Providing pronunciation to words

Nature Geek said:

It's always been a pet peeve of mine when informational books or articles don't provide pronunciation to words. This could be anything from ancient Egyptians to Latin words in biology. I find myself mentally stumbling over the words every time I come across them, which slows me down. I only see pronunciation given in children's books and some textbooks. I wonder why. It's hard to intelligently discuss what you've learned with others when you don't know how to say it.

In your opinion, does it cheapen a book or make it juvenile to provide pronunciation? Just curious.

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I think this is probably going to vary a lot by person, and my perception varies by publication. I generally don't like it - it feels, I dunno, condescending or something. If it's what I consider a genuinely strangely constructed or in a language that tends toward unpronounceable (like, say, the name of a Welsh town, heh), ok, but I see them in magazine articles for words I think are pronounceable and roll my eyes. I've never really considered that other people may want them, which is dopey of me, except that it doesn't bother me if I see it in something like The Economist or USA Today, which seem disparate, but I think they're both the kind of thing read by people for whom English is not their primary language more than other things.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

I have a pronunciation guide in both my books, but then, I include a huge number of foreign words, and include chants people can practice that require better than guesswork pronunciation. Readers have thanked me for providing it.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

In writing, English isn't a very phonetically-rendered language. What you might consider as a "pronunciation" guide for Boston, Massachusetts, wouldn't work very well for Lubbock, Texas. Or Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Or Kingston, Jamaica. Or Auckland, New Zealand.

Say these words aloud:

Ought
Bough
Tough
Trough
Through
Thorough

caw

These days I fond it easier to get pronunciation from Google where I can actually hear the word said. I can never remember what those phonetic letters like the dictionaries use actually mean.

Nature Geek said:

It's always been a pet peeve of mine when informational books or articles don't provide pronunciation to words. This could be anything from ancient Egyptians to Latin words in biology. I find myself mentally stumbling over the words every time I come across them, which slows me down. I only see pronunciation given in children's books and some textbooks. I wonder why. It's hard to intelligently discuss what you've learned with others when you don't know how to say it.

In your opinion, does it cheapen a book or make it juvenile to provide pronunciation? Just curious.

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At some point, someone will plumb pronunciation guides into ebooks. I think it's the sort of thing where the words exist in your browser or ereader, and the pronunciation guide exists in a database somewhere, as veinglory points out, and the two just need to be brought together as needed.

My own fave ereader app Marvin lets you configure custom data sources - so you can tell the context menu that pops up when you tap on a word to include 'look up in Wikipedia' or 'look up in the OED', or wherever has an appropriate API. So there's probably a way of DIYing this already. I'm not sure what Kindle has plumbed into the platform these days, but they probably have dictionary support, and that probably includes pronunciation.

If you are using a foreign language with unusual sounds please give me a pronunciation guide! I use Gaelic now and again and have a heck of a time trying to find phonetic pronunciation for myself and the readers. I'm a fan of the Iron Druid series and love that he gives me a guide, but I wish it was a full guide with every book and I didn't have to go back to previous books for some pronunciations he's decided I should know. Gaelic is the language of my people...who apparently didn't want anyone else to know what they were talking about.

blacbird said:

In writing, English isn't a very phonetically-rendered language. What you might consider as a "pronunciation" guide for Boston, Massachusetts, wouldn't work very well for Lubbock, Texas...

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Excellent point. I was going to suggest that if the book contained a glossary it might be appropriate to add a pron. guide next to the definition, dictionary-style. But after reading blacbird's post I recalled the phonetic guides that are included in the AWAD email newsletters which are written by a New Yorker: as a speaker of British English they often make no sense to me, generally substituting 'oh' for 'ah', to give a simple example.

You could get around this problem to some extent by using proper phonemes, but that would rather defeat the point of making the terms more accessible to a wider range or readers as they would all first have to know and understand phonemes!

Caught in a cleft stick, as they say.