Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda
I'm all for renaming stuff originally named for controversial colonial figures, but at least make it readable in the latin alphabet. Most people won't take the time to learn the international phonetic alphabet, they're going to keep calling it the Matthew Begbie school simply because they can actually say it, which defeats the whole purpose
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Teach the basics in schools and in a generation or two it wouldn't be a big deal at all, and people would have picked up a useful tool for learning all kinds of other languages as a bonus. It's already used in dictionaries and other reference texts around the world for helping with pronunciations anyways and could be easily taught in primary school.
The crux of the issue is really the extent to which people support language preservation, because if people here are serious about supporting indigenous language preservation in public spaces there's no way around learning some new sounds. The languages around here use quite a few sounds that don't exist in English, so whether or not latin letters are used people are still going to have to learn challenging new pronunciations to get it right. Insisting that it be anglicized in writing is just saying it's more important that English speakers can pronounce it in a way that makes sense to English speakers than it is to represent it in a way that preserves the correct pronunciation. The signs that use a combination of anglicized and IPA versions are a compromise, but getting rid of the IPA altogether doesn't make much sense for anyone that cares about the language being preserved with correct pronunciation.