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The Usage section of the article describes brackets being used with [...] meaning "more specific" and /.../ meaning "less specific".
Today is not /.../ gaining more the sense of the (phonemological) "underlying structure" and [...] the sense of the (physiological-audiological) "actual uttered sound"?
For example, the Russian series spelled "ТЯ" is phonemologically /tja/ and the Russian series spelled "ТьА" is phonemologically /tʲa/. That is "Т" + "Я" "means" something different than "Ть" + "А". But they are both audiologically [tja] (or [tʲa]) .
So the [...] notation is actually less "specific" here than the /.../ notation.
I'm talking about a kind of Chomskian "underlying structure" vs. "surface features" which seems to be only slowly and unevenly oozing into the consciousness of phoneticians at large... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.6.237.236 ( talk) 15:12, 25 December 2006 (UTC).
The dark l (IPA [ɫ]) seems to be almost completely missing from the main article (besides a passing mention under Co-articulation diacritics). It does have its own article Velarized_alveolar_lateral_approximant and is part of the Other laterals section of the summary IPA table that appears at the bottom of every individual IPA letter article. I would put this in my self but am uncertain where it should go without breaking the flow of the article so for the time being I'll leave it to someone else to decide but I will give it a go eventually if it doesn't get looked at. Cheers guys -- Het 17:03, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
This is my first visit to this talk page. However, if I were particularly cynical I would think that it keeps getting archived in order to try and hide the previous discussions of the validity of routine use of IPA in Wikipedia. None of the previous arguments in support of IPA will make any sense whatsoever to the vast majority of Wikipedia users who make casual use of Wikipedia articles. To suggest, as has been written a number of times, that it is well worth the time to spend 45 minutes learning some IPA is nonsense. It is akin to suggesting that all readers of Wikipedia should spend 45 minutes learning some HTML so that they can better understand how its web pages are formatted. I can see no problem with replacing all Wikipedia uses of IPA with sound links (using some suitable standard, e.g. Ogg Vorbis) recorded by people who know how to pronounce words in articles (in as many dialects as required). This is easy to do as sound input is a common feature of computer hardware/software and has been for sometime, Freeware sound encoders are easy to find and the task can be performed by anyone who knows the “correct” pronunciation whether they understand IPA or not. For graphical interfaces, there is a well-known term WYSIWYG for What You See Is What You Get. It seems that we also need WYHIWYG for What You Hear Is What You Get and IPA most definitely does not have this property. However, just to give you IPA buffs something to do – why don’t you amuse yourselves trying to work out the IPA for WYHIWYG and then I’ll record its correct pronunciation for you. [Anonymous because anonymity is important]
A large majority of the description sections on letters, diacritics and suprasegmentals are missing footnote-references. I have a copy of the Handbook of the IPA which I can use to specifically cite most of this content, however, is citing the same source over and over a good idea? The ikiroid ( talk· desk· Advise me) 06:00, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
<ref name=IPAHandbook>{{cite book|blah blah blah}}</ref>
the first time and then <ref name=IPAHandbok />
each time after that, and all footnotes will point to the same reference. —
An
gr
13:59, 31 December 2006 (UTC)I have to question the legitimacy and credibility of the work referred to in cite 32, "Canepari, Luciano (2005). “The Official IPA & other notations”, A Handbook of Phonetics (PDF), Lincom Europea."
This work is highly unacademic, full of language and punctuation anomalies, and contains arguments that are simply puerile. For these reasons, I don't believe it's suitable to back up any claim about what "some linguists" believe. If this viewpoint is truly held by some non-trivial group of linguists, there must be credible academic papers expressing this view somewhere. If they do indeed exist, one of them should be cited. If not, I would remove the "Criticism" section until a legitimate cite is found.
A few brief examples for my statement that this work is not credible:
Puerile
The author writes (p. 84): "This is the reason why, although offIPA is better than any other <phonetic alphabet>, its limitations spontaneously call to mind the negative feelings connected to off in various phrases, as for instance an off day – quite different, of course, from a day off."
Such an "argument" would elicit rolled eyes and groans if used by a small-town newspaper sports columnist. Seeing it on the page of an allegedly serious academic book is simply mind-blowing. Enough to make one wish that books, and not just papers, had to meet peer-review standards.
Highly unacademic
Just count the astonishing number of exclamation points and instances of the word "absurd" and its synonyms. If you've read more than two or three academic papers in your life, you'll immediately notice something: academics just don't write this way.
Anomalies
Angle brackets are used instead of quotation marks, either single (standard in most British conventions) or double (US style). I've yet to find any national variant of English in which this is acceptable usage. This makes one wonder if the work cited was even edited.
