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Pronunciation of Glyphs

Is it needed?

The short answer: not at all.

MediaGlyphs is aimed at being just a writing system, with a simple and logical grammar and intuitive glyphs (easy to understand, easy to distinguish).

Its purpose is to preserve the different spoken languages of the world while at the same time to allow inter-language (written) communication.

The glyphs can hence be read aloud or thought in every language.

Faced with MG, a speaker of English would read/think "listen" or "hear", a Chinese speaker would probably see it as "tīng jiàn" (听见 or 聽見), a Spanish "oir" and so on and so forth.

Input programs use the user's mother tongue to access the glyphs. When the English speaker types "hear", the above glyph pops up.

There is hence no need for a specific pronunciation of MG, being MG primarily a written system.


Nevertheless the desire could arise to have a standard pronunciation of each glyph. Several motives could be imagined:


But let's stress once more that the standard MG pronunciation is provided only for the people that desire it. There is absolutely no need to learn it or to use it.




Now that the necessary disclaimer and warning have been issued, the fact you are still reading means you are interested in how does the pronunciation scheme works and how was it crafted.

The standard pronunciation scheme

On the MG website, all glyphs are clickable, and lead to an explanation page that contains translations of their meaning in many languages.
Those pages also include the standard pronunciation. For example, clicking on the above mentioned MG, you'll be able to identify at the bottom of the page two coloured icons:

dol pos.


Those two represent the standard pronunciation attached to the concept "listen": "dolpos".
"dolpos" can hence be pronounced instead than "hear", "oir", "tīng jiàn" (听见).

Those icons have many levels of super-imposed information:
The following sample sentence is written in MG, English translation and MG pronunciation (with latin characters and MG colour shapes):
MG: I; me MG: think; intend; consider; ponder; cogitate; cerebrate MG: you MG: hear MG: I; me MG: speak; talk; say; express in words
(I)(think)(you)(hear)(me)(speaking)
api padus ayo dolpos api pipun
api padus ayo dolpos api pipun
If you are familiar with the Japanese language, you'll realize that the pronunciation scheme (or the colourshapes) are to the mediaglyphs what hiragana is to kanji (kanji are Japanese ideograms, they can be written with hiragana, a phonetic writing system; for example, books for children have hiragana printed over the kanji - called furigana - as aid to the learning).
The kanji hold the meaning, the hiragana hold the sound.

"How was it done, why these sounds, how do I pronounce them?"

Many constructed languages suffer from a serious defect: they are difficult to pronounce for usually large groups of people.
To avoid this, extremely simple phonetics (choice of sounds) and phonology (how the sounds are combined to give words) were chosen for the MG pronunciation scheme.

Further information about musical rendering, colourshapes, composite words and core vocabulary is available in other pages.
Also a tutorial on pronunciation will be added, together with audio files.
 
 
What is MG?
First appearance: Wed May 8 01:54:21 BST 2002 - | - Last modified: Fri Mar 12 19:08:53 CET 2010
MG: in between; amidst; inter-; among; amongst; amidin between; amidst; inter-; among; amongst; amid