Re: pronunciation of saurus by a spanish speaker who also knows some greek

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On 6/6/06, Sebastian Apesteguia <sebapesteguia@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
> Mike, what I think is definitively wrong is....
> (silence in the tribune) "SOR-us".
[...]
> So I presume that is ok to write it
> "Sow"-"roose".

Yes, that's a good English version of how it "should" be pronounced
(even if no English speaker says it that way).

Which brings me to another point: discussing phonetics is kind of
pointless without using something like the International Phonetic
Alphabet. Each language has its own version of how the letters should
be pronounced in which contexts (and English is especially irregular
in its version, I think), but IPA characters are universal.

http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ipa/ipa.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/ipaascii.html

Since the pronunciation of symbols is largely based on pronunciation
in Latin, "proper" pronunciation of dinosaur names generally looks
pretty much like the actual name, e.g., _Stegosaurus_ is something
like /,stego'saurus/ (using IPA-ASCII; see the second link above). Of
course, English speakers are far more likely to say /'stEg@,sor.@s/,
Spanish speakers to say /es,teXo'saurus/, Japanese to say
/su<vls>tegoso:rusu<vls>/ (or even /su<vls>tegorju/?), southern
Germans to say /'Stego,zaurus/, etc. (I'm guessing a bit on the
non-English ones--native speakers who know the IPA, please correct me
where I'm wrong.)
--
Mike Keesey
The Dinosauricon: http://dino.lm.com
Parry & Carney: http://parryandcarney.com