[XeTeX] epsdice package.

[Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Jul 2011, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>> like "hay" (or some other form of money) or different, like in German for
>> example? (That's the reason IPA was invented: it's completely clear.)
>
> I think the point Michael was making is that because Cherokee is already
> written in a phonetic script, transliterating it into a different phonetic
> script the students don't know and don't need to know and requiring them
> to learn that on top of the script they actually want to learn, would be
> counterproductive.  Bear in mind that the audience for his project is not
> linguists who might already know IPA, but language learners.

I have some sympathy with this perspective, but as one who
has tried to learn spoken Chinese through the medium of
pinyin, I know only too well that such representations
can convey at best only a vague approximation to the truth.

The IPA has its drawbacks, that is true, and is more intended to
convey intra-language differences than inter-language, but it is
still almost certainly the best way in which to present the sounds
of a language to an audience with no previous familiarity with
the sounds of which it is composed.

In Michael's own examples :

	ᏌᏊ: Sah-Gwoo
	ᏍᎪᎯ: Skoh-Hee

the "ᏌᏊ" and "ᏍᎪᎯ" elements are fine for native speakers
familiar with the sound system, but the broad transcription
into "Sah-Gwoo" and "Skoh-Hee" does leave a great deal to
be desired, as Peter Dyballa suggests.


Philip Taylor