I thought I was in love with ours. The pictures are beautiful, the format is wonderful. Then I had ds use it last week for vocab- the word was "abide". Day 1: he was supposed to look up the word, and write down the pronounciation. I wanted, you know, the little marks over short and long vowels, separated syllables. Nothing complex. I wanted: uh bid (with the long mark over the i). I would have settled for a bid with the long i mark. Preferably also something to indicate accent syllable, but that would be good enough. In the dictionary: uh-bide. The underline, I guess, is the accent. Whatever. But no long i mark- and even worse, the e is still on the word! Every single one is like that. There's no notation for short vowel sounds either! Am I just being picky, or is it my dictionary? I had looked at samples, but apparently not close enough. I'm going to try to make it work, but would love children's dictionary suggestions that use a more traditional ... um.. notation for vowel sounds.
I had to resort to a regular old Webster's for the very same reason. I want my boys to be "fluent" in phonetic notation.
I was not even aware of dictionaries that don't utilize standard pronunciation guides. Soooooo....after reading your post, I checked out the one my kids had when they were little. My ds used to just read it for pleasure. We never did use it as a reference as most of the words we had to look up required Webster's or some other major "adult" dictionary. Well, now I know the Scholastic Children's Dictionary also uses the form of "pronunciations" that yours does. I can only assume it is designed to be used by children during their basic phonics knowledge phase of reading. Go figure. Oh, well. Ds learned a little bit about a lot of things in there. :lol:
I always thought all dictionaries were the same as far as the pronunciation thing goes...anyway, the one we use is Webster's New World Children's Dictionary. It has bright illustrations, pretty good word list for my 3rd and 1st grader, and a little box on every page showing the meanings of all those squiqqly lines on top of letters, and yes, shame on me, I can never remember what they are called There is also a word box on a lot of pages, with history of a specific word, or explanation, etc. There's even a thesaurus at the back, though not as extensive as the dictionary itself. I like this one, its suitable for my 3rd and 1st graders. I was going to first get a real one (sans pictures), but then I figured this one is less intimidating for a child just learning to use it. They actually sometimes just sit and leaf through it, laughing at weird sounding words, etc
We gave our Scholastic Children's Dictionary and Thesarus to a friend with younger hs'ing kids, so I'm not sure how they are marked. I did buy the Merriam Webster's School Dictionary at Half Price Books when the kids had trouble finding the vocabulary words they were looking for in the other, and complained mightily against using the BIG dictionary that has everything and then some in it. The School Dictionary has the markings I'm use to seeing. But actually it's a bit different. There are no "short vowel" markings, but there is a "long vowel" marking. And there's one dot over the a for "father as pronounced by those who do not rhyme it with bother" and two dots over the a for words like cot and bother, and "with most American speakers, father". HOWEVER, I like it. All the markings are explained on pg. 20a. I wouldn't use it before grade 4, however!
Most "big" dictionaries don't use breves to mark short vowels - an unmarked vowel is a short one. Saves ink that way, I guess. But they usually mark long vowels with a macron. Other than that, each one can make up their own markings as they wish, apparently, as well as how to show syllable divisions (just a space, a dot, or a /) and where to place a ' to show accent, either before the accented syllable or after it. >sigh< I WISH diacritical markings were uniform, but they're just not. I've had the best luck using older (from the 60's) collegiate dictionaries ... big enough to have most words we need to look up, but old enough not to contain all the "dirty words" (like the s-word or the f-bomb). The only problem is some words more recently added, like computer words and such, but I don't find a big need for that.
I recently purchased the American Heritage dictionary and it has markings (including the breve) most similar to what is taught in CLE.
Finding this thread interesting, I just looked over our dictionary. It is Webster's New World Dictionary and Thesaurus. It has all the markings.
We also have a small paper-back Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus. It has no pronunciation guide AT ALL. It just divides by syllables and give the definition. I got it because it was small. Our Miriam Webster School Dictionary is much more complete; there are even "common" vocabulary words that aren't in the paperback one!
I didn't see any ugly words in it. I got the children's version (have 2 six year old boys), so not sure about the older kiddos version. You can look at it via Christian Book and Mardels carries it if you have one of those close to you. We have really liked it. I had to look long and hard though to find one with markings like CLE taught. That is the way I was taught also when in school, but it seems that a lot of the dictionaries have come away from that for some reason.
