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From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Fri Mar 1, 2002  5:29 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] Re: IPA of Welsh song?

I appreciate the offer, but I fear I am in a bit of a hurry. The trouble I
have with non-IPA "pronunciation guides" is that they're all based on some
individual's understanding of how English is pronounced - i.e., the Welsh
sounds are compared with some ostensible sound in English. If it were
Italian or Spanish or even German that these sounds were compared with, I
wouldn't have a problem, because those languages tend to be very
consistent in how they pronounce vowels, consonants (following strict
rules). English, on the other hand, has so many different regional
dialects, and even within "BBC" English, I hear variations of how
different vowels and consonants are pronounced. So the baseline is
constantly shifting, and I have no idea, as a result, about the exact
pronunciation of the "ah", for example, that the Welsh "a" might be
compared to. IPA, by contrast, tends to start with the Italian vowels,
which don't change that much from speaker to speaker.

Karen Mercedes
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
***************************************
What lies behind us, and what lies before us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson




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