This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
IPA/English page. |
|
Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27Auto-archiving period: 92 days |
Discussions on this page often lead to previous arguments being restated. Please read recent comments, look in the archives, and review the FAQ before commenting. |
Frequently asked questions The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?
The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or
EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /
j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.
For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{ respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it. Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion. The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.
Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{
IPA-all}} or {{
IPA-endia}}. The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.
The English rhotic is
pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the
Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic. |
This help page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Help:IPA/English is a reader-facing page intended for viewing by non-editors. Please prioritize their needs when adjusting its design, and move editor-facing elements to other pages. |
This page was nominated for deletion on 1 March 2008. The result of the discussion was Keep. |
Why is ɪ appearing twice, both under "Vowels" and "Weak vowels"? If we need two entries here, I would expect separate symbols (even if one is a modification of the other with a combining mark of some kind). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:05, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
In the 3rd bullet point of the Dialect variation section colons are used in place of length symbols:
I think they need to be replaced. 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:B1A9:DA55:640A:FC65 ( talk) 20:13, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
/ʔ/ is an entirely paralinguistic sound and "uh-oh" is not a valid word to base the inclusion of a marginal phoneme around. However, seeing and /ts/ is a common marginal phoneme in words like "tsar" or "Mozart", including it would probably be valid. Plexus96 ( talk) 14:36, 17 May 2024 (UTC)
IPA is overwhelming, redundant, and not user friendly. If you use the basic latin sounds the phonics are all there and we all know them. No need to learn a whole new set of sounds that are extremely numerous and cumbersome. 136.143.149.206 ( talk) 17:51, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
On the help page, we show both primary and secondary stress marks, yet we never define how we do (or don't) use those symbols in the diaphonemic system. I believe the last chat we had arriving at some consensus was here, where we agreed on WP to assign secondary stress only to a strong vowel preceding primary stress but not to a strong vowel succeeding it (i.e., following the British rather than American convention). It seems like it would be helpful to explain this, and even the concept of how secondary stress operates in English at all, if anyone can think of a concise wording for the concept. Wolfdog ( talk) 12:53, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
We currently show the pronounciation of Anki as /ˈɒŋkiː/, which seems surprising to me. I am aware that /ɒ/ for the spelling ⟨an⟩ is not unheard of, especially in French loanwords with /ɑ̃/ in the original, but is Anki really pronounced like that? 187.245.68.84 ( talk) 00:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
change hw to ʍ 71.78.136.215 ( talk) 00:43, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
{{
Edit semi-protected}}
template.
Nardog (
talk)
02:38, 2 July 2024 (UTC)There is edit warring against MOS:DIAPHONEMIC on that page. It's Melbourne all over again, with the 'local consensus' nonsense. Sol505000 ( talk) 15:30, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
@
Tim riley: has raised a valid point: Alas, readers familiar with the real-world IPA cannot be expected to guess that Wikipedia has its own esoteric phonetic system in which the pronunciation symbols mean "this unless you'd rather pronounce it that".
Our transcriptions are still surrounded by single slashes /…/. Readers familiar with the IPA will know that this means a phonemic transcription. However, our transcriptions are not phonemic, but diaphonemic. We do not mark them as such, though. I thought last year we had reached a consensus that we should mark the diaphonemicity of our transcriptions by surrounding them with double slashes ⫽…⫽, see
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Pronunciation/Archive 11#Distinction between varieties of English. Are other steps required? --
mach
🙈🙉🙊
11:48, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
{{IPA|/.../}}
in the Key section where they were unambiguously referring to diaphonemes rather than phonemes as far as I could find, but it can be ambiguous sometimes. (E.g. should it be "/A/ is merged with /B/ in accent X", "⫽A⫽ is merged with /B/ in accent X", or "⫽A⫽ is merged with ⫽B⫽ in accent X"?)I just suggested it at that talk page, but in case it's of more interest here: since it seems that //r// is so much more of a chronic objection than the fact that our key makes vowel distinctions that AmE doesn't, perhaps the problem is rather that "don't pronounce this letter that's clearly there" is a bigger mental block than "pronounce these two letters the same way". So perhaps it might help to change the symbols we use for the diaphonemes to //ɑː(r)//, //ɔː(r)//, etc., explicitly parenthesising the r? Double sharp ( talk) 08:17, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
Here's what really happened to initiate this discussion. There was a longstanding stable IPA on the Richard D'Oyly Carte page, and then User:Sol505000 edit warred there about it, but they did not get a consensus in their favor. So they brought the issue to this Talk page to see if they could get a different consensus here. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 23:04, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
IPA/English page. |
|
Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27Auto-archiving period: 92 days |
Discussions on this page often lead to previous arguments being restated. Please read recent comments, look in the archives, and review the FAQ before commenting. |
Frequently asked questions The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?
