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from a user's talk page addressed to Kudpung:
In order to continue, I need to know whether you have linking or intruding ar or not, something you've so far refused to say. Without that, I can't evaluate your claim. So, would you, speaking your best (snobbiest?), say "Worcester is home" (or any appropriate linking environment) with an /r/ before "is"? If you don't, would it be considered correct to do so? Then, take "Anglia is home" -- is there an /r/ there? If there is, is that considered correct? kwami ( talk) 12:08, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
First and foremost, to set the record straight, the claims are not mine; several Wikipedians, among them the micromanagers of Wikipedia Projects, have suggested on this discussion and on other talk pages that there may be some weaknesses in the way the Wikipedia assumes that British place names should be transliterated into the IPA, and because they are probably not linguists, it has not been possible for them to express their concern in a way that the linguists here can understand and address in simple, non lingo-technical terms.
For the benefit of readers of this thread who are not linguists, and to answer the question in italics above: My best, snobbiest RP does NOT pronounce the linking r at the end of Worcester when the next word begins with a vowel. There are in fact several kinds of RP and they have all changed over the last 60 years since I started speaking and was educated in awfully rather posh schools. That 'posh' unlinked r is how BBC newscasters spoke in the 50s and how the Queen still speaks when reading from a prepared script - such as her speech at the opening of the parliamentary session, and her Christmas speech to the nation, and on other formal occasions. In more private circles and when on a walk-about, her speech has become a tiny bit more laid back, while two generations later, her grandchildren William and Harry speak much the same as any reasonably well educated kids of their generation. The accent of their father, Prince Charles, is still in many ways, more affected (snobbish) than that of his mother, the Queen. Contrary to some popular ideas expressed on this encyclopedia and elsewhere, nobody in Britain is in a hurry to speak with the same accent of the Queen. A form or RP, or regionally and socially devoid accent, is becoming exponentially widespread in the land, and regional accents among the younger genrations are becoming barely discernible.
However, in TESOL, for example, we expose our students to a wide variety of English accents to enable them to even distinguish words from the worst American slur, to perfectly fluent, but educated, native Indian English, and Thai and Chinese English gibberish (Tinglish & Chinglish). What I teach them is a more modern RP without the awful affectations of the 40s and 50s, but they very often have to learn the bulk of their pronunciation from either their indigenous non-native English speaking teachers, or from native English TEFLers who may speak with a strong American or British regional or cultural bias, and are not capable of code switching to any form of RP. Generally, the IPA is only of interest to those who need a pronunciation reference across several langauges. Anyone just learning one second language just has to 'listen and repeat' in the traditional way, with some help from the teacher in the physical aspects of producing some sounds that may be new to the learner. Very few second langauge learners will ever achieve even a near native pronunciation, it's rarely necessary, and their utterances will allmost always be coloured by traces of their own first language accent. You can be in a conference room full of mixed nationalities all speaking perfectly fluent French for example, but you will notice their origins from their accents. In TESOL, (outside the US), frequent use of the IPA is made because many exams, including TESOL certification, demand it. (just so you know, in my university I taught phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax in the Graduate School). Unlike some of the IPA specialists that contribute to the IPA articles in the Wikipedia, they are not expected to become perfectly fluent in their use of it. They will however, be able to look at a word of up to , say, three sylables, and recognise quite accurately how it will sound. One side effect of learning the IPA is that because it is a script, it can be an immense help in preparing learners how to use non Roman scripts. Musicians score quite well when learning the IPA because they have already learned to read a language in a non Roman script that represents sounds: that of music. Generally, the IPA is a working tool for teachers, linguists, and students learning several languages simultaneously. It does not demand total understanding of it as a stand-alone subject, any more than I speak fluent Thai, without a university degree in it, for running my business here. One of the problems in this discussion has been as far as I can see, is that the non linguists here have been brushed off and scared away by a lot of technical gibberish by IPA specialists who consider any non IPA experts as complete idiots, failed linguists, and trolls.
It's pretty clear and well-written, and might help with some of the confusions. Even though I come to this page constantly (mainly to cut and paste), I wouldn't mind seeing it every time. Grover cleveland ( talk) 18:15, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
This phonetic alphabet uses characters, that I'm afraid most are unfamiliar with. I prefer the pronunciation provided by Merriam Webster over the IPA. Can we incorporate both into the articles?
For example: Washington Merriam Webster: "/ˈwȯ-shiŋ-tən" is easier for me to understand than IPA: "/ˈwɒʃɪŋ.tən"
99.73.184.21 ( talk) 08:16, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
Actually, despite my (colorful? to put it kindly) protests on the main IPA talk page, I would not argue that IPA is less suited to this purpose than some other form of pronunciation guide... wȯ-shiŋ-tən is really no easier to interpret than anything else: either you know what the silly glyphs stand for, or you don't.
Point is that, either way, some people are actually just going to have to look it up. The question I would raise is whether or not it would not also be beneficial to include, inline, the explanation of the symbols found on the IPA-EN key page (this thing, I guess), since a lot of readers are going to be forced to look it up anyway. (Otherwise, why is this page linked?)