[EDIT: Let me add one more example, from p. 90: "¿How many people in the whole world then can not read or write, although they speak their tongue as <perfect natives>?". The Spanish opening question mark in an English text?! This book simply reeks of being self-published and unedited.]
Finally, it's rather hard to avoid questioning the intentions and seriousness of anyone who attacks something (the IPA in this case) with the intention of replacing it with a new version... named after himself! (the "canIPA", or "Canepari IPA"). This is roughly equivalent to an astronomer trying to get a telescope named after himself (Hubble was quite dead before someone else proposed naming the famed space telescope after him) or a president trying to get his own picture on a coin or bill.
I don't disagree that the IPA can be improved. I just don't think that this source is even a remotely credible one for the assertion that "some linguists" believe... anything.
Steve Fishboy
06:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Apparently he's Professor of phonetics at the University of Venice. There's a review of the book by Daniele Vitali (2006) Language Problems and Language Planning 30/2: 193-195. I agree that it's very bizarrely written, and if a better source can be found then it should be substituted (or at least added). However, it does seem to be legit inasmuch as it's published and he is a real academic. On a slightly different note, I'm confused by the claim that the IPA is really a phonemic alphabet, not a phonetic one. Surely it can be used phonetically as well as phonemically. garik 17:10, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be both reasonable and rigorous to change the claim from "Some linguists..." to "At least one linguist...". The former implies that there's at least a minority of linguists that hold this position, which has yet to be demonstrated. If we assume that there are only 21,000 linguists in the world (this is simply the number of subscribers to the Linguist List -- the true number is undoubtedly many times this), and if we define "minority" as just 1%, that means there should be at least 200 or so linguists who hold this view -- enough that there have to be a couple serious publications out there criticizing the IPA. I strongly suspect that while most linguists can find something they would change in the IPA, no one here will be able to cite any serious work calling for anything near the radical change proposed by our author -- note that not even he himself does so. Steve Fishboy 03:03, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Where would be a good place in this subsection to mention the fact that ɑ and a are not interchangeable (where a is often written similarly to ɑ in handwriting, note a if you have a serif font), and that ɡ must be one-story, not like the
in most serif fonts? --
Random832(
t
c)
00:44, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Can I delete that bit? It has no sources coupled with crappy arguments. Cameron Nedland 14:51, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Chi's already been used for uvular fricatives, so the velar fricative sign might indeed be from Cyrillic - or they just used the 'Latin variant' of chi. Ultimately the choice of symbol has to be more or less arbitrary though. I agree that some choices seem odder than others, however. I also agree with removing the vague criticism section and its poorly written source. I further agree with Angr that we should have such a section, however. I'll try to find a more representative source. garik 15:32, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
for the voiceless fricative (the exact opposite of the 1887 IPA!). Powell doesnt use Greek χ nor any symbols for uvulars (same as IPA). Greek χ was used earlier for velars (e.g. by Horatio Hale (1846), Lepsius (1855, 1863).
The main question that arose to me after having read this article was 'Is the IPA meant to be used to represent the sounds of any spoken language in a language independent way or do you need a different representation for the same word for each specific language?'. I think I know the answer (the latter) but I think it's important to make this clear in the description of the subject so people know this right away. I am, however, probably not the most suitable person to do this since I just started reading up on the matter. Prodoc 21:34, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
After reading the article, it was unclear to me how one should actually start translating a word to the IPA represent. Are there different methods? Are there different steps or stages in the translation process? etc. I think a general "how-to" section would be a valuable addition to the article. Prodoc 21:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Shouldn't the section about Greek letters also mention ʎ, isn't it based on λ? 惑乱 分からん 14:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Clarify the use of syllable emphasis marks in IPA. The Suprasegmentals section doesn't say that those symbols appear before the stressed sound. American dictionaries place similar symbols after so this is a very common point of confusion. I only managed to figure it out because I suspected a difference and searched for the answer, eventually finding it here under the Notation section of the Lexical Stress topic.
I'd also strongly suggest a language-specific link in the introductory section to where a reader can find a "quick reference" such as the IPA_chart_for_English. Wikipedia becomes a more mainstream reference everyday. Not everyone who clicks on a Wikipedia IPA hyperlink has a PhD in linguistics. I wanted to learn how to pronounce an unfamiliar word, not become an expert on IPA. To help IPA become more widely accepted and appreciated, this article could become friendlier to "newbies". —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MKC ( talk • contribs) 18:50, 9 February 2007 (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 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | → | Archive 10 |
The Usage section of the article describes brackets being used with [...] meaning "more specific" and /.../ meaning "less specific".