The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or
EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /
j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.
For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{ respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it. Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion. The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.
Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{
IPA-all}} or {{
IPA-endia}}. The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.
The English rhotic is
pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the
Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic. |
This help page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Help:IPA/English is a reader-facing page intended for viewing by non-editors. Please prioritize their needs when adjusting its design, and move editor-facing elements to other pages. |
This page was nominated for deletion on 1 March 2008. The result of the discussion was Keep. |
Why is ɪ appearing twice, both under "Vowels" and "Weak vowels"? If we need two entries here, I would expect separate symbols (even if one is a modification of the other with a combining mark of some kind). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:05, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
In the 3rd bullet point of the Dialect variation section colons are used in place of length symbols:
I think they need to be replaced. 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:B1A9:DA55:640A:FC65 ( talk) 20:13, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
/ʔ/ is an entirely paralinguistic sound and "uh-oh" is not a valid word to base the inclusion of a marginal phoneme around. However, seeing and /ts/ is a common marginal phoneme in words like "tsar" or "Mozart", including it would probably be valid. Plexus96 ( talk) 14:36, 17 May 2024 (UTC)
IPA is overwhelming, redundant, and not user friendly. If you use the basic latin sounds the phonics are all there and we all know them. No need to learn a whole new set of sounds that are extremely numerous and cumbersome. 136.143.149.206 ( talk) 17:51, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
On the help page, we show both primary and secondary stress marks, yet we never define how we do (or don't) use those symbols in the diaphonemic system. I believe the last chat we had arriving at some consensus was here, where we agreed on WP to assign secondary stress only to a strong vowel preceding primary stress but not to a strong vowel succeeding it (i.e., following the British rather than American convention). It seems like it would be helpful to explain this, and even the concept of how secondary stress operates in English at all, if anyone can think of a concise wording for the concept. Wolfdog ( talk) 12:53, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
We currently show the pronounciation of Anki as /ˈɒŋkiː/, which seems surprising to me. I am aware that /ɒ/ for the spelling ⟨an⟩ is not unheard of, especially in French loanwords with /ɑ̃/ in the original, but is Anki really pronounced like that? 187.245.68.84 ( talk) 00:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
change hw to ʍ 71.78.136.215 ( talk) 00:43, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
{{
Edit semi-protected}}
template.
Nardog (
talk)
02:38, 2 July 2024 (UTC)There is edit warring against MOS:DIAPHONEMIC on that page. It's Melbourne all over again, with the 'local consensus' nonsense. Sol505000 ( talk) 15:30, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
@
Tim riley: has raised a valid point: Alas, readers familiar with the real-world IPA cannot be expected to guess that Wikipedia has its own esoteric phonetic system in which the pronunciation symbols mean "this unless you'd rather pronounce it that".
Our transcriptions are still surrounded by single slashes /…/. Readers familiar with the IPA will know that this means a phonemic transcription. However, our transcriptions are not phonemic, but diaphonemic. We do not mark them as such, though. I thought last year we had reached a consensus that we should mark the diaphonemicity of our transcriptions by surrounding them with double slashes ⫽…⫽, see
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Pronunciation/Archive 11#Distinction between varieties of English. Are other steps required? --
mach
🙈🙉🙊
11:48, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
{{IPA|/.../}}
in the Key section where they were unambiguously referring to diaphonemes rather than phonemes as far as I could find, but it can be ambiguous sometimes. (E.g. should it be "/A/ is merged with /B/ in accent X", "⫽A⫽ is merged with /B/ in accent X", or "⫽A⫽ is merged with ⫽B⫽ in accent X"?)I just suggested it at that talk page, but in case it's of more interest here: since it seems that //r// is so much more of a chronic objection than the fact that our key makes vowel distinctions that AmE doesn't, perhaps the problem is rather that "don't pronounce this letter that's clearly there" is a bigger mental block than "pronounce these two letters the same way". So perhaps it might help to change the symbols we use for the diaphonemes to //ɑː(r)//, //ɔː(r)//, etc., explicitly parenthesising the r? Double sharp ( talk) 08:17, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
Here's what really happened to initiate this discussion. There was a longstanding stable IPA on the Richard D'Oyly Carte page, and then User:Sol505000 edit warred there about it, but they did not get a consensus in their favor. So they brought the issue to this Talk page to see if they could get a different consensus here. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 23:04, 11 July 2024 (UTC)