you wrote: the lack of guides is also frustrating because it often makes reading the question roughly analogous to navigating a minefield in which you know there are exactly 237 mines but you don't have any idea WHERE THEY ARE. Not to mention the fact that you know that you have up to eight players feeling like you would if you had to listen to your verbal butchery. Actually, I need feedback on this topic enough to justify posting-- I have often been criticized for writing questions like this, usually as a consequence of 1: writing "world focus" questions (by that I mean geography, lit, mythology, and especially history from what some qb players critically refer to as "the left field" or enjoy as "other parts of the world,") and 2: needing to come up with abundant clues that lead a player to the answer on such a topic (in other words, to avoid using "filler." I hitherto have not provided pronunciation guides for the following reasons, 1: they often cause moderators to stumble even more while they encounter the hard-to- pronounce word, skip the word, and then gather breath to pronounce whatever is in the guide, and thus, they cause awkward pauses before rather important clues, 2: they restrict pronunciations to a single one, when there are in fact multiple, equally valid pronunciations (not just in answers, though this is especially valid with nouns that happen to have been introduced to our culture via a succession of several others), and 3: I might not know, as a question writer who learns more from reading than from taking notes as a professor speaks, how to pronounce it myself, nor where to find acceptable guides. (This is one reason why I sometimes volunteer to read my own packets--it's painful to see moderators stumble so much, and perhaps cause mistakes, premature negs, or even outright wrong answers because something didn't come out right). The best solution I have ever seen to this problem happened at Michigan's MLK tournament, where long and hard to pronounce words had their syllables separated by dashes (for instance, Chal-chih-uit- li-cue). (Also, anyone remember the Pow-ha-tan question from COTKU?) This approach allows the moderator to plough through the word, one syllable at a time, without stumbling or pausing too much by realizing they've got to look for a guide somewhere else in the question. Another approach has been to spell the word phonetically, but that can also cause less experienced moderators to pause while they try to figure out what is going on. It would work though, it seems, with languages like Gaelic or French, that don't necessarily have long words, but that are filled with superfluous letters (I'm told the actual pronunciation for "Caidheargh," a place name, is something like /kar/). you wrote earlier: At the same time, I do not appreciate being penalized for correct pronunciation of words from languages that I DO know, which happened to me more a few times and happened to teams we were playing against a few times as well (to the point where our team was actually arguing with the moderator that our opponents' pronunciation was correct and that they should get the points). I'd attribute this more to moderator error. Moderators should give a small amount of leeway on the vowels if all the consonants come out in the right order, and people also need to understand that transliteration is also sometimes imperfect (the guy who ends up killing the Fenris Wolf is named Vidarr, but the d in the center is actually an aeth (sic), so an answer "Vitharr" should also be acceptable. Ditto for Njor(d=th) = Njorth or Njord. Accept 'em both. I'm sick of arguing with moderators about that as well. "Albert CA-muss". Yeah, that makes me wince too, but unless there's another writer out there with that pronunciation, I'd accept it, since I don't think it's fair to penalize people for learning their facts via books. Any feedback is appreciated. --Wesley (at IU)
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