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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)[reply]

Do you have anything to contribute, or have you just posted on this page in order to tell everybody not to post on this page? Lfh (talk) 16:53, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Merely an observation and suggestion, indeed one of the more useful contributions, I feel. I'm certainly not suggesting that people do not post on this page. People are quite at liberty to post comments on this 'talk' page, in much the same way as they are quite welcome to shovel sand from one heap to another, and then back again. Fortnum (talk) 17:16, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If anything I've said has been in error, rather than simply at variance with your opinion, I'd like to know, as long as you're prepared to put it in polite terms. Lfh (talk) 19:46, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Let's not feed the troll. kwami (talk) 20:05, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lfh, Kwami, this is not a 6th grade dispute. To anyone who has complained that the more intelligent discussion on this IPA topic has been spread around several user talk pages rather than here, I think Fortnum sums it up beautifully succinctly. it's just a question of some people being intransigent and not even prepared to entertain the idea that something somewhere might need some formal, structured discussion, significantly rewriting, or in the worst case scenario, abandoning completely. No one wants that to happen to something they have spent hours working on in good faith, and it takes a heck of a lot of courage to accept without pouting, getting upset, and throwing one's weight and/or authority around. The closing lines of this posting will summarise what I mean. I'm firmly convinced that if everyone were to approach this with as much good will as the the ones you have forced off this discussion, the problem would have been well on the way to being resolved. Some people seem to be forgetting that this is an encyclopedia - we are not writing articles for ourselves, we are producing a work of importance for the global community, and doing it voluntarily. However, I sense that many of the editors tend to think the whole thing is either a joke or a cheap Internet forum. When I suggested doing an RfC on the IPA issue, the idea was met with what looked like bad faith comments by an editor who looks as if he/she deliberately does some specific edits knowing that it will cause friction based on something that is already under discussion. Finally, it looks as if it could be a case for ANI or ARBCOM, but I don't go automatically running to seek protection behind Aunty Ani's skirts when someone, even an admin, 'accidentally' treads on my toes, like many do.

Look, I'm a linguist, but for a hobby I write Wikipedia articles about people and places in Worcestershire, Warwickshire, and Herefordshire, which ironically are among the targets for those possibly disruptive edits, and is the reason why I was dragged into all this in the first place. I'm also a lexicographer, but unlike others in these discussions, although the IPA is a daily tool in my work, it is not my major discipline; I write, among other things, dictionaries (published), and EFL textbooks (published) and the IPA interpretations and the studio recorded DVDs of both the American and English pronunciation used in our books are considered to be a fair representation of what we teach, and teach others to teach; that means RP and not Cockney or Geordie for BE; and General American and not Bronx, SAE or AAVE, for AE. By the same token, I would expect the IPA for American place names in the Wikipedia to be based on General American and not on British RP or some minority dialect of North America; and I would obviously expect the IPA for British place names in the Wikipedia to be based on RP and not on Brummy, Scouse, orNew England.

One thing is absolutely incontrovertibility sure however, (because enough editors have 'complained'), the IPA of British place names in the Wikipedia is being changed away from their standard pronunciation. Merely explaining this away in this MoS does not work if editors blatently refuse to implement it as it was probably intended, (vague, confusing explanation) and just continue to systematically go through British articles and unilaterlly change things according to their own interpretation.

I've tried to make it so clear, in long postings and in shorter messages with bulleted lists for clarity, that what I suggest the English Wikipedia and readers want, is an IPA transliteration that fairly represents the most commonly used form of pronunciation in the respective country and culture. I've tried taking part in the discussions above but I was edged out by craftily composed side issues used as smoke screens to hide from the the WP:NOT that the IPA in this encyclopedia has become (compare the IPA entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica). I stand accused (bordering on WP:CIVIL by an admin) that I don't bother - if that were true I wouldn't keep wasting my breath on this issue, and I wonder just how many really do care. If the Wikipedia IPAists remain intransigent, I won't however bother wasting my time getting more deeply involved, and they can believe they have a consensus.

In a nutshell, I am trying to resolve not one, but two clear issues: First, something that several editors contend is an error in the Wikipedia IPA transliterations, and second, the right for us to defend that opinion without risk of being assumed to be uncaring, unbothered trolls, and suffer possible disruptive editing that we can't complain about because they have been done by admins. It may be of interest to read THIS on this subject by User:Jamesinderbyshire. Too many editors on this encyclopedia project are more concerned with using the anonymity it affords to act completely stupidly, than in producing quality encyclopedic material.

To sum up what I have already stated sooo many times before, here and on other threads and article or project talk pages, and to answer Kwami's various questions once more that he maintains I have evaded, although they were often addressed directly on his and other users' talk pages:

1. Both WP:IPAEN and International Phonetic Alphabet are in my opinion, in flagrant conflict with WP:NOT.
2. WP:IPAEN would, in my opinion, be OK if Wikipedia would keep out of telling people how to use it. Don't ditch the article, just ditch the drop-down 'How To', and leave any OR out of it.
3. International Phonetic Alphabet is, in my opinion, just simply far too exhaustive and goes way beyond the remit of an encyclopedia. If the article's author(s), feel(s) strongly enough about it, they should go into a huddle and write and publish a new book about it.
4. Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation) is, in my opinion, inherently flawed because General American and RP are sometimes so fundamentally different that ESOL learners are totally confused, therefore at least both pronunciations should be shown where appropriate - this is in fact recommended, with instructions how to do it, but disruptive editing is being done instead.
5. Some stats: WP:IPAEN edit count: one main editor 202, next editor 37; IPA: edit count same main editor 289, next editor 171, two of the other major contributors have retired from editing; Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation): edit count (same main editor) 44, next editor 25.
6. I am suggesting that everything in the encyclopedia on IPA and pronunciation may not perhaps reflect a very wide diversity of authorship. However, in retrospect I suppose I could equally be accused of squatting all the Rhône wine articles.
7. I don't have the slightest personal agenda in any of this, whatever some of my comments or those of other commentators might suggest.
8. In Wikipedia's own official words: The current "pan-dialectal" English convention at Wikipedia:IPA for English is arbitrary/unreferenced/original research, and is therefore invalid.
9. See THIS comment by User:Jamesinderbyshire.

