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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Nice idea! I would also like a transliteration of IPA into pseudo-english (like francais = frahn-say). Most people don't know IPA well enough, and sometimes I don't want to or can't listen to audio. Also I find sometimes, having it written out helps with comprehension.

(While we are at it, can people please start "transliterating" names from languages that use the latin alphabet in very different ways, like "Saoirse (seersha)"? And liberally using hyphens to break up longer foreign words? I know everybody is proud and feels well educated when they can pronounce foreign names, but I think there is no shame in using pronunciation aids.)

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> I would also like a transliteration of IPA into pseudo-english

Wikipedia already has a respelling key for this purpose. English orthography is such a mess, though, that I wouldn't trust a machine with this task. And even a human can't get around the problem that many pronunciations simply can't be expressed in “respelled” form, because they violate the rules of English phonology. That doesn't necessarily mean they're hard for English speakers to pronounce, but it does mean that trying to spell such words as if they're in English will get you nowhere.

And that's before we get to the issue of different accents!

> can people please start "transliterating" names from languages that use the latin alphabet in very different ways

No. Transliteration doesn't exist to make words from other languages pronounceable by English speakers, it exists to express a word in a different script. Focussing on English speakers would sacrifice important nuances, like maintaining phonological distinctions English doesn't have, or the ability to convert back to the original script losslessly. For example, Mandarin Chinese has at least two different consonants that sound like “sh” to an English speaker, and at least four that sound like “ch”, but the distinction between these is critical to Chinese speakers, and if we “transliterated” them to just “sh”/“ch”, we would end up with large numbers of homographs, and the transcription would be useless to Chinese speakers.

Also, what you're describing is the job of transcription, not transliteration.

Well, I think a respelling key is better than being not able to pronounce it at all.

I recognize parts of IPA, but I frequently forget the sound of some characters, and can't reproduce arbitrary IPA with confidence. I think if you haven't learned it properly, and use it regularly, its somewhat impractical.

Mandarin is an interesting example. I found Pinyin really intuitive (as an English and German speaker), and once you get used to some quirks (like x vs sh, or q which is more like english "chi" than english "qu", or i and e that sound much more schwa-like than I'd expect), it is fairly easy to pronounce most words (provided the tone marks are indicated. Official signage in China usually omits them for some reason).

And I know the difference between transcription and transliteration, that's why I put transcription in scare quotes. What I mean is, lets pretent Irish words are not written in Latin, but in ... Lotin (which looks 100% like Latin but is completely different :-)), and then treat it like Cyrillic. I have less problems reading Russian or Arabic or Greek names, compared to names writen in other Latin-alphabet languages - because most transliteration schemes try to preserve at least some familiarity for west European language speakers (unless it is Klingon, or Wade-Gilles...).

As someone who can read IPA I'd rather have it the other way round (which unfortunately is not possible because it's not an injective relation).

It's bewildering even serious dictionary publishers now predominantly use pseudo-English transliteration in most of their products.

You can't really learn proper native pronunciation from such transliterations. They are an approximation at best (IPA is too, if you take accents into account but even then it's much more exact).

Oh yes, I'm looking forward to descriptions of pronunciations like 'rhymes with tomato'. English, with its myriad of accents, is an awful language to transcribe anything into.

Moreover, having these pseudo-English transcriptions may leave people with a false impression they know how to pronounce something, while in fact using these transcriptions with naïve English phonology still leaves you incomprehensible (or at best very grating) to native speakers. Something something 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing' something something Dunning–Kruger something something.

Better just learn IPA yourself. Seriously.

I (an Irish person) wouldn't pronounce Saoirse as "seersha", more like "sayr-sha". And in Ireland the pronouncation of the name is pretty well understood. Would you phonetically spell out American names like Barack, or Hillary? Or just foreign ones?

To be honest, I just copied that from some other site, because I can never remember how to pronounce that name.

I guess I would just spell out names the given audience is likely to mispronounce - although you could argue to do it with every name, like one newspaper always mentions who a person is, no matter how famous ("bla bla, Donald Trump, president of the United States, bla bla Joe Schmoe, plumber from Virgina")

That's an interesting example, given that there are plenty of people who pronounce our former President's name to rhyme with "rack"...

The problem with transliterating names is that there often isn't only one way of pronouncing them.

For example, every Saoirse I know pronounces it "sur-sha".

Does "français" really sound like "frahn-say" to monolingual English speakers? It has always sounded more like "frahn-seh" to me, but that may be because I also speak Spanish. There's a recording of the word here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Français

It's not an isolated example. For instance, "chez" is pronounced "shay" in English but in French it sounds more like "sheh" to me.

According to Wiktionary it's /fʁɑ̃.sɛ/. So like the English word "set" without the -t. Even including an "n" is not correct; it nasalizes the vowel. This is why English-like transcriptions can only take you so far. There's only so many sounds in English, and when languages start using ones that don't exist, it's impossible to bridge that gap.

As a monolingual English speaker until college, I have had a terrible time with distinguishing some word-final diphthongs. For instance, I catch myself using the English "-o" /oʊ/ in Spanish, when it should be just /o/. I also have a hard time with /e/ vs /eɪ/.

The point of using a simple respelling is to show it is not pronounced "Fran Kice". Anything better than that is an improvement.

"say" and "seh" sound pretty much the same to me, but I'm not a monolingual English speaker, I grew up in Germany and the US, and I might also mix up things.

I find the first syllable harder to describe, since there is no way to note these nasal sounds in English (actually, I think they should be called anti-nasal, since no air goes through the nose when I say it, but I disgress). But I think in general, some basics of French pronunciation are known to most English speakers, so using a French word is a bad example.

Are you making 'seh' rhyme with 'meh', or mostly with 'say', but saying it's subtly different? (If only there were some sort of phonetic alphabet eh...)

I would say it's most like the long 'a' in 'fate' or 'mate'.

I did mean rhyming with "meh", not a long "a" at all! In IPA, I'd say it's ɛ, like the vowel in the English word "bed".

So it really sounds like "a" to you? Huh.

Oh, interesting.

It does, yes, but as I alluded to that differs from 'ay' in which I'd linger slightly more on the end 'y' note if you see what I mean.

Less extreme than the way Americans linger on a syllable-ending 'r', but the same sort of thing.

IIRC that vowel is /e/, which is neither really /ɛ/ ('eh') nor the diphthong /eɪ/ ('ey'). And that quite neatly illustrates the problem with shoehorning other languages into English phonology and spelling.

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