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 |
"[…] {{IPAEng}} is appropriate, as it links to Help:IPA English pronunciation key […]"
should now be tweaked to:
"[…] {{IPAEng}} is appropriate, as it links to Help:Pronunciation […]"
Would do, but page is protected. — ¾-10 00:51, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
I am but an armchair linguist, so when other people on WP were screaming that Kwami didn't know what he was doing re transcription and pronunciation help, I didn't have 2¢ to add and wasn't prepared to argue either way. But I have come to believe that they are mostly wrong and he is mostly right. He is the one who is effectively sorting out the different needs and addressing each one (e.g., "For a broad, non-regional transcription of an English word, as when giving the pronunciation of a key word in an article, {{IPAEng}} is appropriate […] For foreign words that are not assimilated into English, regional pronunciations of English words, and non-standard English dialects, {{IPA2}} would be more appropriate […] For phonemic transcriptions that follow Australian pronunciation, use the templates {{IPAAusE}} and {{pronAusE}}.") The relationship of phonetics to phonemics is complex, and every part of it gets highlighted differently somewhere on WP. Sometimes the blind people groping the trunk and the blind people groping the tail don't realize that they're both touching the same elephant. I currently believe that Kwami sees more of the elephant than they do. Sometimes an IPA character is used to represent a phoneme, not a phone. (A lot of people don't realize that.) Which may be to say, it is being used as a variable whose value may be its phone or also several nearby phones that may regionally express the same phoneme. Probably we ought to have a separate set of characters for this variable usage, but we don't. We could invent one, but most people will avoid using it. And there would have to be a slightly different (or sometimes very different) one for each language. Which may be why people resist it—they instinctively grasp that IPA allows for interlingual (phonetic) comparison, and when you lead them toward the phonemic, which also has its proper applications, they say "hey! Where'd the phonetic go?!". They don't want phonemic systems that don't also maximize phonetic comparison. That is, they do want both at the same time. But they fail to understand that you can't have both in the same transcription. I'm digressing; let me get back to the basics. Sometimes laypeople need phonemic transcriptions for words in their own language. Sometimes they need phonetic ones for foreign words. (A corollary of the previous two sentences is that a native English-speaking reader of EN-WP and an EFL reader of the same EN-WP could in many cases best be served by different transcriptions of the same English word.) Sometimes a language has both naturalized and imported pronunciations that coexist. In each of those cases, laypeople need a different help chart to explain the different transcription style. There doesn't have to be one transcription style, nor one help page/chart, that addresses all of those cases. In fact, the point is that there can't be. You can't transcribe broadly and narrowly at the same time. Which one you do should really depend on the context—on the target audience—not on your personality. They both have applications. With EN-WP having multiple target audiences simultaneously, I could envision multiple transcriptions for a single word (although I know that such a system is currently a pipe dream, and maybe most people would never understand its purpose, so maybe it's never to be.) Anyway, I'm digressing again. Let me end with thanks to Kwami—I think his help has been a positive force. — ¾-10 00:51, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
Hi, please add an interwiki to " simple:Template:IPA-en". Thanks. — Cheers, Truth's Out There – talk– 16:26, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
This template links the pronunciations to Help:IPA for English which then redirects to Wikipedia:IPA for English. In comparison, Template:pron-en directly links to Wikipedia:IPA for English (so no redirect is needed). I think Template:IPA-en should act similarly, i.e. link directly to Wikipedia:IPA for English. huji— TALK 11:38, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
What about a short popup crib sheet if you hover over the transcription? Maybe something like:
(The colors can be adjusted to s.t. less gaudy, of course) kwami ( talk) 08:51, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm slowly converting the tranclusions of this template to a null or IPA switch, so that the default can eventually be changed to "English pronunciation: ", in order to move it in line with the other IPA-xx templates. kwami ( talk) 14:57, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
Was the "help" link (as found in {{ Audio-IPA}} deliberately not used in this template, or is it missing through oversight? In my experience, most Microsoft users cannot play the .ogg sound files without downloading additional items, and most casual users will not know this. Could a technical "help" link be included following the "listen" text? -- EncycloPetey ( talk) 03:55, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
I've talked to people who have said that IPA is so difficult to understand that they don't even consider Wikipedia when trying to figure out how to pronounce a word. With simplicity in mind I've written a template with mouseovers that show how to pronounce each phoneme when pointed at. This way even a complete layman can puzzle out the pronunciation with (relatively) little effort.