I can concede that space and flow may be issues. In response I would suggest that maybe pronunciation doesn't belong inline in the first paragraph of an article to begin with; if there isn't enough room to do it right, there just isn't enough room to do it there at all.
Other than that, my biggest gripe about the guys running this IPA stuff is that the articles where I most want to see a pronunciation guide don't actually include it. :(
J.M. Archer ( talk) 17:22, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
How are these words to be categorized? With THOUGHT (as in the U.S. and Conservative RP), or with LOT (as in most of the U.K., and I presume, the Southern Hemisphere)? 82.124.231.186 ( talk) 14:49, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
For me, the o in kilogram is a schwa, whereas the o in omission is not, even if reduced. The note seems to imply that this sound may be absent altogether in some dialects, but doesn't hint at the fact that those that do have the sound may disagree about which words fall into the omission category.
I suspect that a majority of North Americans would agree with me on these two particular words, and the Merriam-Webster would seem to support that. 82.124.231.186 ( talk) 14:12, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
I don't know where to ask this, so I apologize if this isn't the correct place. Someone added a rough pronunciation to the ONEOK Field article (pronounced "wun ok"). I was hoping somebody here could provide a more accurate IPA pronunciation. Its pronounced "one oak" or "won oak" (its an Oklahoma based company). Thanks.— NMajdan• talk 17:56, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
It is salutary to note that all those previous contributors who had a degree of academic distinction and knowledge about this subject have long since left, driven to distraction by the repetitive, rambling and plain wrong assumptions/assertions/new interpretations of IPA by Wikipedia's 'editors'. Maybe it's time to wrap this one up. Fortnum ( talk) 16:41, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
-- Kudpung ( talk) 12:29, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Kudpung, you claim you're answering my questions, while once again evading them. Also, as a trained linguist, you should know that several claims you are making are false. Why should "York" have an /r/ in RP? Why should "Warwickshire" not have an /r/? Until you're willing to support the claims you make, you're not engaging in honest discussion, but only standing on a soap box.
"Warwickshire" has a final /r/ in RP. If you disagree, we can discuss what phonemes and allophones are, though I really would expect that you should understand this. (I've tried to engage in this discussion with you several times, but you have adamantly refused.) "York" does not have an /r/ in RP. If you disagree, we can discuss that as well.
If, however, your objection is that we should transcribe names in the local pronunciation, then let's stick to that as a philosophical issue, rather than making up spurious linguistic arguments. So far the consensus has been that we use a diaphonemic transcription and add the local pronunciations where beneficial. I don't know any editors who would object to you adding local pronunciations to place names; the problem is when you delete the broader pronunciation that gives non-locals access to the article.
If you think the WP IPA is American cultural imperialism forcing itself on England (despite the consensus of English editors in crafting the IPA key), then please tell us what is American about it, since everything in it is found in English English.
If your objection is that we shouldn't have a diaphonemic transcription at all, then that is yet a fourth discussion, one that we've had several times, though we can always have it again.
If your objection is that the IPA should be accessible to ESL students, then that is yet a fifth discussion, and one that AFAIK we have not had. It is true that our English IPA conventions are designed for the native or near-native speaker rather than the ESL student. This is in contrast with the IPA for other languages, which does not assume any ability in the language.
If your objection is that we "shouldn't tell people what to do", but rather allow an idiosyncratic transcription for every article, then I don't think compromise is possible. People have a hard enough time following the IPA without it meaning something different each time they see it. We do need guidelines and standards. You're not going to see different transcriptions in the OED depending on who edited that particular word, but rather a consistent system for the entire dictionary. WP should be no different. kwami ( talk) 23:28, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Is there a list of basic English words written in IPA? The reason I ask is that I was just on the page for word I know how to pronounce and I saw the IPA. This made me realize that it might be easier to pick up IPA instead of looking at bare symbols and finding out which phoneme they represent, but instead to chunk a word, which is a string of phonemes, that I already know how to pronounce and I can store the IPA in my head. Does that make sense? THanks, -- Rajah ( talk) 05:56, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
We have ɝː, ɚ in some place names which are locally non-rhotic. Is this something that would be worth extending to other vowels, say ɑ˞ ? The /r/ seems to be the thing people most object to. (The /j/ after alveolars is perhaps just as objectionable, but much less common.) Of course, it might be a little silly to worry about the /r/ and not /h/ or /j/, but we could also mark them too, perhaps as /ˈʰɑ˞tfɚd/ Hartford, /ˌnʲuː ˈmɛksɨkoʊ/ New Mexico. This would only be for place and personal names. IMO, it would be a choice between introducing more IPA characters for people to have to learn, and having people object that "that's not how it's pronounced" (locally, that is). In the key we could gloss them "not pronounced in the local dialect". That would also reduced the number of redundant transcriptions. Or is our current approach of generic vs. local English good enough? kwami ( talk) 21:07, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
Let's just be absolutely clear on this before anyone decides for me whether my argument is academic or political (which it is neither - it is a practical one and based on the real use):
There is growing concern that the IPA spellings of English place names, particularly those of the shire counties, and other names that end in an R that is generally not pronounced, are either not correct or do not represent the way in which the majority of British people pronounce those names. IPA Wikipedians have commented that the board-wide system they have designed and are in the process of implementing is phonemic and not phonetic, and that the r must be shown due to the fact that some speakers may introduce a linking r when the next word begins with a vowel.
