Since I myself don’t enjoy pronunciation guides in books and would rather “hear as I read” whatever my phonics training hands me, I have resisted having a pronunciation guide for a long time.\u00a0 But this is the era of audio books as well as printed books, and the books are being read in places were vowel sounds (to name one complication) aren’t like the ones I hear around me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So it’s dawned on me that what I hear in my head should perhaps be laid out in a way that’s helpful to those who want\/like pronunciation guides, without being stifling to those who–like me–wing it, right or wrong.\u00a0 (In other words, if you hate pronunciation guides, don’t look at it when it arrives.)<\/p>\n
However…as I’m deeply into chain-sawing the infodump and static stuff from Book IV right now, I don’t have time to do this myself.\u00a0\u00a0 This is an appeal for help, with no deadline attached to it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I see some preliminary questions needing to be answered, resulting from some problems.\u00a0\u00a0 Spelling, for instance, is not an exact guide to how I say the names and other unique words (I just checked that)\u00a0 so we can’t just say “this letter combination is always pronounced this way.”\u00a0\u00a0 And vowel sounds for the same English word vary widely around the world.\u00a0\u00a0 (Where I grew up, we said “tin” for both “tin” and “ten.”\u00a0\u00a0 But we never said “I’ll bit you will” for “I’ll bet you will.”)<\/p>\n
So…should it be exhaustive (dictionary-like listing of every invented word with its pronunciation in some easy-to-understand fashion), or should it cover only the words used often enough to be “needed” by the reader?<\/p>\n
Should the pronunciation guide follow the International Phonetic Alphabet or something simpler?<\/p>\n
Should it be housed on the Paksworld website (my preference) or…somehow incorporated into the books (I see publisher resistance if the vote comes down on the side of exhaustive.)<\/p>\n
Since it’s to be a service for readers, readers should have the chance to express what they want to see in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since I myself don’t enjoy pronunciation guides in books and would rather “hear as I read” whatever my phonics training hands me, I have resisted having a pronunciation guide for a long time.\u00a0 But this is the era of audio books as well as printed books, and the books are being read in places were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reader-help","tag-reader-help-wanted"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1361,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions\/1361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}