Hi all, First, I want to thank Matt C. and the rest of the ISU team for running a tournament that ran fairly smoothly, was extremely playable, and for the most part a lot of fun. Although neither Grinnell team placed particularly highly, I think we mostly enjoyed ourselves nonetheless. That said, I want to address the inclusion or noninclusion of pronunciation guides in the packets, which bugged me the most at the tournament and is something that bugs me in general as both a player and as a moderator. No, I don't claim to be able to pronounce everything that I come across as a player-- in the case of Russian names and other words, the inverse may in fact be true-- and I think the rule that is currently in place about close approximations demonstrating clear knowledge is a very good one. 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). This may just be the fault of the specific moderators involved-- I always thought you were supposed to prompt for spelling or something when you can't decipher the accent-- and so may not be the main problem here (though I still think that answers should contain pronunciation guides, if for no other reason than the aesthetic-- I still visibly wince whenever a moderator pronounces it "Albert CA-muss"). The question of pronunciation in the questions themselves is another matter. A number of questions, particularly in literature and history, are chock-full of foreign words that are not even close to being phonetic (don't even get me STARTED on Pinyin :P) or else are so complex that your average skim of questions before the round just ain't gonna do the job if you aren't familiar with the language. (To a lesser extent, Biology and Chemistry also suffer from this problem-- after about the fourth syllable of a complex compound my tongue tends to attempt seppuku rather than attempt to complete the pain.) As a player, the mispronunciation is frustrating because it breaks up the flow of the question and often obscures otherwise gettable clues. As a moderator, 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. This, then, is an entreaty to question writers: if the word seems like it would be hard for the average guy off the street to say, PLEASE include a pronunciation guide for it? I know that most quizbowlers who have been playing long enough to moderate are not the average guy off the street, but neither are we all supermen-- most of us have a few lingual specializations, outside of which we are often quite helpless. For that matter, does there exist anywhere some sort of on-line list of commonly mispronounced quizbowl words? If there isn't, I would even be willing to help compile something like that in the name of making the quizbowl experience more enjoyable. And with that, I am off to read Baudelaire's "Recueillement" and listen to something by Dvorak while driving around in my Fahrfugnugen and following the Tao. Cheers, Brad Houston
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