Re: Pronunciation keys

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> As I said in my 2nd message, I have no complaint with the standard
> symbols used in English dictionaries; they have a long history and are
> widely recognized by the general educated public, who have no
> familiarity with the IPA.
It's however annoying to L2 speakers like me, who learnt English phone*ics with
(slightly non-standard) IPA. I suppose we don't constitute enough of a market
segment to warrant separate editions ...

The worst confuzzlers I've run across are the McGraw-Hill technical
dictionaries, at least those of which I have encountered uses a variant of the
Oxford system with the added twist it merges a bunch of things that are
distinctive in the variant I learnt. Most notably, perhaps, the vowels of
"star", "caught", and "cot" all get transcribed as [ä] (that's a-umlaut in case
it gets mangled).

                                                 Andreas

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