Today is not /.../ gaining more the sense of the (phonemological) "underlying structure" and [...] the sense of the (physiological-audiological) "actual uttered sound"?
For example, the Russian series spelled "ТЯ" is phonemologically /tja/ and the Russian series spelled "ТьА" is phonemologically /tʲa/. That is "Т" + "Я" "means" something different than "Ть" + "А". But they are both audiologically [tja] (or [tʲa]) .
So the [...] notation is actually less "specific" here than the /.../ notation.
I'm talking about a kind of Chomskian "underlying structure" vs. "surface features" which seems to be only slowly and unevenly oozing into the consciousness of phoneticians at large... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.6.237.236 ( talk) 15:12, 25 December 2006 (UTC).
The dark l (IPA [ɫ]) seems to be almost completely missing from the main article (besides a passing mention under Co-articulation diacritics). It does have its own article Velarized_alveolar_lateral_approximant and is part of the Other laterals section of the summary IPA table that appears at the bottom of every individual IPA letter article. I would put this in my self but am uncertain where it should go without breaking the flow of the article so for the time being I'll leave it to someone else to decide but I will give it a go eventually if it doesn't get looked at. Cheers guys -- Het 17:03, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
This is my first visit to this talk page. However, if I were particularly cynical I would think that it keeps getting archived in order to try and hide the previous discussions of the validity of routine use of IPA in Wikipedia. None of the previous arguments in support of IPA will make any sense whatsoever to the vast majority of Wikipedia users who make casual use of Wikipedia articles. To suggest, as has been written a number of times, that it is well worth the time to spend 45 minutes learning some IPA is nonsense. It is akin to suggesting that all readers of Wikipedia should spend 45 minutes learning some HTML so that they can better understand how its web pages are formatted. I can see no problem with replacing all Wikipedia uses of IPA with sound links (using some suitable standard, e.g. Ogg Vorbis) recorded by people who know how to pronounce words in articles (in as many dialects as required). This is easy to do as sound input is a common feature of computer hardware/software and has been for sometime, Freeware sound encoders are easy to find and the task can be performed by anyone who knows the “correct” pronunciation whether they understand IPA or not. For graphical interfaces, there is a well-known term WYSIWYG for What You See Is What You Get. It seems that we also need WYHIWYG for What You Hear Is What You Get and IPA most definitely does not have this property. However, just to give you IPA buffs something to do – why don’t you amuse yourselves trying to work out the IPA for WYHIWYG and then I’ll record its correct pronunciation for you. [Anonymous because anonymity is important]
A large majority of the description sections on letters, diacritics and suprasegmentals are missing footnote-references. I have a copy of the Handbook of the IPA which I can use to specifically cite most of this content, however, is citing the same source over and over a good idea? The ikiroid ( talk· desk· Advise me) 06:00, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
<ref name=IPAHandbook>{{cite book|blah blah blah}}</ref>
the first time and then <ref name=IPAHandbok />
each time after that, and all footnotes will point to the same reference. —
An
gr
13:59, 31 December 2006 (UTC)I have to question the legitimacy and credibility of the work referred to in cite 32, "Canepari, Luciano (2005). “The Official IPA & other notations”, A Handbook of Phonetics (PDF), Lincom Europea."
This work is highly unacademic, full of language and punctuation anomalies, and contains arguments that are simply puerile. For these reasons, I don't believe it's suitable to back up any claim about what "some linguists" believe. If this viewpoint is truly held by some non-trivial group of linguists, there must be credible academic papers expressing this view somewhere. If they do indeed exist, one of them should be cited. If not, I would remove the "Criticism" section until a legitimate cite is found.
A few brief examples for my statement that this work is not credible:
Puerile
The author writes (p. 84): "This is the reason why, although offIPA is better than any other <phonetic alphabet>, its limitations spontaneously call to mind the negative feelings connected to off in various phrases, as for instance an off day – quite different, of course, from a day off."
Such an "argument" would elicit rolled eyes and groans if used by a small-town newspaper sports columnist. Seeing it on the page of an allegedly serious academic book is simply mind-blowing. Enough to make one wish that books, and not just papers, had to meet peer-review standards.
Highly unacademic
Just count the astonishing number of exclamation points and instances of the word "absurd" and its synonyms. If you've read more than two or three academic papers in your life, you'll immediately notice something: academics just don't write this way.
Anomalies
Angle brackets are used instead of quotation marks, either single (standard in most British conventions) or double (US style). I've yet to find any national variant of English in which this is acceptable usage. This makes one wonder if the work cited was even edited.
