Re: Handling phonetic/military spelling

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 18:34 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi All:
> 
> In Orca, there is a feature to spell words out via speech synthesis. 
> The options include just sending each character of a word to the speech 
> synthesis engine as well as performing phonetic/military spelling.  The 
> phonetic/military spelling substitutes a word for each letter.  For 
> example "abc" becomes "alpha bravo charlie" in English.
> 
> We currently have the phonetic/military word substitutions for the 
> letters a-z, and we handle this via a simple dictionary: the keys are 
> the single characters and the values are the words.
> 
> I'm curious about a few things: what other languages support 
> phonetic/military spelling?  Should we include their alphabet in a big 
> dictionary?  Should we do something else to make this more flexible to 
> allow translators to extend the military/phonetic alphabet to their 
> language (if so, how would we do this)?

The NATO phonetic alphabet is accepted throughout most
of the world, at least for official military and radio
communication.  But as Leonardo pointed out, normal
folks in some countries may be less familiar with it,
even if it is used for official communications.

The Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
has a few interesting tidbits about local conventions in
the sections "Additions in German, Danish and Norwegian"
and "Variants".

The stuff about pronouncing diacritics make me wonder
about Vietnamese, which puts half a dozen different
diacritics on every vowel.  Clytie, are you reading
this?

--
Shaun