![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
This page is meant to be the key for the {{ IPA-en}} template (which displays " /X/") that is used as a broad pronunciation guide to key words in Wikipedia articles. It is not meant for phonetic detail, dialectical differences, or non-English phonologies. Please keep it as simple and accessible as possible, as many of our readers are not familiar with the IPA. kwami 19:41, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
As for syllabification, that is not distinctive in English and does not need to be indicated. Showing syllable breaks just sparks edit wars with people who think they should be somewhere else. Problem is, English has ambisyllabic consonants, which cannot be represented by the IPA. kwami 23:03, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
The obvious problem is that there is no single pronunciation of English. Attempts to create a standard either privilege one dialect over others; create an artificial pronunciation no one speaks; or are a confusing mixture of both. This particular mode picks up some odd bits of phonetic trivia (like the insertion of a schwa before a syllable-final r, which does not occur in many varieties of English) but omits other pan-English phonetic developments, like voiceless stop aspiration - which, of course, cannot be determined by rule without reference to the supposedly "non-distinctive" syllabification. RandomCritic
Not surprisingly, IPA transcriptions of English words used in America, England, and Australia are all different -- and slightly more surprisingly, phoneticians in these countries all use the IPA in slightly different ways, rather de-internationalizing it, and making it very difficult for a person trained in the tradition of one country to read another person's transcriptions correctly. Even more problematically, "traditional" or "standard" transcriptions of sounds may be read in ways that are quite misleading from the point of view of IPA, especially its canonical vowels. A Midwesterner seeing [ ɒ ] in [ stɒp ] may suppose that it is the same sound he or she uses in pronouncing "stop", though in fact the latter is closer to [ ɑ ], or even [ a ].
It is likewise "traditional" to transcribe the "long a" and "long o" diphthongs as [ eɪ ] and [ oʊ ]. But in America, England, and Australia alike, the dominant pronunciations have much lower nuclear vowels than [ e ] and [ o ], while the off-glides are closer to [ i ] and [ u ] than [ ɪ ] and [ ʊ ] in most pronunciations, outside of the now vanishingly rare RP. The "traditional transcription" thus enjoins a pronunciation that almost no English speaker actually uses.
The scheme shown assumes a rhotic dialect, but the vowels are for the most part chosen from a (typically non-rhotic) British variant of English, strongly influenced by RP. This cannot be back-translated into a non-rhotic dialect without the use of a rule involving deletion of a non-onset r and compensatory lengthening; a task considerably complicated when syllabification is considered irrelevant!
I also note the -- to me, quite novel -- use of [ ɨ ] to represent the slightly lower and more centralized variant of [ ɪ ] found in unstressed vowels. The symbol [ ɨ ] canonically represents a quite different-sounding sound, the desired sound being not nearly so high, nor so central -- being, indeed, closer to [ ɪ ] than to any other canonical IPA vowel, though of course not identical; while a fully stressed [ ɪ ] (perhaps only heard in very emphatic speech) is more front than the canonical [ ɪ ].
In the end, I am not particularly pleased with the use of IPA to represent some pan-English, not-quite-phonetic, yet not wholly phonemic transcription. I would rather see either: (1) consistent, side-by-side uses of a few common dialects;
or (2) one dialect, of any type, used consistently, and identified, and accepted as WP standard;
or (3) an abandonment of IPA altogether in favor of a phonemic scheme that can be translated by the aid of certain rules to an approximation of one of several dialects of English.
