Phonetic orthographies

[Randy Presuhn]

Hi -

> From: "Gerard Meijssen" <gerardm at wiktionaryz.org>
> To: "Peter Constable" <petercon at microsoft.com>
> Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Friday, November 24, 2006 11:19 AM
> Subject: Re: Phonetic orthographies
...
> I am also convinced that persons who speak English to any degree have no 
> use whatever for phonetic transcriptions of English. An IPA 
> transcription would be useless anyway if all the Meta data indicates is 
> that it is English or British / American.. such a Standards compliant 
> distinction does imho not significantly identify it for a linguist to be 
> truly useful.
...

This is contrary to my experience as a native speaker of English.
Many speakers of English have a larger vocabulary for reading
than for speaking.  If I decide I want to start using one
of those words in conversation, I need to look it up in a
dictionary and use its transcription to figure out how
to pronounce it.

Randy