IPA in encyclopædiae

[Myranda]

Since I wrote that post about IPA you know I'm in support :P

I think most of this could be taken care of just here on the forums by editing it into the naming convention threads. Those are primarily geared towards names of people, but in most cases it's not too hard to infer the race of origin for place names as well and apply the same rules. When unsure, it seems pretty safe to fall back on the "standard" 5 vowels and use consonants as pronounced in Japanese, leaving the hardest task being determining which syllables are the stressed ones.

Then you get names like Rouaille from the latest patches where no matter how much you think you understand the rules, you do a double take when actually voice-acted by the NPCs, lol.

Love the idea about dialects, though I'd have to agree with Risvertasashi that general rules for changes would be easier and more concise to implement than a whole separate list of each word.

An afterthought: Ferne did appear one time to say that due to low literacy rates, when it comes to the written word the wealthy pretty much make up their own grammatical rules for sentence structure and there is no standard. I suppose it's entirely possible there's little standardization in oral pronunciation as well, though it would need to be close enough that people could at least still understand each other.