Furthermore, I believe one of the confusions throughout this entire debate is the use of the word local, which may or may not have a slightly different connotation on different continents of the English speaking world, and may in fact be one of the root causes of so much conflict and misunderstanding in this entire issue. I also believe that the majority of readers a re neither interested in, or do not understand, the highly technical linguistic explanations they have been given.
Before any discussion takes place, it needs to established what is meant by local, regional, national, and global, as these words themselves appear to be being interpreted differently.
[1]
Most likely in the United Kingdom they would mean:
- local = in the city, in the immediate area surrounding the city, and possibly the rest of the county.
- regional = the rest of a county that covers a particularly large geographic area, and its neighbouring counties.
- national = the country where the language is spoken. In this case, England, where a neutral RP is more commonplace and/or widespread than say, for example, Scotland and Wales where their national accents a re the accepted educated accents of the majority.
- global = worldwide, or in the case of this issue, the regions of the world where whre the two main versions (AE & BE) predominate, such as for example, The Philippines where AE predominates, and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent where BE predominates.
We also need some qualification regarding the statement: ...a minority of editors gets really upset.... I don't think anyone gets upset by the transcription. To put it correctly, firstly the number of commentators equals or surpasses the number of major contributors to the various IPA articles, keys, and guidelines - all of which would appear to be primarily the work of one major editor; and secondly, people are not upset (yet) by the use, but are simply trying to explain that the prescriptive use practiced by the IPA author(s) may be red for a rethink. And thirdly, and most importantly,we must differetiate between Wikipedia editors (aka Wikipedians), and visitors to the encyclopeia who xanted to look something up, and then signed on to be able to suggest that the said prescriptions do not match the view they would expect. This is not insignificant, and should not be brushed of with a flick of the wrist.
--
Kudpung (
talk)
15:26, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
I noticed that the articles for both Sarah Jarosz, and for Philip Lynott (the second of which pronounced his surname as LYE-not, both need IPA help for their names. Jarosz already has a "sounded out" name next to her spelled name that someone else left behind. Could anyone take a look at the two of these musicians and see if you can improve with an IPA rendition of their last names? Thanks. -- Leahtwosaints ( talk) 17:39, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Thank you greatly. You folks with IPA are a real blessing. Both sounded out sound correct. :) -- Leahtwosaints ( talk) 23:07, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Some of you may have noticed that I've been regularizing & maintaining the IPA with AWB. I've worked out some regex expressions that do a pretty good job - turns out there are a fair number of transcriptions with Cyrillic rather than Latin < a >, for example, which would make searches bafflingly difficult. Since it took a lot of head-scratching at bugging other editors to get the expressions figured out, I thought I'd post them on the talk of {{ IPA-en}} and {{ pron-en}}, in case anybody's interested in fixing the IPA for this or other languages for themselves. — kwami ( talk) 00:01, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Recently a lot of syllable splits have been indicated in the IPA renderings. I wonder if the way to do that has been discussed and what the scientific basis for it would be. One of the remarks pertaining to it in the article is in a footnote, converted to a table here. I wonder if these should be analysed as indicated in the third column:
one syllable | two syllables | alternative |
---|---|---|
our /ˈaʊər/ | plougher /ˈplaʊ.ər/ | /ˈpla.wər/ |
hire /ˈhaɪər/ | higher /ˈhaɪ.ər/ | /ˈha.jər/ |
loir /ˈlɔɪər/ | employer /ɨmˈplɔɪ.ər/ | /ɨmˈplɔ.jər/ |
mare /ˈmɛər/ | mayor /ˈmeɪ.ər/ | /ˈme.jər/ |
− Woodstone ( talk) 07:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
BTW, I've been adding syllable breaks in names like Nuxhall /ˈnʌks.hɔːl/, so people don't misread the sh as /ʃ/. Likewise /t.h, n.k, n.ɡ/. I've also been more consistent with sequential vowels, adding a dot between all except after /ː/ and in the common ending /iə/. I know when I review other people's transcriptions, I'm never sure what "ng" is supposed to be, so this should hopefully clarify it. — kwami ( talk) 18:03, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
I should be done will all AWB-parsed transclusions of IPA-en and pron-en in a bit. If anyone sees non-canonical IPA that I've missed, please let me know and I'll try coding it in to my next pass with AWB. (On my list so far: syllable breaks and tense vowels before engma and ar.) — kwami ( talk) 21:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Oh, and here's an illustration of why we need to mark stress on monosyllables: Stow cum Quy. — kwami ( talk) 22:01, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
I'd like to point out a problem with the table. For many Canadian speakers, baht and calm are not pronounced with the same vowel. Namely, calm is something like [kɒːm] (same vowel as cot and caught), while baht is [bɑːt], with a special vowel used in foreign words. (These words include taco, pasta, Mazda, etc., for those Canadians who don't pronounce these words with /æ/. However, while I can easily imagine taco, pasta, and Mazda with /æ/, this seems unimaginable for a word which has a graphical ah.) This vowel is in fact very close to British and American realizations of baht. It is the Canadian realization of calm that is different. I know that the following paper (to which I don't have access) talks about foreign a in Canadian English: The emergence of a new phoneme: Foreign (a) in Canadian English. 82.124.97.111 ( talk) 15:07, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I've managed to access the PDF. Don't know what the problem was.
