What if…

July 15, 2008

What if there was some futuristic culture that kept, not a written dictionary, but an audio dictionary, to preserve pronunciation? Someone deemed to have “perfect” pronunciation would be chosen to be recorded saying all the words into an audio archive that would be accessible by all and utilized starting from the earliest years of speech development to extinguish all speech “imperfections.” The problem (or advantage?) of our current language-preservation system is that pronunciation guides have no standard to be compared to; to indicate that the “o” symbol should be pronounced like the “a” in “father” means something completely different to all English speakers and always will unless a new system is developed. Maybe I will start my own audio-dictionary for my own language I invent.