Of course this should be something that has some precedent of usage, and is not something made up by a WP user yesterday. RandomCritic 05:29, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
The bottom line is that it is extremely annoying that User:Kwamikagami, though he doesn't seem to understand either the theoretical basis or the facts behind various transcriptions of English (much less the principles behind the English pronunciation of classical names, but that a whole different can of worms) feels the necessity to go hither and yon around WP imposing his misunderstandings upon hundreds of articles and thousands of pronunciations, creating errors -- often highly ridiculous and grotesque ones -- which may not be discovered and corrected for months or years. Why doesn't he just leave it alone? RandomCritic 12:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm not an expert, but it all looks pretty good to me. Thanks for all the work it took to assemble this. Since it is widely linked, we'll see what general readers make of it in a little while. — Michael Z. 2007-10-19 21:40 Z
Ok, here's a problem I'm having here. This pronunciation table does not help. Whatever happened to the dictionaries I used as a kid that had pronunciations in mostly roman letters, with the occasional funky lines or dots over vowels? Does Webster have a patent on those? Bottom line is you're reinventing the wheel, and doing a piss poor job. 71.185.131.144 ( talk) 04:51, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Among the absurd pronunciations, used by nobody in the world, that User:Kwamikagami has come up with are:
These are ridiculous, and show that the user hasn't the slightest idea of what he is doing -- yet bulls ahead anyway. I daresay there are more such out there waiting to be discovered. RandomCritic 15:32, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Several editors object to using phonemic transcriptions for English words, or non-regional transcriptions, or perhaps both. However, this doesn't have to be an either-or choice. For place and personal names, there's the internationally recognized form, and often a differing local form. With Toronto, for example, a non-regional transcription would be something like /təˈrɒntoʊ/, and the local pronunciation pronunciation could be transcribed something like IPA: [ˈtʰɹʷɑnə], assessing a different subset of the IPA chart. That is what is suggested at Help:Pronunciation. Before we get into any more edit wars, let's discuss if this is how we want to go with Wikipedia. The alternative, as I see it, is to list London, Sydney, New York, Atlanta, Dublin, Johannesburg, Aukland, or Los Angeles as well as Toronto pronunciations of "Toronto", all phonetic, in an attempt to avoid theoretical complications. kwami 23:56, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
If I understand correctly, the opposing side feels that we shouldn't create abstract pronunciations that don't exist in the real world. At least one person objects to any phonemic transcription because he rejects the concept of the phoneme alltogether. Here's an simple example:
Collet is, per the OED (RP), /ˈkɒlɪt/, and per W3 (GA) /ˈkɑlɨt/. Now, do we really want multiple transcriptions for a simple word like collet? (Aussie might be the same as RP for this word, but it won't be for others, meaning yet a third national standard. And then there's SA, Ireland, and other countries. Currently we only list GA, which some RP speakers might rightfully object too.) We can combine the two, per the chart on this page, for */ˈkɒlɨt/. (Asterisk for a constructed form.) Now, RP speakers know (or will know, once they check the chart) that for them there is no difference between /ɨ/ and /ɪ/, while GA speakers know (or will soon realize) that for them there is no difference between /ɒ/ and /ɑ/. Thus speakers of either standard can read the transcription correctly according to their dialect. This is precisely the tack that W3 takes for various US dialects, though of course they use their own in-house symbols, which most Wikipedians fiercely reject. (Believe me, I've tried that too. And this isn't OR, because W3 symbols when read broadly are exactly equivalent to our */ˈkɒlɨt/)
If we go further, and reject a phonemic approach entirely, then the number of transcriptions multiplies, if only because GA isn't very well standardized, and the single transcription [ˈkʰɑˑlɨt] will not be sufficient for the entire country. kwami 01:33, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
W3 is Webster's Third International Dictionary, and GA is "general American" (newscaster standard).
Another approach to this which I forgot to mention, and which TI has switched to and I reverted pending discussion here, is to use parentheses for sounds which differ between dialects. So, for example, our /ɪər/, which could be read [ɪr] or [ɪə] or [ɪər], depending on dialect, would become /ɪ(ə)(r)/. Personally I find it more difficult to read, and I suspect it will cause just as much confusion among our readers. kwami 03:54, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
AFAICT this scheme has no unified way of transcribing "bath" words (words that have /ɑː/ or its equivalent in RP and AuE but /æ/ in GenAm) and "cloth" words (words that have /ɒ/ or its equivalent in RP and AuE but /ɔː/ in GenAm. — An gr 19:05, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
When we doubled the number of rhotic vowels (or vowel-ar sequences, many of which I do not control), in the draught before this page was created, it was suggested that all pre-rhotic vowels should be lax. We followed the OED in using schwa for the distinction, as follows:
IPA | Examples |
---|---|
/ɪr/ | mirror |
/ɪər/ | beer, mere |
/ɛr/ | berry, merry |
/ɛər/ | bear, mare, Mary |
/ær/ | barrow, marry |
/ɑr/ | bar, mar |
/ɒr/ | moral, forage |
/ɔr/ | born, for |
/ɔər/ | boar, four, more |
/ʌr/ | hurry, Murray |
/ʊər/ | boor, moor |
/ɜr/ (ɝ) | bird, myrrh, furry |
This is what we now have in the chart. One advantage of this system, besides conformity to the OED, is that people like me can simply ignore the schwas, making it easy to read. However, in going over actual practice in Wikipedia, what I often see instead is to use the existing free vowels plus ar:
IPA | Examples |
---|---|
/ɪr/ | mirror |
/iːr/ | beer, mere |
/ɛr/ | berry, merry |
/eɪr/ | bear, mare, Mary |
/ær/ | barrow, marry |
/ɑr/ | bar, mar |
/ɒr/ | moral, forage |
/ɔr/ | born, for |
/oʊr/ | boar, four, more |
/ʌr/ | hurry, Murray |
/uːr/ | boor, moor |
/ɜr/ (ɝ) | bird, myrrh, furry |
The advantage of this format is that it mirrors the non-rhotic vowels (that is, it's a broader transcription), meaning there is only half as much to learn for someone not familiar with the IPA; it is also extremely easy to read for someone like me who doesn't make all these distinctions. The more I think about it, and the more articles I see on Wikipedia, the better the second format looks.
