RE: Helping Jaws (et al) pronounce our company name

Actually I would say that pronunciation is more like spelling. There 
may be more than one way to spell a word (e.g. "color" vs. "colour"), 
but that difference would be embedded in the text, not in a style 
sheet.  In this case, you may have a <lang> tag like <lang = 
en-us/en-uk> to specify which variety is used.

There is a sense in which pronunciation is independent of content, 
much like the content of a document like the Declaration of Human 
Rights is independent of which language it is translated into. 
However, I wouldn't want to say that changes in language content are 
equivalent to changes in "style", even if the implementation is 
similar.

In some cases, changes in pronunciation are critical for words which 
are spelled the same but have different pronunciations depending on 
meaning. I'm thinking of cases like "bass" which would mean a musical 
clef or a type of fish depending on how it's pronounced,

I liked idea of linking to the XML file which stored the special 
pronunciations. In theory speech readers could download these files 
and incoporate them into their pronunciation routines.

For instance, here are some proposed markups from SABLE Speech 
Synthesis Markup Languiage
http://www.research.att.com/~rws/Sable.v1_0.htm

<PRON SUB="tomahto">tomato</PRON>
<PRON ORIGIN=fr>passe</PRON> (similar tp <span lang="fr">passe</span>)

Of course this was from 1999...


Elizabeth


>Maybe splitting hairs here (as often happens with these discussions),
>but...why wouldn't pronunciation be a characteristic of how something
>is spoken ? How to pronounce something is to ACSS what how to display
>something is to CSS, in my view...or am I missing an oh-so-subtle difference ?
>
>And yes, ACSS is not well supported, and the current spec does not
>provide any means of defining pronunciation hints and/or lookup lists...
>but other suggested solutions aren't workable yet either.
>
>Patrick
>________________________________
>Patrick H. Lauke
>Webmaster / University of Salford
>http://www.salford.ac.uk
>
>>  From: Phill Jenkins [mailto:pjenkins@us.ibm.com]
>
>>  >No tags exist for this but one thing that might help is aural css.
>>
>>  Aural CSS is for styling the speaking, Loud, soft, gender,
>>  etc. - not for
>>  pronunciation.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer
Education Technology Services, TLT
Penn State University
ejp10@psu.edu, (814) 865-0805

210 Rider Building II
227 West Beaver Ave
University Park, PA  16801-4819
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10
http://tlt.psu.edu

Received on Thursday, 25 September 2003 09:27:24 UTC