It seems I may have been a bit off in my phonetic description of the vowels above.
In any case, for the purposes of the discussion here, the important point is that for many Canadians, there are words which belong neither to the PALM category, nor to the TRAP category, but to an intermediate one. The best example of this given in the article is the word plaza, pronounced by 38% of Canadians with the TRAP vowel, 18% with the PALM vowel, and 44% with something between the two, low-central for most of them. (According to the article, the PALM/LOT vowel of Americans is already low-central, whereas the PALM/LOT/THOUGHT vowel of Canadians is low-back.) An intermediate pronunciation was also produced in 41% of cases in each of the words lava and façade.
For 9 of the 20 words with "foreign a" tested, an intermediate vowel was more common among Canadians than was the PALM vowel.
This kind of pronunciation was not rare among Americans either, particularly for Colorado (27%) and panorama (23%). For panorama, it was more common than the PALM vowel (5%).
The article suggests that there may be a phonemic contrast between laggard/lager/logger, rack/Iraq(i)/rocky, stab/Saab/sob, sad/façade/sod, dally/Dalí/ dolly, and suggests the notation /ah2/ or /ahf/ (with f for foreign) for the intermediate phoneme.
Naturally, Britons already make these distinctions, but that is because they haven't merged the PALM and LOT vowels.
For the current IPA guide, the inclusion of baht and palm under the same heading is problematic for the likely 40 or 50 percent of Canadians who would pronounce them differently, and a smaller percentage of Americans. At a minimum, a note about the problem should be inserted.
But I would go further and propose using the symbol /aː/ or /äː/ to transcribe words like baht. Speakers who pronounce baht and palm with the same vowel sound could simply ignore the distinction. The choice of /aː/ (understood to refer to a low-central, rather than low-front, vowel) would have the advantage that it is phonetically accurate for both Americans and Canadians. 82.124.103.148 ( talk) 06:47, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
An editor is giving contradictory pronunciations for Chichester, Pennsylvania and edit warring over any attempt to resolve them, including deleting my comments on the talk page. He's a newbie, so I don't want to have him blocked, so maybe s.o. here can speak to him? — kwami ( talk) 03:10, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
In the article on Caroline Dhavernas, the transcription of the pronunciation of her first name was recently changed from /ʼkɛrəlɨn/ to /ʼkærəlɨn/.
Now, I understand (and, despite some earlier misgivings, am willing to accept) the general premise that /ær/ is intended to be a dialect-neutral rendering that should be equally meaningful to readers who have, or have not, undergone the "marry-merry merger" in their own speech. My concern in this case is that Caroline Dhavernas, herself, pronounces her own name as /ʼkɛrəlɨn/ (based on her self-introduction in the voice-over commentary for the pilot episode on the Wonderfalls DVD set). And I confess I feel pretty strongly that, when describing the pronunciation of a person's name, preference should definitely be given (where possible) to the way the person him/herself pronounces his/her own name — even if this pronunciation happens to reflect a specific regional dialect or is otherwise "nonstandard".
I know the /ær/ pronunciation is common in Montreal, where Caroline is from (i.e., the "marry-merry merger" is not characteristic of the English spoken in and around Montreal) — and, frankly, I was surprised when I listened to the way she pronounced her name in the DVD commentary, because I was mostly expecting her to say /ʼkærəlɨn/ — but she unquestionably did say /ʼkɛrəlɨn/, and no matter what people working on the IPA for English project are doing with this particular phoneme, I'm having trouble feeling good about consciously and explicitly transcribing someone's name in a manner that contradicts how they say their own name.
If necessary (and if it would make any difference to the argument here), I'm willing to try putting up an OGG or WAV file of Caroline Dhavernas saying "Caroline Dhavernas", so the rest of you can listen. It happens that my own speech has not fully incorporated the marry-merry merger, so I am very conscious of the difference and am pretty certain of what I heard.
Comments? Richwales ( talk) 00:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I suggest that "a mission" be dropped as a sample for the pronunciation of ə. The pronunciation of the indefinite article "a" is rather variable and context dependent. The other two samples for ə, Rosa’s and comma, don't have that problem and should be sufficient. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.6.75.255 ( talk) 23:35, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
If you have a moment, please feel free to take a look at User:Grover cleveland/IPATest. It's a little slow, unfortuately, but it seems to work mostly. Let me know whether this is something you think is worth doing some more work on. Cheers. Grover cleveland ( talk) 05:15, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
A minor example of the problems hard-formatting dialectical differences can do: at germen, there is both a generic term and an English place name. Since the transcription is marked as phonemic, if we were to use /r/ in one but not the other, we would claim that the pronunciations differ, which would be false: any individual speaker would pronounce the two the same. — kwami ( talk) 07:18, 24 May 2010 (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 5 | ← | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | → | Archive 15 |
from a user's talk page addressed to Kudpung:
In order to continue, I need to know whether you have linking or intruding ar or not, something you've so far refused to say. Without that, I can't evaluate your claim. So, would you, speaking your best (snobbiest?), say "Worcester is home" (or any appropriate linking environment) with an /r/ before "is"? If you don't, would it be considered correct to do so? Then, take "Anglia is home" -- is there an /r/ there? If there is, is that considered correct? kwami ( talk) 12:08, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
First and foremost, to set the record straight, the claims are not mine; several Wikipedians, among them the micromanagers of Wikipedia Projects, have suggested on this discussion and on other talk pages that there may be some weaknesses in the way the Wikipedia assumes that British place names should be transliterated into the IPA, and because they are probably not linguists, it has not been possible for them to express their concern in a way that the linguists here can understand and address in simple, non lingo-technical terms.