What do you all think? There's still time to switch over. kwami 06:16, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
We should stick to the principal of understandability and simplicity for readers. That said, neither version bothers me—I know what a schwa is from elementary school, but I think the length mark (ː) is basic IPA used in many places (and ought to be added to the key).
Let's not worry too much about what is in the 20,000 articles with IPA. Many of them will be non-English or general IPA about phonetics/phonemics, and many of them will simply be inconsistently formulated. This new key should be seen as a recommendation, but also as general enough to help a reader figure out most of the English IPA seen in the wild.
The optional r's in parentheses do add a bit of visual clutter, but they are easy to understand, and make the assumption explicit for readers. I don't see a problem with using them or not. — Michael Z. 2007-10-22 18:12 Z
One RP editor objected to using <ɨ> for the reduced vowel of roses, saying it should be <ɪ>. However, it appears that the OED itself has switched over to this usage, though using a more accurate symbol <ᵻ>. For example, the OED lists a "British" pronunciation of parallelepiped as /ˌparəlɛlᵻˈpɪpɛd/, clearly distinguishing /ᵻ/ from both the other reduced vowel, /ə/, and the full vowel /ɪ/. kwami 00:09, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
We should stick to IPA, as per the MOS. -- Kjoon lee 19:48, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
I'd think that /ɘ/ would be easily confused with the schwa since it is very rare, especially when it appears in isolation. — Michael Z. 2007-10-25 02:15 Z
I just wanted to tell you guys, especially Kwami, that I'm glad this mini-project exists. Whenever I'd see the IPA code for a word in an article, I'd get frustrated because I hadn't a clue how it should possibly be pronounced. At least with this, I can learn it, adapt it, and expand my IPA and linguistic knowledge. Thanks again! 頑張って! - Cyborg Ninja 16:42, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
To me, the only instance in which it makes sense to write /ɔl/ is for the "al" sound in words such as "although" and "already", which is a very different sound. But a number of dictionaries seem to write it as /ɔ:l/, thereby not distinguishing it from the sound in "ball". -- Smjg 13:57, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
I suggest this article be merged with Help:Pronunciation. We don't need both articles in help space. Since this is the English Wikipedia and IPA is the standard here, it is appropriate for Help:Pronunciation to consist mostly of the IPA English pronunciation key, with mention of audio files and a pointer to the full IPA chart for non-English words. The shorter title is more consistent with WP:NAME. -- agr 16:30, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Pronounciation of beowulf shows an o with a bent bar under it, but this symbol isn't on this page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.165.246.187 ( talk) 20:11, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Just use the customary pronunciation methods provided in the average dictionary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.202.50.178 ( talk) 19:16, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
If the people who have the power to decide what is used here feel the IPA pronunciation is appropriate, fine. However, they should acknowledge that most average users will not find it helpful, since they don't understand it. Therefore, for wikipedia to be useful to a larger group of people, alternatives should be supplied. Personally, I think the best tool is a sound recording. If American, British, and Australian pronunciations are different, then provide all three of them. We can all agree that there is no "correct" pronunciation; but surely, typical pronunciations will be helpful to many. Some of this page's discussion sounds like little boy's in a pissing contest. I think the question should be: "Do we want to display our linguistic erudition or do we want to help people in the spirit of an encyclopedia?". I'd vote for the second. 69.92.131.213 ( talk) 20:01, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
JayLevitt brings up a point above that I have thought about too. I have AHD4's electronic version on my PC, and it makes the whole issue of readers needing to understand the written transcription entirely moot by synthesizing audio of every word using speech synthesis (TTS). I'm pretty sure it just reads the AHD-format phonemic transcription and strings together audio for each phoneme into a word. But it works quite well, and it was not expensive for me to buy a copy. Wikipedia should eventually add this feature in addition to the IPA transcriptions (not instead of them). The TTS engine would synthesize based on the IPA as input. (So technically it would not be TTS, but IPATS.:-)) Interested readers could still ponder and squabble over the transcription choices to their hearts' content. But meanwhile the other 99% of WP users (who don't care about linguistics) would sidestep the whole field by simply clicking on the TTS button and listening to the audio. I am not an IT wiz, so unfortunately I can't undertake this feature addition myself. But I hope that eventually someone suitably skilled does so. — ¾-10 23:02, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
I suggest that Wikipedia switch to the pronunciation guide from dictionary.com. —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
24.148.244.163 (
talk)
01:56, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
First I want to say I really like this guide and it seems to me like all the right decisions are being made in the end.
