User talk:NathanHawking/Prototype01

OTHER PAGES MAY DEPEND UPON THE CONTENT OF ARTICLE: Please do not make significant changes without discussion on the talk page. See Introduction.

Introduction
In the course of creating the List of heteronyms page, I was unable to find a simple guide to indicating pronunciation on Wikipedia. Thus this article, designed to be:
 * 1) Intuitive, simple and easy to use;
 * 2) Easy to type, requiring few or no special characters.
 * 3) Pronounce as many words as possible with the fewest ambiguities.

Obviously, the result will entail trade-offs. I studied a number of such guides, and found them all either too complex or too ambiguous. One simple guide, for example, used "i" to indicate the sound of both bite and bit.

Editing the example words should present little problem if there's a compelling reason to do so--such as an error or a significantly better word. Editing the SYMBOLS, however, without discussion on this page, may create difficulties:
 * Other dependent articles may become inconsistent;
 * Revising the symbols may create internal inconsistency or result in increased ambiguity in use.

If you have an idea for improving the symbol selection, please discuss it here. My arrangement uses only normal letters and the tilde (~) to indicate the voiced t~h sound, as in the. Caps denote the accented syllable. I'm not indicating syllables otherwise, for simplicity.--NathanHawking 02:46, 2004 Oct 31 (UTC)

Title
Pronunciation (simple guide to markup, American): The title was a struggle for me. It's not a pronunciation guide, it's American, it's about indicating or markup. If you have a better title idea, please bring it up.--NathanHawking 02:46, 2004 Oct 31 (UTC)