For the benefit of readers of this thread who are not linguists, and to answer the question in italics above: My best, snobbiest RP does NOT pronounce the linking r at the end of Worcester when the next word begins with a vowel. There are in fact several kinds of RP and they have all changed over the last 60 years since I started speaking and was educated in awfully rather posh schools. That 'posh' unlinked r is how BBC newscasters spoke in the 50s and how the Queen still speaks when reading from a prepared script - such as her speech at the opening of the parliamentary session, and her Christmas speech to the nation, and on other formal occasions. In more private circles and when on a walk-about, her speech has become a tiny bit more laid back, while two generations later, her grandchildren William and Harry speak much the same as any reasonably well educated kids of their generation. The accent of their father, Prince Charles, is still in many ways, more affected (snobbish) than that of his mother, the Queen. Contrary to some popular ideas expressed on this encyclopedia and elsewhere, nobody in Britain is in a hurry to speak with the same accent of the Queen. A form or RP, or regionally and socially devoid accent, is becoming exponentially widespread in the land, and regional accents among the younger genrations are becoming barely discernible.
However, in TESOL, for example, we expose our students to a wide variety of English accents to enable them to even distinguish words from the worst American slur, to perfectly fluent, but educated, native Indian English, and Thai and Chinese English gibberish (Tinglish & Chinglish). What I teach them is a more modern RP without the awful affectations of the 40s and 50s, but they very often have to learn the bulk of their pronunciation from either their indigenous non-native English speaking teachers, or from native English TEFLers who may speak with a strong American or British regional or cultural bias, and are not capable of code switching to any form of RP. Generally, the IPA is only of interest to those who need a pronunciation reference across several langauges. Anyone just learning one second language just has to 'listen and repeat' in the traditional way, with some help from the teacher in the physical aspects of producing some sounds that may be new to the learner. Very few second langauge learners will ever achieve even a near native pronunciation, it's rarely necessary, and their utterances will allmost always be coloured by traces of their own first language accent. You can be in a conference room full of mixed nationalities all speaking perfectly fluent French for example, but you will notice their origins from their accents. In TESOL, (outside the US), frequent use of the IPA is made because many exams, including TESOL certification, demand it. (just so you know, in my university I taught phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax in the Graduate School). Unlike some of the IPA specialists that contribute to the IPA articles in the Wikipedia, they are not expected to become perfectly fluent in their use of it. They will however, be able to look at a word of up to , say, three sylables, and recognise quite accurately how it will sound. One side effect of learning the IPA is that because it is a script, it can be an immense help in preparing learners how to use non Roman scripts. Musicians score quite well when learning the IPA because they have already learned to read a language in a non Roman script that represents sounds: that of music. Generally, the IPA is a working tool for teachers, linguists, and students learning several languages simultaneously. It does not demand total understanding of it as a stand-alone subject, any more than I speak fluent Thai, without a university degree in it, for running my business here. One of the problems in this discussion has been as far as I can see, is that the non linguists here have been brushed off and scared away by a lot of technical gibberish by IPA specialists who consider any non IPA experts as complete idiots, failed linguists, and trolls.
It's pretty clear and well-written, and might help with some of the confusions. Even though I come to this page constantly (mainly to cut and paste), I wouldn't mind seeing it every time. Grover cleveland ( talk) 18:15, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
This phonetic alphabet uses characters, that I'm afraid most are unfamiliar with. I prefer the pronunciation provided by Merriam Webster over the IPA. Can we incorporate both into the articles?
For example: Washington Merriam Webster: "/ˈwȯ-shiŋ-tən" is easier for me to understand than IPA: "/ˈwɒʃɪŋ.tən"
99.73.184.21 ( talk) 08:16, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
Actually, despite my (colorful? to put it kindly) protests on the main IPA talk page, I would not argue that IPA is less suited to this purpose than some other form of pronunciation guide... wȯ-shiŋ-tən is really no easier to interpret than anything else: either you know what the silly glyphs stand for, or you don't.
Point is that, either way, some people are actually just going to have to look it up. The question I would raise is whether or not it would not also be beneficial to include, inline, the explanation of the symbols found on the IPA-EN key page (this thing, I guess), since a lot of readers are going to be forced to look it up anyway. (Otherwise, why is this page linked?)