I've noticed that there's no distinct representation given for the y at the end of happy or city. I'd like to see /i/ used for this purpose. I think someone mentioned in one of the other discussions that this is the symbol that the OED now uses.
I speak with a New Zealand accent. I'm subject to happy tensing and the weak vowel merger. In my head [i] is an unstressed allophone of /iː/, not an allophone for a terminal /ɪ/. In other words the distinction between /i/ and /ɪ/ seems phonemic to me. That said, I don't believe it's possible to construct a minimal pair to demonstrate whether my [i] actually belongs to /iː/ or /ɪ/. (Because /i/ is always unstressed and always at the end of a word whereas /iː/ is always stressed and /ɪ/ is never at the end of a word.)
By the way, someone gave the i in wysiwyg as an example of an unstressed /ɪ/. I would spell this /wɪziwɪg/.
Ben Arnold ( talk) 13:29, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Per this edit summary, the yod-dropping after /t d s z n/ is uniform, but I'm not sure how to express that this specifically happens after alveolar consonants without saying, well, "alveolar consonant." Any ideas? — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 03:45, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I changed "Hawaii" to "Hawaiʻi" to more clearly show show the glottal stop issue, and because my understanding is that is the most common way the glottal stop-pronunciation is spelled in he state (and it is the Hawaiian language spelling). Kwamikagami reverted, saying "that d n display well". It displays fine for me. How does it display for others? Libcub ( talk) 11:07, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Re marginal consonants: The pronunciation of "ugh" is sometimes /ʊx/ or /ʌx/. RHUD MWCD (The second audio clip at MWCD is especially distinctive.) -- Jtir ( talk) 19:00, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
If this is supposed to be IPA, then why is the symbol for the trilled alveolar consonant used instead of the /ɹ/ symbol that is used for the alveolar approximant which is the sound in very and run? 128.138.64.130 ( talk) 22:49, 25 February 2008 (UTC)EF
I'd kept these as alternates mainly because /ɝː/ causes fewer complaints when used for place names in non-rhotic dialect areas, or for names when that person doesn't pronounce the ar. A large number of articles use this format, so I think we need to keep these in the chart. Also, the examples that were just removed illustrate the differences between ɝ ɚ ʌ ə ɪ ɨ, which may be helpful for some people. kwami ( talk) 20:49, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Kindly do not remove tags because you disagree with them. It will not do to say "this scheme is not controversial". Self-evidently it is. Indeed, it is without support of any kind.
In his ceaseless efforts to promote this pronunciation scheme, User:Kwamikagami writes: "this is how we [sic] indicate English pronunciation on wikipedia".
This is the central problem with this page. Besides the obvious fact that Kwamikagami's "we" doesn't include those Wikipedians who actually know something about linguistics, there cannot be a Wikipedia-specific pronunciation scheme. Wikipedia does not exist to promote some individual's, or even some small group's, idea of what is appropriate symbolism for pronunciation -- whether devised afresh or cobbled together out of several different dictionary schemes. You cannot get around this by saying "This is a help page". It is original research nonetheless and a violation of Wikipedia policy. If it is "only a help page", then on what basis are changes being made to articles all over Wikipedia to make it conform? Putting this on a Help page is apparently an attempt to avoid the kind of scholarly scrutiny to which other Wikipedia articles are, in principle, subject.
I have been asked why I do not propose an alternative treatment instead of just pointing out the errors in the scheme. The answer should have been obvious: there is no single phonemic scheme which will produce underlying representations for all English dialects -- or even just the most commonly spoken ones. That is because the dialects of English are no longer phonemically identical on a synchronic level. You can derive them historically from a common ancestor, but it is quite impossible to produce a "pan-dialectal" scheme which is in the least intelligible to the speakers of any of the dialects. Trying to do so is quixotic, and in the end only does violence to English.
The present pronunciation scheme is a teratological nightmare, which is neither phonemic, phonetic, or pan-dialectal. It makes Wikipedia, or at least certain of its editors look very foolish. If you must have *some* scheme -- which I do not believe is necessary -- then it should be a well-established norm that can be verified by consultation with accessible reference works, consistent with Wikipedia standards. Making something up just for Wikipedia is not acceptable.