[EDIT: Let me add one more example, from p. 90: "¿How many people in the whole world then can not read or write, although they speak their tongue as <perfect natives>?". The Spanish opening question mark in an English text?! This book simply reeks of being self-published and unedited.]
Finally, it's rather hard to avoid questioning the intentions and seriousness of anyone who attacks something (the IPA in this case) with the intention of replacing it with a new version... named after himself! (the "canIPA", or "Canepari IPA"). This is roughly equivalent to an astronomer trying to get a telescope named after himself (Hubble was quite dead before someone else proposed naming the famed space telescope after him) or a president trying to get his own picture on a coin or bill.
I don't disagree that the IPA can be improved. I just don't think that this source is even a remotely credible one for the assertion that "some linguists" believe... anything.
Steve Fishboy
06:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Apparently he's Professor of phonetics at the University of Venice. There's a review of the book by Daniele Vitali (2006) Language Problems and Language Planning 30/2: 193-195. I agree that it's very bizarrely written, and if a better source can be found then it should be substituted (or at least added). However, it does seem to be legit inasmuch as it's published and he is a real academic. On a slightly different note, I'm confused by the claim that the IPA is really a phonemic alphabet, not a phonetic one. Surely it can be used phonetically as well as phonemically. garik 17:10, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be both reasonable and rigorous to change the claim from "Some linguists..." to "At least one linguist...". The former implies that there's at least a minority of linguists that hold this position, which has yet to be demonstrated. If we assume that there are only 21,000 linguists in the world (this is simply the number of subscribers to the Linguist List -- the true number is undoubtedly many times this), and if we define "minority" as just 1%, that means there should be at least 200 or so linguists who hold this view -- enough that there have to be a couple serious publications out there criticizing the IPA. I strongly suspect that while most linguists can find something they would change in the IPA, no one here will be able to cite any serious work calling for anything near the radical change proposed by our author -- note that not even he himself does so. Steve Fishboy 03:03, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Where would be a good place in this subsection to mention the fact that ɑ and a are not interchangeable (where a is often written similarly to ɑ in handwriting, note a if you have a serif font), and that ɡ must be one-story, not like the
in most serif fonts? --
Random832(
t
c)
00:44, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Can I delete that bit? It has no sources coupled with crappy arguments. Cameron Nedland 14:51, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Chi's already been used for uvular fricatives, so the velar fricative sign might indeed be from Cyrillic - or they just used the 'Latin variant' of chi. Ultimately the choice of symbol has to be more or less arbitrary though. I agree that some choices seem odder than others, however. I also agree with removing the vague criticism section and its poorly written source. I further agree with Angr that we should have such a section, however. I'll try to find a more representative source. garik 15:32, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
for the voiceless fricative (the exact opposite of the 1887 IPA!). Powell doesnt use Greek χ nor any symbols for uvulars (same as IPA). Greek χ was used earlier for velars (e.g. by Horatio Hale (1846), Lepsius (1855, 1863).
The main question that arose to me after having read this article was 'Is the IPA meant to be used to represent the sounds of any spoken language in a language independent way or do you need a different representation for the same word for each specific language?'. I think I know the answer (the latter) but I think it's important to make this clear in the description of the subject so people know this right away. I am, however, probably not the most suitable person to do this since I just started reading up on the matter. Prodoc 21:34, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
After reading the article, it was unclear to me how one should actually start translating a word to the IPA represent. Are there different methods? Are there different steps or stages in the translation process? etc. I think a general "how-to" section would be a valuable addition to the article. Prodoc 21:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Shouldn't the section about Greek letters also mention ʎ, isn't it based on λ? 惑乱 分からん 14:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Clarify the use of syllable emphasis marks in IPA. The Suprasegmentals section doesn't say that those symbols appear before the stressed sound. American dictionaries place similar symbols after so this is a very common point of confusion. I only managed to figure it out because I suspected a difference and searched for the answer, eventually finding it here under the Notation section of the Lexical Stress topic.
I'd also strongly suggest a language-specific link in the introductory section to where a reader can find a "quick reference" such as the IPA_chart_for_English. Wikipedia becomes a more mainstream reference everyday. Not everyone who clicks on a Wikipedia IPA hyperlink has a PhD in linguistics. I wanted to learn how to pronounce an unfamiliar word, not become an expert on IPA. To help IPA become more widely accepted and appreciated, this article could become friendlier to "newbies". —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MKC ( talk • contribs) 18:50, 9 February 2007 (UTC)