[Tools-discuss] Re: A "pronunciation" resource?

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Sunday, November 2, 2025 11:28 -0500 Robert Sparks
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> 
> On 11/2/25 11:18 AM, Salz, Rich wrote:
>> >> Would it be worthwhile to add a "Pronunciation guide" that
>> >> people 
>> could add to their datatracker entry? Might still be too local to
>> be  useful, but might be worthwhile for non-ascii named folks to
>> add  something.
>> 
>> > Do you mean someone records themselves saying their own name?
>> 
>> I was thinking more like "It rhymes with ditch balls". I think
>> it  could be useful to know that a co-author's name (袁靖昊)
>> is pronounced  "Jing HAO"
> 
> Is this perhaps conflating "Roman script version of name" with
> "pronunciation of name"? We already capture a Roman script variant
> (but we call it ASCII). For pronunciation, we could add a field and
> let someone supply a string using the
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet or
> some other similar thing.

Rathole warning and a slightly finer distinction:  What you are
calling "Roman script version of name" has traditionally been much
closer to "what person would prefer to be called by English speakers,
using a script those speakers can understand".  That is tedious, but
many speakers of languages that are written in scripts very different
from Latin, prefer to be called, in English-speaking countries (or
others) by names that are distinctly not "versions", "equivalents",
"transliterations", "interpretations", etc., of their names.  They
are just alternate names those people have chosen or, in some cases,
that have been chosen for them.  Also IPA contains characters that
might not easily render in all of the ways people might look at the
datatracker, is not easy to learn and understand, and it (or
particular versions of it) may not be able to represent the phones or
phonemes of all of the world's languages.  AFAIK, all "similar
things" are as bad or worse. I don't think any of those problems
(other than maybe the learning curve) are insurmountable, but the
dimensions of the rathole and the animals it contains are quite
impressive.

   john