RandomCritic ( talk) 14:18, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
This page is meant to be the key for the {{ IPA-en}} template (which displays " /X/") that is used as a broad pronunciation guide to key words in Wikipedia articles. It is not meant for phonetic detail, dialectical differences, or non-English phonologies. Please keep it as simple and accessible as possible, as many of our readers are not familiar with the IPA. kwami 19:41, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
As for syllabification, that is not distinctive in English and does not need to be indicated. Showing syllable breaks just sparks edit wars with people who think they should be somewhere else. Problem is, English has ambisyllabic consonants, which cannot be represented by the IPA. kwami 23:03, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
The obvious problem is that there is no single pronunciation of English. Attempts to create a standard either privilege one dialect over others; create an artificial pronunciation no one speaks; or are a confusing mixture of both. This particular mode picks up some odd bits of phonetic trivia (like the insertion of a schwa before a syllable-final r, which does not occur in many varieties of English) but omits other pan-English phonetic developments, like voiceless stop aspiration - which, of course, cannot be determined by rule without reference to the supposedly "non-distinctive" syllabification. RandomCritic
Not surprisingly, IPA transcriptions of English words used in America, England, and Australia are all different -- and slightly more surprisingly, phoneticians in these countries all use the IPA in slightly different ways, rather de-internationalizing it, and making it very difficult for a person trained in the tradition of one country to read another person's transcriptions correctly. Even more problematically, "traditional" or "standard" transcriptions of sounds may be read in ways that are quite misleading from the point of view of IPA, especially its canonical vowels. A Midwesterner seeing [ ɒ ] in [ stɒp ] may suppose that it is the same sound he or she uses in pronouncing "stop", though in fact the latter is closer to [ ɑ ], or even [ a ].
It is likewise "traditional" to transcribe the "long a" and "long o" diphthongs as [ eɪ ] and [ oʊ ]. But in America, England, and Australia alike, the dominant pronunciations have much lower nuclear vowels than [ e ] and [ o ], while the off-glides are closer to [ i ] and [ u ] than [ ɪ ] and [ ʊ ] in most pronunciations, outside of the now vanishingly rare RP. The "traditional transcription" thus enjoins a pronunciation that almost no English speaker actually uses.
The scheme shown assumes a rhotic dialect, but the vowels are for the most part chosen from a (typically non-rhotic) British variant of English, strongly influenced by RP. This cannot be back-translated into a non-rhotic dialect without the use of a rule involving deletion of a non-onset r and compensatory lengthening; a task considerably complicated when syllabification is considered irrelevant!
I also note the -- to me, quite novel -- use of [ ɨ ] to represent the slightly lower and more centralized variant of [ ɪ ] found in unstressed vowels. The symbol [ ɨ ] canonically represents a quite different-sounding sound, the desired sound being not nearly so high, nor so central -- being, indeed, closer to [ ɪ ] than to any other canonical IPA vowel, though of course not identical; while a fully stressed [ ɪ ] (perhaps only heard in very emphatic speech) is more front than the canonical [ ɪ ].
In the end, I am not particularly pleased with the use of IPA to represent some pan-English, not-quite-phonetic, yet not wholly phonemic transcription. I would rather see either: (1) consistent, side-by-side uses of a few common dialects;
or (2) one dialect, of any type, used consistently, and identified, and accepted as WP standard;
or (3) an abandonment of IPA altogether in favor of a phonemic scheme that can be translated by the aid of certain rules to an approximation of one of several dialects of English.