Example:
{{IPAc-en|ˈ|b|æ|t|ə|l|ʃ|ɪ|p}}
→
/ˈbætəlʃɪp/
It is currently implemented under {{ IPAc-en}} and combines the behaviours of {{ IPA-en}}, {{ pron-en}} and the original {{ IPAc-en}}. Details in current {{ IPAc-en}} documentation.
I propose that, after testing, the code in {{ IPA-en}} is replaced with the current {{ IPAc-en}} and all incidents of all three templates be changed to {{ IPA-en}}. Ideally with the template calls edited so that each phoneme is a separate variable allowing mouseovers to be shown.
This will require some editing to separate all phonemes by '|' but I believe that the increase in usability for a sizable audience is worth it. I am also developing a Greasemonkey script that will automatically located all incidents of the three templates on an edit page and convert them to {{ IPA-en}} calls with individual phonemes. -- Deflective ( talk) 12:31, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
Excellent idea. I've edited it so that it use “curly quotes” rather that 'straight apostrophes', I think it is more legible this way. Also, I think we should provide several examples at least for phonemes with significantly perceptually different allophones (e.g. voiceless stops "“t” as in “tie”, “sty”, “water”", and maybe vowels before /l/ and /ŋ/); and, maybe, saying more explicitly that /ɪ/, /ɵ/, /ʊ/ and /i/ mean "either /ɪ/ or /ə/", "either /ə/ or /oʊ/", "either /ʊ/ or /ə/", and "either /ɪ/ or /iː/": my proposals are "either short I or schwa, as “e” in “roses”"; "either schwa or long O, as “o” in “kilogram”", etc. --
___A. di M.
16:04, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
{{IPAc-en|tʃ|ɔər}}
→
/tʃɔːr/{{IPAc-en|{{H:title|'qu' in 'quick'|kw}}|{{H:title|'ark' in 'park'|ɑrk}}}}
→ [deleted so as to avoid triggering category for ill-formed templates. —
kwami (
talk)
22:57, 31 August 2011 (UTC)There doesn't seem to be any progress in changing the {{ IPA-en}} template to the new implementation. I still think this is an improvement and consider it worthwhile to manually convert existing {{ IPA-en}} calls to {{ IPAc-en}} if that's what it takes.
To help with this I've updated the Greasemonkey script so it will convert all instances of {{ pron-en}}, {{ IPA-en}} and {{ IPAc-en}} on an edit page to a properly grouped phoneme separated version of {{ IPAc-en}}. The script is available to anyone interested, it isn't exhaustively tested so please let me know if there's problems with it.
I will begin making changes by the end of the week unless there's a reason not to. -- deflective ( talk) 07:22, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
All objections to the template change concentrates on the SAMPA conversion. This feature seemed like a relatively harmless way to add functionality for the rare user who finds it useful. At worst, later users could hit preview on the edit page and then copy/paste the translated word.
But this is distracting from the point of the change, to make Wikipedia pronunciations usable for the average layman who finds IPA too complex. Instead of holding up the change in order to debate how to handle an editing feature lets drop it.
Without the translations, are there any objections to making this change to {{ IPA-en}}? -- deflective ( talk) 11:00, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
{{ editprotected}}
As discussed in the previous two sections.
I've talked to people who have said that IPA is so difficult to understand that they don't even consider Wikipedia when trying to figure out how to pronounce a word. With simplicity in mind I've written a template with mouseovers that show how to pronounce each phoneme when pointed at. This way even a complete layman can puzzle out the pronunciation with (relatively) little effort.
Example:
{{IPAc-en|ˈ|b|æ|t|əl|ʃ|ɪ|p}}
→
/ˈbætəlʃɪp/
It is currently implemented under {{ IPAc-en}} and combines the behaviours of {{ IPA-en}} and {{ pron-en}}. Details in the current {{ IPAc-en}} documentation.
This proposal requests that the code in {{ IPA-en}} is replaced with the current {{ IPAc-en}} so that all incidents of the templates can be changed to {{ IPA-en}} with the template calls edited so that each phoneme is a separate variable allowing mouseovers to be shown.