I can concede that space and flow may be issues. In response I would suggest that maybe pronunciation doesn't belong inline in the first paragraph of an article to begin with; if there isn't enough room to do it right, there just isn't enough room to do it there at all.
Other than that, my biggest gripe about the guys running this IPA stuff is that the articles where I most want to see a pronunciation guide don't actually include it. :(
J.M. Archer ( talk) 17:22, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
How are these words to be categorized? With THOUGHT (as in the U.S. and Conservative RP), or with LOT (as in most of the U.K., and I presume, the Southern Hemisphere)? 82.124.231.186 ( talk) 14:49, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
For me, the o in kilogram is a schwa, whereas the o in omission is not, even if reduced. The note seems to imply that this sound may be absent altogether in some dialects, but doesn't hint at the fact that those that do have the sound may disagree about which words fall into the omission category.
I suspect that a majority of North Americans would agree with me on these two particular words, and the Merriam-Webster would seem to support that. 82.124.231.186 ( talk) 14:12, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
I don't know where to ask this, so I apologize if this isn't the correct place. Someone added a rough pronunciation to the ONEOK Field article (pronounced "wun ok"). I was hoping somebody here could provide a more accurate IPA pronunciation. Its pronounced "one oak" or "won oak" (its an Oklahoma based company). Thanks.— NMajdan• talk 17:56, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
It is salutary to note that all those previous contributors who had a degree of academic distinction and knowledge about this subject have long since left, driven to distraction by the repetitive, rambling and plain wrong assumptions/assertions/new interpretations of IPA by Wikipedia's 'editors'. Maybe it's time to wrap this one up. Fortnum ( talk) 16:41, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
-- Kudpung ( talk) 12:29, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Kudpung, you claim you're answering my questions, while once again evading them. Also, as a trained linguist, you should know that several claims you are making are false. Why should "York" have an /r/ in RP? Why should "Warwickshire" not have an /r/? Until you're willing to support the claims you make, you're not engaging in honest discussion, but only standing on a soap box.
"Warwickshire" has a final /r/ in RP. If you disagree, we can discuss what phonemes and allophones are, though I really would expect that you should understand this. (I've tried to engage in this discussion with you several times, but you have adamantly refused.) "York" does not have an /r/ in RP. If you disagree, we can discuss that as well.
If, however, your objection is that we should transcribe names in the local pronunciation, then let's stick to that as a philosophical issue, rather than making up spurious linguistic arguments. So far the consensus has been that we use a diaphonemic transcription and add the local pronunciations where beneficial. I don't know any editors who would object to you adding local pronunciations to place names; the problem is when you delete the broader pronunciation that gives non-locals access to the article.
If you think the WP IPA is American cultural imperialism forcing itself on England (despite the consensus of English editors in crafting the IPA key), then please tell us what is American about it, since everything in it is found in English English.
If your objection is that we shouldn't have a diaphonemic transcription at all, then that is yet a fourth discussion, one that we've had several times, though we can always have it again.
If your objection is that the IPA should be accessible to ESL students, then that is yet a fifth discussion, and one that AFAIK we have not had. It is true that our English IPA conventions are designed for the native or near-native speaker rather than the ESL student. This is in contrast with the IPA for other languages, which does not assume any ability in the language.
If your objection is that we "shouldn't tell people what to do", but rather allow an idiosyncratic transcription for every article, then I don't think compromise is possible. People have a hard enough time following the IPA without it meaning something different each time they see it. We do need guidelines and standards. You're not going to see different transcriptions in the OED depending on who edited that particular word, but rather a consistent system for the entire dictionary. WP should be no different. kwami ( talk) 23:28, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Is there a list of basic English words written in IPA? The reason I ask is that I was just on the page for word I know how to pronounce and I saw the IPA. This made me realize that it might be easier to pick up IPA instead of looking at bare symbols and finding out which phoneme they represent, but instead to chunk a word, which is a string of phonemes, that I already know how to pronounce and I can store the IPA in my head. Does that make sense? THanks, -- Rajah ( talk) 05:56, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
We have ɝː, ɚ in some place names which are locally non-rhotic. Is this something that would be worth extending to other vowels, say ɑ˞ ? The /r/ seems to be the thing people most object to. (The /j/ after alveolars is perhaps just as objectionable, but much less common.) Of course, it might be a little silly to worry about the /r/ and not /h/ or /j/, but we could also mark them too, perhaps as /ˈʰɑ˞tfɚd/ Hartford, /ˌnʲuː ˈmɛksɨkoʊ/ New Mexico. This would only be for place and personal names. IMO, it would be a choice between introducing more IPA characters for people to have to learn, and having people object that "that's not how it's pronounced" (locally, that is). In the key we could gloss them "not pronounced in the local dialect". That would also reduced the number of redundant transcriptions. Or is our current approach of generic vs. local English good enough? kwami ( talk) 21:07, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
Let's just be absolutely clear on this before anyone decides for me whether my argument is academic or political (which it is neither - it is a practical one and based on the real use):
There is growing concern that the IPA spellings of English place names, particularly those of the shire counties, and other names that end in an R that is generally not pronounced, are either not correct or do not represent the way in which the majority of British people pronounce those names. IPA Wikipedians have commented that the board-wide system they have designed and are in the process of implementing is phonemic and not phonetic, and that the r must be shown due to the fact that some speakers may introduce a linking r when the next word begins with a vowel.