Of course this should be something that has some precedent of usage, and is not something made up by a WP user yesterday. RandomCritic 05:29, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
The bottom line is that it is extremely annoying that User:Kwamikagami, though he doesn't seem to understand either the theoretical basis or the facts behind various transcriptions of English (much less the principles behind the English pronunciation of classical names, but that a whole different can of worms) feels the necessity to go hither and yon around WP imposing his misunderstandings upon hundreds of articles and thousands of pronunciations, creating errors -- often highly ridiculous and grotesque ones -- which may not be discovered and corrected for months or years. Why doesn't he just leave it alone? RandomCritic 12:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm not an expert, but it all looks pretty good to me. Thanks for all the work it took to assemble this. Since it is widely linked, we'll see what general readers make of it in a little while. — Michael Z. 2007-10-19 21:40 Z
Ok, here's a problem I'm having here. This pronunciation table does not help. Whatever happened to the dictionaries I used as a kid that had pronunciations in mostly roman letters, with the occasional funky lines or dots over vowels? Does Webster have a patent on those? Bottom line is you're reinventing the wheel, and doing a piss poor job. 71.185.131.144 ( talk) 04:51, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Among the absurd pronunciations, used by nobody in the world, that User:Kwamikagami has come up with are:
These are ridiculous, and show that the user hasn't the slightest idea of what he is doing -- yet bulls ahead anyway. I daresay there are more such out there waiting to be discovered. RandomCritic 15:32, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Several editors object to using phonemic transcriptions for English words, or non-regional transcriptions, or perhaps both. However, this doesn't have to be an either-or choice. For place and personal names, there's the internationally recognized form, and often a differing local form. With Toronto, for example, a non-regional transcription would be something like /təˈrɒntoʊ/, and the local pronunciation pronunciation could be transcribed something like IPA: [ˈtʰɹʷɑnə], assessing a different subset of the IPA chart. That is what is suggested at Help:Pronunciation. Before we get into any more edit wars, let's discuss if this is how we want to go with Wikipedia. The alternative, as I see it, is to list London, Sydney, New York, Atlanta, Dublin, Johannesburg, Aukland, or Los Angeles as well as Toronto pronunciations of "Toronto", all phonetic, in an attempt to avoid theoretical complications. kwami 23:56, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
If I understand correctly, the opposing side feels that we shouldn't create abstract pronunciations that don't exist in the real world. At least one person objects to any phonemic transcription because he rejects the concept of the phoneme alltogether. Here's an simple example:
Collet is, per the OED (RP), /ˈkɒlɪt/, and per W3 (GA) /ˈkɑlɨt/. Now, do we really want multiple transcriptions for a simple word like collet? (Aussie might be the same as RP for this word, but it won't be for others, meaning yet a third national standard. And then there's SA, Ireland, and other countries. Currently we only list GA, which some RP speakers might rightfully object too.) We can combine the two, per the chart on this page, for */ˈkɒlɨt/. (Asterisk for a constructed form.) Now, RP speakers know (or will know, once they check the chart) that for them there is no difference between /ɨ/ and /ɪ/, while GA speakers know (or will soon realize) that for them there is no difference between /ɒ/ and /ɑ/. Thus speakers of either standard can read the transcription correctly according to their dialect. This is precisely the tack that W3 takes for various US dialects, though of course they use their own in-house symbols, which most Wikipedians fiercely reject. (Believe me, I've tried that too. And this isn't OR, because W3 symbols when read broadly are exactly equivalent to our */ˈkɒlɨt/)
If we go further, and reject a phonemic approach entirely, then the number of transcriptions multiplies, if only because GA isn't very well standardized, and the single transcription [ˈkʰɑˑlɨt] will not be sufficient for the entire country. kwami 01:33, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
W3 is Webster's Third International Dictionary, and GA is "general American" (newscaster standard).
Another approach to this which I forgot to mention, and which TI has switched to and I reverted pending discussion here, is to use parentheses for sounds which differ between dialects. So, for example, our /ɪər/, which could be read [ɪr] or [ɪə] or [ɪər], depending on dialect, would become /ɪ(ə)(r)/. Personally I find it more difficult to read, and I suspect it will cause just as much confusion among our readers. kwami 03:54, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
AFAICT this scheme has no unified way of transcribing "bath" words (words that have /ɑː/ or its equivalent in RP and AuE but /æ/ in GenAm) and "cloth" words (words that have /ɒ/ or its equivalent in RP and AuE but /ɔː/ in GenAm. — An gr 19:05, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
When we doubled the number of rhotic vowels (or vowel-ar sequences, many of which I do not control), in the draught before this page was created, it was suggested that all pre-rhotic vowels should be lax. We followed the OED in using schwa for the distinction, as follows:
IPA | Examples |
---|---|
/ɪr/ | mirror |
/ɪər/ | beer, mere |
/ɛr/ | berry, merry |
/ɛər/ | bear, mare, Mary |
/ær/ | barrow, marry |
/ɑr/ | bar, mar |
/ɒr/ | moral, forage |
/ɔr/ | born, for |
/ɔər/ | boar, four, more |
/ʌr/ | hurry, Murray |
/ʊər/ | boor, moor |
/ɜr/ (ɝ) | bird, myrrh, furry |
This is what we now have in the chart. One advantage of this system, besides conformity to the OED, is that people like me can simply ignore the schwas, making it easy to read. However, in going over actual practice in Wikipedia, what I often see instead is to use the existing free vowels plus ar:
IPA | Examples |
---|---|
/ɪr/ | mirror |
/iːr/ | beer, mere |
/ɛr/ | berry, merry |
/eɪr/ | bear, mare, Mary |
/ær/ | barrow, marry |
/ɑr/ | bar, mar |
/ɒr/ | moral, forage |
/ɔr/ | born, for |
/oʊr/ | boar, four, more |
/ʌr/ | hurry, Murray |
/uːr/ | boor, moor |
/ɜr/ (ɝ) | bird, myrrh, furry |
The advantage of this format is that it mirrors the non-rhotic vowels (that is, it's a broader transcription), meaning there is only half as much to learn for someone not familiar with the IPA; it is also extremely easy to read for someone like me who doesn't make all these distinctions. The more I think about it, and the more articles I see on Wikipedia, the better the second format looks.
