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

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> 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

Better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirshenbaum (check out the links at the bottom, 
and keep in mind that... erm... I modified the vowel chart from 
Kirshenbaum's original which... well... some say it makes the vowel system 
of American English look all nice and symmetric...)

To say "English is especially irregular" is an understatement. :-) It has 
the worst orthography of any language that uses an alphabet or syllabary. 
It's worse than French, all kinds of Gaelic, Tibetan, and 
Mongolian-in-the-Mongolian-script. (In French, at least, there are often 
lots of ways a spoken word could be written down, but only one way to 
pronounce any written word, including even scientific names, if we ignore a 
few irregular words and placenames. English even lacks this, in spite of 
actually having rules that prevent "ghotiugh" from being pronounced "fish".) 
I've made the observation it's easier to learn for nonnative speakers (who 
learn the spelling and the pronunciation at the same time, sort of like 
learning Chinese) than for native speakers -- I've often seen native 
speakers making mistakes I wouldn't dream of, because they already know the 
pronunciation and try to write it down.

I really like this page. http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html :-)