Re: Dictionary.app and IPA pronunciation

Phil Stripling wrote:

> I'm not willing to form an opinion, given the accent errors. It may
> be that the work was done by non-native American English speakers
> without reference to a standard pronouncing dictionary of American
> English.

The "faith" business actually looks more like the kind of error a native
speaker would make, since the difference isn't phonemic for English
speakers. A "perfect" alphabet for English would not distinguish
between the two.

Actually that gives me an idea. For the non-IPA pronunciation guide
they (correctly) give the same vowel for "day" and "faith" since that
symbol system doesn't distinguish between [eI] and [e]. So I suspect
that they translated from the non-IPA system to IPA.

> The vowel sounds, where wrong, are similar to standard American
> English.

Not for the words with the vowel sound in "sat". It wasn't even close.
It wasn't even close to a sound that actually exists in English. (OK,
that isn't fully true, the sound is similar to the vowel sound in some
pronunciations of "bird"). That bit was so grossly off that it had to
be from some other error and it was systematic throughout the dozen or
so things that I looked at.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
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