Furthermore, I believe one of the confusions throughout this entire debate is the use of the word local, which may or may not have a slightly different connotation on different continents of the English speaking world, and may in fact be one of the root causes of so much conflict and misunderstanding in this entire issue. I also believe that the majority of readers a re neither interested in, or do not understand, the highly technical linguistic explanations they have been given.
Before any discussion takes place, it needs to established what is meant by local, regional, national, and global, as these words themselves appear to be being interpreted differently.
[1]
Most likely in the United Kingdom they would mean:
- local = in the city, in the immediate area surrounding the city, and possibly the rest of the county.
- regional = the rest of a county that covers a particularly large geographic area, and its neighbouring counties.
- national = the country where the language is spoken. In this case, England, where a neutral RP is more commonplace and/or widespread than say, for example, Scotland and Wales where their national accents a re the accepted educated accents of the majority.
- global = worldwide, or in the case of this issue, the regions of the world where whre the two main versions (AE & BE) predominate, such as for example, The Philippines where AE predominates, and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent where BE predominates.
We also need some qualification regarding the statement: ...a minority of editors gets really upset.... I don't think anyone gets upset by the transcription. To put it correctly, firstly the number of commentators equals or surpasses the number of major contributors to the various IPA articles, keys, and guidelines - all of which would appear to be primarily the work of one major editor; and secondly, people are not upset (yet) by the use, but are simply trying to explain that the prescriptive use practiced by the IPA author(s) may be red for a rethink. And thirdly, and most importantly,we must differetiate between Wikipedia editors (aka Wikipedians), and visitors to the encyclopeia who xanted to look something up, and then signed on to be able to suggest that the said prescriptions do not match the view they would expect. This is not insignificant, and should not be brushed of with a flick of the wrist.
--
Kudpung (
talk)
15:26, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
I noticed that the articles for both Sarah Jarosz, and for Philip Lynott (the second of which pronounced his surname as LYE-not, both need IPA help for their names. Jarosz already has a "sounded out" name next to her spelled name that someone else left behind. Could anyone take a look at the two of these musicians and see if you can improve with an IPA rendition of their last names? Thanks. -- Leahtwosaints ( talk) 17:39, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Thank you greatly. You folks with IPA are a real blessing. Both sounded out sound correct. :) -- Leahtwosaints ( talk) 23:07, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Some of you may have noticed that I've been regularizing & maintaining the IPA with AWB. I've worked out some regex expressions that do a pretty good job - turns out there are a fair number of transcriptions with Cyrillic rather than Latin < a >, for example, which would make searches bafflingly difficult. Since it took a lot of head-scratching at bugging other editors to get the expressions figured out, I thought I'd post them on the talk of {{ IPA-en}} and {{ pron-en}}, in case anybody's interested in fixing the IPA for this or other languages for themselves. — kwami ( talk) 00:01, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Recently a lot of syllable splits have been indicated in the IPA renderings. I wonder if the way to do that has been discussed and what the scientific basis for it would be. One of the remarks pertaining to it in the article is in a footnote, converted to a table here. I wonder if these should be analysed as indicated in the third column:
one syllable | two syllables | alternative |
---|---|---|
our /ˈaʊər/ | plougher /ˈplaʊ.ər/ | /ˈpla.wər/ |
hire /ˈhaɪər/ | higher /ˈhaɪ.ər/ | /ˈha.jər/ |
loir /ˈlɔɪər/ | employer /ɨmˈplɔɪ.ər/ | /ɨmˈplɔ.jər/ |
mare /ˈmɛər/ | mayor /ˈmeɪ.ər/ | /ˈme.jər/ |
− Woodstone ( talk) 07:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
BTW, I've been adding syllable breaks in names like Nuxhall /ˈnʌks.hɔːl/, so people don't misread the sh as /ʃ/. Likewise /t.h, n.k, n.ɡ/. I've also been more consistent with sequential vowels, adding a dot between all except after /ː/ and in the common ending /iə/. I know when I review other people's transcriptions, I'm never sure what "ng" is supposed to be, so this should hopefully clarify it. — kwami ( talk) 18:03, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
I should be done will all AWB-parsed transclusions of IPA-en and pron-en in a bit. If anyone sees non-canonical IPA that I've missed, please let me know and I'll try coding it in to my next pass with AWB. (On my list so far: syllable breaks and tense vowels before engma and ar.) — kwami ( talk) 21:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Oh, and here's an illustration of why we need to mark stress on monosyllables: Stow cum Quy. — kwami ( talk) 22:01, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
I'd like to point out a problem with the table. For many Canadian speakers, baht and calm are not pronounced with the same vowel. Namely, calm is something like [kɒːm] (same vowel as cot and caught), while baht is [bɑːt], with a special vowel used in foreign words. (These words include taco, pasta, Mazda, etc., for those Canadians who don't pronounce these words with /æ/. However, while I can easily imagine taco, pasta, and Mazda with /æ/, this seems unimaginable for a word which has a graphical ah.) This vowel is in fact very close to British and American realizations of baht. It is the Canadian realization of calm that is different. I know that the following paper (to which I don't have access) talks about foreign a in Canadian English: The emergence of a new phoneme: Foreign (a) in Canadian English. 82.124.97.111 ( talk) 15:07, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I've managed to access the PDF. Don't know what the problem was.