What do you all think? There's still time to switch over. kwami 06:16, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
We should stick to the principal of understandability and simplicity for readers. That said, neither version bothers me—I know what a schwa is from elementary school, but I think the length mark (ː) is basic IPA used in many places (and ought to be added to the key).
Let's not worry too much about what is in the 20,000 articles with IPA. Many of them will be non-English or general IPA about phonetics/phonemics, and many of them will simply be inconsistently formulated. This new key should be seen as a recommendation, but also as general enough to help a reader figure out most of the English IPA seen in the wild.
The optional r's in parentheses do add a bit of visual clutter, but they are easy to understand, and make the assumption explicit for readers. I don't see a problem with using them or not. — Michael Z. 2007-10-22 18:12 Z
One RP editor objected to using <ɨ> for the reduced vowel of roses, saying it should be <ɪ>. However, it appears that the OED itself has switched over to this usage, though using a more accurate symbol <ᵻ>. For example, the OED lists a "British" pronunciation of parallelepiped as /ˌparəlɛlᵻˈpɪpɛd/, clearly distinguishing /ᵻ/ from both the other reduced vowel, /ə/, and the full vowel /ɪ/. kwami 00:09, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
We should stick to IPA, as per the MOS. -- Kjoon lee 19:48, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
I'd think that /ɘ/ would be easily confused with the schwa since it is very rare, especially when it appears in isolation. — Michael Z. 2007-10-25 02:15 Z
I just wanted to tell you guys, especially Kwami, that I'm glad this mini-project exists. Whenever I'd see the IPA code for a word in an article, I'd get frustrated because I hadn't a clue how it should possibly be pronounced. At least with this, I can learn it, adapt it, and expand my IPA and linguistic knowledge. Thanks again! 頑張って! - Cyborg Ninja 16:42, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
To me, the only instance in which it makes sense to write /ɔl/ is for the "al" sound in words such as "although" and "already", which is a very different sound. But a number of dictionaries seem to write it as /ɔ:l/, thereby not distinguishing it from the sound in "ball". -- Smjg 13:57, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
I suggest this article be merged with Help:Pronunciation. We don't need both articles in help space. Since this is the English Wikipedia and IPA is the standard here, it is appropriate for Help:Pronunciation to consist mostly of the IPA English pronunciation key, with mention of audio files and a pointer to the full IPA chart for non-English words. The shorter title is more consistent with WP:NAME. -- agr 16:30, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Pronounciation of beowulf shows an o with a bent bar under it, but this symbol isn't on this page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.165.246.187 ( talk) 20:11, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Just use the customary pronunciation methods provided in the average dictionary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.202.50.178 ( talk) 19:16, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
If the people who have the power to decide what is used here feel the IPA pronunciation is appropriate, fine. However, they should acknowledge that most average users will not find it helpful, since they don't understand it. Therefore, for wikipedia to be useful to a larger group of people, alternatives should be supplied. Personally, I think the best tool is a sound recording. If American, British, and Australian pronunciations are different, then provide all three of them. We can all agree that there is no "correct" pronunciation; but surely, typical pronunciations will be helpful to many. Some of this page's discussion sounds like little boy's in a pissing contest. I think the question should be: "Do we want to display our linguistic erudition or do we want to help people in the spirit of an encyclopedia?". I'd vote for the second. 69.92.131.213 ( talk) 20:01, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
JayLevitt brings up a point above that I have thought about too. I have AHD4's electronic version on my PC, and it makes the whole issue of readers needing to understand the written transcription entirely moot by synthesizing audio of every word using speech synthesis (TTS). I'm pretty sure it just reads the AHD-format phonemic transcription and strings together audio for each phoneme into a word. But it works quite well, and it was not expensive for me to buy a copy. Wikipedia should eventually add this feature in addition to the IPA transcriptions (not instead of them). The TTS engine would synthesize based on the IPA as input. (So technically it would not be TTS, but IPATS.:-)) Interested readers could still ponder and squabble over the transcription choices to their hearts' content. But meanwhile the other 99% of WP users (who don't care about linguistics) would sidestep the whole field by simply clicking on the TTS button and listening to the audio. I am not an IT wiz, so unfortunately I can't undertake this feature addition myself. But I hope that eventually someone suitably skilled does so. — ¾-10 23:02, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
I suggest that Wikipedia switch to the pronunciation guide from dictionary.com. —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
24.148.244.163 (
talk)
01:56, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
First I want to say I really like this guide and it seems to me like all the right decisions are being made in the end.