A Greasemonkey script has been developed that will automatically located all incidents of these templates on an edit page and convert them to {{ IPAc-en}} calls with individual phonemes (will be updated to {{ IPA-en}} once the change has been made). -- deflective ( talk) 00:00, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
Well, we're here again, over a year later, and while it's possible I've gone and missed the place where any progress on this has moved to, it appears that this proposal has stagnated. At the risk of being a windbag: For as long as I can remember using Wikipedia, I have considered this commitment to IPA to be its most singularly evident flaw. It was perfectly stated by Deflective at the top of this section -- IPA may be universal, but it's so completely inaccessible to the layperson that it defeats the purpose of including a pronunciation guide at all (it would be interesting to run a poll on how many users rely on IPA vs. how many simply look elsewhere). IPA simply goes too far, almost entirely sacrificing accessibility on the altar of absolute universality. I can't think of a clearer warning bell than having the expression "it looks Greek to me" apply literally to what is often the second or third "word" in an article!
This idea, to include a mouse-over template that automatically translates any IPA into phonetic examples in the language of that particular Wikipedia site is brilliant, inspired and would satisfy all while harming none. It should be implemented, not merely as an optional addition (inevitably leaving most pages without it), but as a permanent fixture of all IPA pronunciation links, as has been proposed. (Indeed, I think it is the IPA that should be hidden behind a mouseover, with the pronunciation format most accessible to the majority of users taking center stage: The people who know of, and/or need IPA, can still find it, while the majority of users who have no idea what it is won't be bewildered by the linguistic equivalent of a differential equation written in Ancient Greek. But I'll be happy with accessible pronunciation guidance, however it manifests. Eunomiac ( talk) 14:22, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
With a little regex, AWB makes it pretty easy to ferret out funky IPA transcriptions. (Though of course not simply incorrect ones.) If anyone's interested, I've posted some of the code I've come up with at Template talk:Pron-en#regex. — kwami ( talk) 01:10, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
- Stevertigo ( w | t | e) 14:57, 12 June 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 1 |
"[…] {{IPAEng}} is appropriate, as it links to Help:IPA English pronunciation key […]"
should now be tweaked to:
"[…] {{IPAEng}} is appropriate, as it links to Help:Pronunciation […]"
Would do, but page is protected. — ¾-10 00:51, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
I am but an armchair linguist, so when other people on WP were screaming that Kwami didn't know what he was doing re transcription and pronunciation help, I didn't have 2¢ to add and wasn't prepared to argue either way. But I have come to believe that they are mostly wrong and he is mostly right. He is the one who is effectively sorting out the different needs and addressing each one (e.g., "For a broad, non-regional transcription of an English word, as when giving the pronunciation of a key word in an article, {{IPAEng}} is appropriate […] For foreign words that are not assimilated into English, regional pronunciations of English words, and non-standard English dialects, {{IPA2}} would be more appropriate […] For phonemic transcriptions that follow Australian pronunciation, use the templates {{IPAAusE}} and {{pronAusE}}.") The relationship of phonetics to phonemics is complex, and every part of it gets highlighted differently somewhere on WP. Sometimes the blind people groping the trunk and the blind people groping the tail don't realize that they're both touching the same elephant. I currently believe that Kwami sees more of the elephant than they do. Sometimes an IPA character is used to represent a phoneme, not a phone. (A lot of people don't realize that.) Which may be to say, it is being used as a variable whose value may be its phone or also several nearby phones that may regionally express the same phoneme. Probably we ought to have a separate set of characters for this variable usage, but we don't. We could invent one, but most people will avoid using it. And there would have to be a slightly different (or sometimes very different) one for each language. Which may be why people resist it—they instinctively grasp that IPA allows for interlingual (phonetic) comparison, and when you lead them toward the phonemic, which also has its proper applications, they say "hey! Where'd the phonetic go?!". They don't want phonemic systems that don't also maximize phonetic comparison. That is, they do want both at the same time. But they fail to understand that you can't have both in the same transcription. I'm digressing; let me get back to the basics. Sometimes laypeople need phonemic transcriptions for words in their own language. Sometimes they need phonetic