beats an accomplished and/or native speaker. Still, the 'sound bites' are usually better than the native English speaker's attempt at figuring out how things should sound. :) Some years ago I had the great opportunity to spend 2 years living in Germany and traveling about a bit. All I had to lean on at the beginning was a Berlitz Traveler's German book. I found its most useful feature was the phonetic spelling for an English speaker of the German words and phrases. It helped me get started and rescued me several times until I learned more of the language. I am not fluent, but I still regularly listen to German and Austrian radio over the net and visit some websites in German. I inquired of our buddy Google as regards the International Phonetic Alphabet, which led me to http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm interesting site. Thanks, Linda ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Gilmore" <johnwgilmore0...@gmail.com> To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 12:08:55 PM Subject: Re: Terminology Linda Mooney wrote: | Can anyone offer a link with these marks that includes something about them, and | hopefully audible enunciation? Sound bites are useful, but mastery of the linguists' International Phonetic Alphabetic is what you should shoot for first. The marks can be deceptive. Pronunciation of the Hungarian name 'Béla Bartók' is subtly different from that suggested by anglophone associations with these marks, which are usually based on some knowledge of their use in French. These associations are better than what is suggested to most anglophones by just 'Bela Bartok', but they don't yield a good result. In other cases, one must just learn a little. Polish is not, for example, difficult to pronounce once one has done so. Without that little, it appears to an anglophone to be a thicket of consonants. Łukasiewicz==>Woo-kaze-yevitch is not intuitively obvious to anglophones, but once you learn it you can stop using the copout term 'Polish notation'. (My own spoken Polish consists of very simple declararative sentences punctuated by 15-second pauses used to construct the next one, but I can read and pronounce it.) Now for a commercial. The use of these marks in other languages is one of the more powerful arguments for converting our systems to Unicode, which makes them available, John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