I've noticed that there's no distinct representation given for the y at the end of happy or city. I'd like to see /i/ used for this purpose. I think someone mentioned in one of the other discussions that this is the symbol that the OED now uses.
I speak with a New Zealand accent. I'm subject to happy tensing and the weak vowel merger. In my head [i] is an unstressed allophone of /iː/, not an allophone for a terminal /ɪ/. In other words the distinction between /i/ and /ɪ/ seems phonemic to me. That said, I don't believe it's possible to construct a minimal pair to demonstrate whether my [i] actually belongs to /iː/ or /ɪ/. (Because /i/ is always unstressed and always at the end of a word whereas /iː/ is always stressed and /ɪ/ is never at the end of a word.)
By the way, someone gave the i in wysiwyg as an example of an unstressed /ɪ/. I would spell this /wɪziwɪg/.
Ben Arnold ( talk) 13:29, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Per this edit summary, the yod-dropping after /t d s z n/ is uniform, but I'm not sure how to express that this specifically happens after alveolar consonants without saying, well, "alveolar consonant." Any ideas? — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 03:45, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I changed "Hawaii" to "Hawaiʻi" to more clearly show show the glottal stop issue, and because my understanding is that is the most common way the glottal stop-pronunciation is spelled in he state (and it is the Hawaiian language spelling). Kwamikagami reverted, saying "that d n display well". It displays fine for me. How does it display for others? Libcub ( talk) 11:07, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Re marginal consonants: The pronunciation of "ugh" is sometimes /ʊx/ or /ʌx/. RHUD MWCD (The second audio clip at MWCD is especially distinctive.) -- Jtir ( talk) 19:00, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
If this is supposed to be IPA, then why is the symbol for the trilled alveolar consonant used instead of the /ɹ/ symbol that is used for the alveolar approximant which is the sound in very and run? 128.138.64.130 ( talk) 22:49, 25 February 2008 (UTC)EF
I'd kept these as alternates mainly because /ɝː/ causes fewer complaints when used for place names in non-rhotic dialect areas, or for names when that person doesn't pronounce the ar. A large number of articles use this format, so I think we need to keep these in the chart. Also, the examples that were just removed illustrate the differences between ɝ ɚ ʌ ə ɪ ɨ, which may be helpful for some people. kwami ( talk) 20:49, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Kindly do not remove tags because you disagree with them. It will not do to say "this scheme is not controversial". Self-evidently it is. Indeed, it is without support of any kind.
In his ceaseless efforts to promote this pronunciation scheme, User:Kwamikagami writes: "this is how we [sic] indicate English pronunciation on wikipedia".
This is the central problem with this page. Besides the obvious fact that Kwamikagami's "we" doesn't include those Wikipedians who actually know something about linguistics, there cannot be a Wikipedia-specific pronunciation scheme. Wikipedia does not exist to promote some individual's, or even some small group's, idea of what is appropriate symbolism for pronunciation -- whether devised afresh or cobbled together out of several different dictionary schemes. You cannot get around this by saying "This is a help page". It is original research nonetheless and a violation of Wikipedia policy. If it is "only a help page", then on what basis are changes being made to articles all over Wikipedia to make it conform? Putting this on a Help page is apparently an attempt to avoid the kind of scholarly scrutiny to which other Wikipedia articles are, in principle, subject.
I have been asked why I do not propose an alternative treatment instead of just pointing out the errors in the scheme. The answer should have been obvious: there is no single phonemic scheme which will produce underlying representations for all English dialects -- or even just the most commonly spoken ones. That is because the dialects of English are no longer phonemically identical on a synchronic level. You can derive them historically from a common ancestor, but it is quite impossible to produce a "pan-dialectal" scheme which is in the least intelligible to the speakers of any of the dialects. Trying to do so is quixotic, and in the end only does violence to English.
The present pronunciation scheme is a teratological nightmare, which is neither phonemic, phonetic, or pan-dialectal. It makes Wikipedia, or at least certain of its editors look very foolish. If you must have *some* scheme -- which I do not believe is necessary -- then it should be a well-established norm that can be verified by consultation with accessible reference works, consistent with Wikipedia standards. Making something up just for Wikipedia is not acceptable.
RandomCritic ( talk) 14:18, 1 March 2008 (UTC)