It seems I may have been a bit off in my phonetic description of the vowels above.
In any case, for the purposes of the discussion here, the important point is that for many Canadians, there are words which belong neither to the PALM category, nor to the TRAP category, but to an intermediate one. The best example of this given in the article is the word plaza, pronounced by 38% of Canadians with the TRAP vowel, 18% with the PALM vowel, and 44% with something between the two, low-central for most of them. (According to the article, the PALM/LOT vowel of Americans is already low-central, whereas the PALM/LOT/THOUGHT vowel of Canadians is low-back.) An intermediate pronunciation was also produced in 41% of cases in each of the words lava and façade.
For 9 of the 20 words with "foreign a" tested, an intermediate vowel was more common among Canadians than was the PALM vowel.
This kind of pronunciation was not rare among Americans either, particularly for Colorado (27%) and panorama (23%). For panorama, it was more common than the PALM vowel (5%).
The article suggests that there may be a phonemic contrast between laggard/lager/logger, rack/Iraq(i)/rocky, stab/Saab/sob, sad/façade/sod, dally/Dalí/ dolly, and suggests the notation /ah2/ or /ahf/ (with f for foreign) for the intermediate phoneme.
Naturally, Britons already make these distinctions, but that is because they haven't merged the PALM and LOT vowels.
For the current IPA guide, the inclusion of baht and palm under the same heading is problematic for the likely 40 or 50 percent of Canadians who would pronounce them differently, and a smaller percentage of Americans. At a minimum, a note about the problem should be inserted.
But I would go further and propose using the symbol /aː/ or /äː/ to transcribe words like baht. Speakers who pronounce baht and palm with the same vowel sound could simply ignore the distinction. The choice of /aː/ (understood to refer to a low-central, rather than low-front, vowel) would have the advantage that it is phonetically accurate for both Americans and Canadians. 82.124.103.148 ( talk) 06:47, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
An editor is giving contradictory pronunciations for Chichester, Pennsylvania and edit warring over any attempt to resolve them, including deleting my comments on the talk page. He's a newbie, so I don't want to have him blocked, so maybe s.o. here can speak to him? — kwami ( talk) 03:10, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
In the article on Caroline Dhavernas, the transcription of the pronunciation of her first name was recently changed from /ʼkɛrəlɨn/ to /ʼkærəlɨn/.
Now, I understand (and, despite some earlier misgivings, am willing to accept) the general premise that /ær/ is intended to be a dialect-neutral rendering that should be equally meaningful to readers who have, or have not, undergone the "marry-merry merger" in their own speech. My concern in this case is that Caroline Dhavernas, herself, pronounces her own name as /ʼkɛrəlɨn/ (based on her self-introduction in the voice-over commentary for the pilot episode on the Wonderfalls DVD set). And I confess I feel pretty strongly that, when describing the pronunciation of a person's name, preference should definitely be given (where possible) to the way the person him/herself pronounces his/her own name — even if this pronunciation happens to reflect a specific regional dialect or is otherwise "nonstandard".
I know the /ær/ pronunciation is common in Montreal, where Caroline is from (i.e., the "marry-merry merger" is not characteristic of the English spoken in and around Montreal) — and, frankly, I was surprised when I listened to the way she pronounced her name in the DVD commentary, because I was mostly expecting her to say /ʼkærəlɨn/ — but she unquestionably did say /ʼkɛrəlɨn/, and no matter what people working on the IPA for English project are doing with this particular phoneme, I'm having trouble feeling good about consciously and explicitly transcribing someone's name in a manner that contradicts how they say their own name.
If necessary (and if it would make any difference to the argument here), I'm willing to try putting up an OGG or WAV file of Caroline Dhavernas saying "Caroline Dhavernas", so the rest of you can listen. It happens that my own speech has not fully incorporated the marry-merry merger, so I am very conscious of the difference and am pretty certain of what I heard.
Comments? Richwales ( talk) 00:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I suggest that "a mission" be dropped as a sample for the pronunciation of ə. The pronunciation of the indefinite article "a" is rather variable and context dependent. The other two samples for ə, Rosa’s and comma, don't have that problem and should be sufficient. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.6.75.255 ( talk) 23:35, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
If you have a moment, please feel free to take a look at User:Grover cleveland/IPATest. It's a little slow, unfortuately, but it seems to work mostly. Let me know whether this is something you think is worth doing some more work on. Cheers. Grover cleveland ( talk) 05:15, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
A minor example of the problems hard-formatting dialectical differences can do: at germen, there is both a generic term and an English place name. Since the transcription is marked as phonemic, if we were to use /r/ in one but not the other, we would claim that the pronunciations differ, which would be false: any individual speaker would pronounce the two the same. — kwami ( talk) 07:18, 24 May 2010 (UTC)