ones for foreign words. (A corollary of the previous two sentences is that a native English-speaking reader of EN-WP and an EFL reader of the same EN-WP could in many cases best be served by different transcriptions of the same English word.) Sometimes a language has both naturalized and imported pronunciations that coexist. In each of those cases, laypeople need a different help chart to explain the different transcription style. There doesn't have to be one transcription style, nor one help page/chart, that addresses all of those cases. In fact, the point is that there can't be. You can't transcribe broadly and narrowly at the same time. Which one you do should really depend on the context—on the target audience—not on your personality. They both have applications. With EN-WP having multiple target audiences simultaneously, I could envision multiple transcriptions for a single word (although I know that such a system is currently a pipe dream, and maybe most people would never understand its purpose, so maybe it's never to be.) Anyway, I'm digressing again. Let me end with thanks to Kwami—I think his help has been a positive force. — ¾-10 00:51, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
Hi, please add an interwiki to " simple:Template:IPA-en". Thanks. — Cheers, Truth's Out There – talk– 16:26, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
This template links the pronunciations to Help:IPA for English which then redirects to Wikipedia:IPA for English. In comparison, Template:pron-en directly links to Wikipedia:IPA for English (so no redirect is needed). I think Template:IPA-en should act similarly, i.e. link directly to Wikipedia:IPA for English. huji— TALK 11:38, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
What about a short popup crib sheet if you hover over the transcription? Maybe something like:
(The colors can be adjusted to s.t. less gaudy, of course) kwami ( talk) 08:51, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm slowly converting the tranclusions of this template to a null or IPA switch, so that the default can eventually be changed to "English pronunciation: ", in order to move it in line with the other IPA-xx templates. kwami ( talk) 14:57, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
Was the "help" link (as found in {{ Audio-IPA}} deliberately not used in this template, or is it missing through oversight? In my experience, most Microsoft users cannot play the .ogg sound files without downloading additional items, and most casual users will not know this. Could a technical "help" link be included following the "listen" text? -- EncycloPetey ( talk) 03:55, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
I've talked to people who have said that IPA is so difficult to understand that they don't even consider Wikipedia when trying to figure out how to pronounce a word. With simplicity in mind I've written a template with mouseovers that show how to pronounce each phoneme when pointed at. This way even a complete layman can puzzle out the pronunciation with (relatively) little effort.
Example:
{{IPAc-en|ˈ|b|æ|t|ə|l|ʃ|ɪ|p}}
→
/ˈbætəlʃɪp/
It is currently implemented under {{ IPAc-en}} and combines the behaviours of {{ IPA-en}}, {{ pron-en}} and the original {{ IPAc-en}}. Details in current {{ IPAc-en}} documentation.
I propose that, after testing, the code in {{ IPA-en}} is replaced with the current {{ IPAc-en}} and all incidents of all three templates be changed to {{ IPA-en}}. Ideally with the template calls edited so that each phoneme is a separate variable allowing mouseovers to be shown.
This will require some editing to separate all phonemes by '|' but I believe that the increase in usability for a sizable audience is worth it. I am also developing a Greasemonkey script that will automatically located all incidents of the three templates on an edit page and convert them to {{ IPA-en}} calls with individual phonemes. -- Deflective ( talk) 12:31, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
Excellent idea. I've edited it so that it use “curly quotes” rather that 'straight apostrophes', I think it is more legible this way. Also, I think we should provide several examples at least for phonemes with significantly perceptually different allophones (e.g. voiceless stops "“t” as in “tie”, “sty”, “water”", and maybe vowels before /l/ and /ŋ/); and, maybe, saying more explicitly that /ɪ/, /ɵ/, /ʊ/ and /i/ mean "either /ɪ/ or /ə/", "either /ə/ or /oʊ/", "either /ʊ/ or /ə/", and "either /ɪ/ or /iː/": my proposals are "either short I or schwa, as “e” in “roses”"; "either schwa or long O, as “o” in “kilogram”", etc. --
___A. di M.
16:04, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
{{IPAc-en|tʃ|ɔər}}
→
/tʃɔːr/{{IPAc-en|{{H:title|'qu' in 'quick'|kw}}|{{H:title|'ark' in 'park'|ɑrk}}}}
→ [deleted so as to avoid triggering category for ill-formed templates. —
kwami (
talk)
22:57, 31 August 2011 (UTC)There doesn't seem to be any progress in changing the {{ IPA-en}} template to the new implementation. I still think this is an improvement and consider it worthwhile to manually convert existing {{ IPA-en}} calls to {{ IPAc-en}} if that's what it takes.
