A Pronunciation Guide

A suggestion has been made that it might be helpful to compile a pronunciation guide as part of the oremus Bible Browser. In order to provide such a guide more quickly, I would be interested in hearing from people who might be able to assist.

This page outlines what I currently have in mind.

I envisage that the pronunciation guide will initially be a free-standing part of the oremus Bible Browser, and will not be tightly coupled to any existing bible text. At a later stage it might be possible, for example, to be able to highlight a word in some bible text, press a button on the web page and have a window display the pronunciation, together with a sound clip. But this tight coupling will probably not be implemented in the first version; instead I envisage a form into which a word can be typed or pasted and then looked up in the pronunciation guide.

So, the initial tasks are

• to compile a list of words which can usefully be included in a pronunciation guide
• to establish suitable conventions for indicating pronunciations
• to provide a guide pronunciation for each word
• to implement a suitable mechanism for storing, querying, retrieving and displaying words

I also envisage that the pronunciation guide would be open source and licensed under some suitable licence to allow re-use.

Further steps

If this pronunciation guide proves to be a useful way of adding enhancements to the oremus Bible Browser, then it might be possible to use a similar mechanism to add other features. This might include a bible encyclopaedia, bible commentary, and so on. To be valuable these would probably need more editorial control than a pronunciation guide does, but many of the issues are similar.

Contact

If you are interested in helping create a pronunciation guide for the oremus Bible Browser or have other comments, please contact me by email at simon@oremus.org.

Simon Kershaw
October 2007