To help with this I've updated the Greasemonkey script so it will convert all instances of {{ pron-en}}, {{ IPA-en}} and {{ IPAc-en}} on an edit page to a properly grouped phoneme separated version of {{ IPAc-en}}. The script is available to anyone interested, it isn't exhaustively tested so please let me know if there's problems with it.
I will begin making changes by the end of the week unless there's a reason not to. -- deflective ( talk) 07:22, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
All objections to the template change concentrates on the SAMPA conversion. This feature seemed like a relatively harmless way to add functionality for the rare user who finds it useful. At worst, later users could hit preview on the edit page and then copy/paste the translated word.
But this is distracting from the point of the change, to make Wikipedia pronunciations usable for the average layman who finds IPA too complex. Instead of holding up the change in order to debate how to handle an editing feature lets drop it.
Without the translations, are there any objections to making this change to {{ IPA-en}}? -- deflective ( talk) 11:00, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
{{ editprotected}}
As discussed in the previous two sections.
I've talked to people who have said that IPA is so difficult to understand that they don't even consider Wikipedia when trying to figure out how to pronounce a word. With simplicity in mind I've written a template with mouseovers that show how to pronounce each phoneme when pointed at. This way even a complete layman can puzzle out the pronunciation with (relatively) little effort.
Example:
{{IPAc-en|ˈ|b|æ|t|əl|ʃ|ɪ|p}}
→
/ˈbætəlʃɪp/
It is currently implemented under {{ IPAc-en}} and combines the behaviours of {{ IPA-en}} and {{ pron-en}}. Details in the current {{ IPAc-en}} documentation.
This proposal requests that the code in {{ IPA-en}} is replaced with the current {{ IPAc-en}} so that all incidents of the templates can be changed to {{ IPA-en}} with the template calls edited so that each phoneme is a separate variable allowing mouseovers to be shown.
A Greasemonkey script has been developed that will automatically located all incidents of these templates on an edit page and convert them to {{ IPAc-en}} calls with individual phonemes (will be updated to {{ IPA-en}} once the change has been made). -- deflective ( talk) 00:00, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
Well, we're here again, over a year later, and while it's possible I've gone and missed the place where any progress on this has moved to, it appears that this proposal has stagnated. At the risk of being a windbag: For as long as I can remember using Wikipedia, I have considered this commitment to IPA to be its most singularly evident flaw. It was perfectly stated by Deflective at the top of this section -- IPA may be universal, but it's so completely inaccessible to the layperson that it defeats the purpose of including a pronunciation guide at all (it would be interesting to run a poll on how many users rely on IPA vs. how many simply look elsewhere). IPA simply goes too far, almost entirely sacrificing accessibility on the altar of absolute universality. I can't think of a clearer warning bell than having the expression "it looks Greek to me" apply literally to what is often the second or third "word" in an article!
This idea, to include a mouse-over template that automatically translates any IPA into phonetic examples in the language of that particular Wikipedia site is brilliant, inspired and would satisfy all while harming none. It should be implemented, not merely as an optional addition (inevitably leaving most pages without it), but as a permanent fixture of all IPA pronunciation links, as has been proposed. (Indeed, I think it is the IPA that should be hidden behind a mouseover, with the pronunciation format most accessible to the majority of users taking center stage: The people who know of, and/or need IPA, can still find it, while the majority of users who have no idea what it is won't be bewildered by the linguistic equivalent of a differential equation written in Ancient Greek. But I'll be happy with accessible pronunciation guidance, however it manifests. Eunomiac ( talk) 14:22, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
With a little regex, AWB makes it pretty easy to ferret out funky IPA transcriptions. (Though of course not simply incorrect ones.) If anyone's interested, I've posted some of the code I've come up with at Template talk:Pron-en#regex. — kwami ( talk) 01:10, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
- Stevertigo ( w | t | e) 14:57, 12 June 2010 (UTC)