--Kudpung (talk) 12:29, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. Can you be more specific? Which parts of WP:NOT does WP:IPAEN violate?
2. WP:NOTHOW specifically states that it does not apply to project namespace (i.e. when it's relevant to editing Wikipedia itself) and "describing to the reader how other people or things use something." In this case, WP:IPAEN instructs the editor how to indicate how words are pronounced and the reader how to understand the transcription. Both perfectly appropriate.
3. That should probably be brought up at Talk:International Phonetic Alphabet. If it's too long, there are ways of dealing with it without removing information from Wikipedia.
4. The key word is "sometimes." Those instances are so few that we needn't accomodate for them. The disruptive editing comes when people don't want to edit according to WP:IPAEN because they disagree with it but don't feel that they should try to change it (for whatever reason).
5. Edit counts should also include those in the talk pages. In my experience, Kwamikagami has put forth a great deal of effort in creating consensus about use of IPA and indicating pronunciation and I don't doubt that his edits reflect the opinions of more than a few editors.
6. Something else to consider is that silence is often taken for consensus. You may have primary authorship for Rhône wine articles, but it's not clear that your edits are controversial unless someone starts complaining.
7. Okay
8. It's already been said that WP:OR doesn't apply to project namespace. I would also like to appeal to WP:IAR. In so doing, I must explain why the rules of WP:OR should be "ignored".
   1. Most of the contrasts that this pronunciation guide reflects, independent of how they're represented (that is, which specific characters are actually used) can be found in many different and widely available dictionaries.
   2. Because they're found in third party sources, the WP:OR concern is one of WP:SYNTH, that is the guide indicates a set of contrasts that incorporates those of two more more different dictionaries but the actual synthesis is unique to (or originating from) Wikipedia and not implied by either.
   3. The synthesis itself does not take a great deal of expertise to understand or accept. If, upon looking up marry & merry in two dictionaries that represent different dialects, you get /ˈmæri/ & /ˈmɛri/ in one and /ˈmɛri/ & /ˈmɛri/ in another, then it's clear even to non-experts that the first dialect makes a contrast that the other does not.
   4. The synthesis also becomes even less significant when we go outside dictionaries and find sources that talk about dialectal variation (this may be something we can look into).
   5. Because these dictionaries choose one dialect over another, WP:NPOV concerns behoove us to actually conduct this synthesis.
   6. WP:NPOV concerns also behoove us to use characters in a way that doesn't favor one dialect.

I believe this is the logic of Wikipedia's diaphonemic representation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aeusoes1 (talk • contribs)

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)[reply]

Kwami, I don't see me mentioning York in this context, in this or any other discussion. Is this, with again accusing me of making up spurious arguments, another of your smoke screens?  :"Warwickshire" does not have a final r in RP. The only exception is when it links to a vowel. YOU have adamantly refused to acknowledge my insistences and those of other editors, and all you do is deliberately make disruptive edits which you know will cause polemic that will not take this issue forward to solutions. A point which you may still be possibly missing is that not everyone wanting a quick reference to the reasonably accurate pronunciation of a place name, wants to plod through all your lengthy lessons and contradictions on its use and still be left nonplussed.

Of course I'm standing on a soapbox - in spite of your personal innuendos, you're quite right! Q: Why do people stand on soapboxes? A: To get the listeners to sit up and absorb what is being said, think about it, then hopefully do something collective and positive about it. And that's the whole point isn't it? I'm asking you, the self appointed IPA gurus to listen to what people are telling you, and stop making a walled garden of your Wikipedia passion. Nevertheless, I'm not going to start contributing to your IPA or pronunciation articles. Even if when you open the gate, I could do so with some academic foundation.

There has been no consensus - except the one you admittedly consider to be that of the assent of a silent majority. That's great, so if ten Americans vote for me to become president and 359,999,990 don't go to the poll, I get to move into the White House, right?

Anything that introduces an intrusive r where there shouldn't be one in normal British English, makes it rhotic, which if I remember rightly in one of your other articles in this encyclopedia (I have noted it somewhere in my office), you clearly and unambiguously state that BE is not a rhotic language! To make it rhotic, in my ears, makes it sound American. You, sir, are an American, and have never even been to Britain, so I naturally, quite naturally, put two and two together and accuse you of linguistic hegemony. It's nothing personal, its's a logical conclusion. In fact the only other thing anyone knows about you here, apart from the fact that you have a truly excellent knowledge of the IPA - which doesn't mean you are also an expert on the sociolinguistic implications of its (mis)use - is that you come from the US. You clearly contradict yourself where you have on occasion stated that the Wikipedia's interpretation of the IPA is based on RP, while somewhere else you say that everything about it is American? Please make up your mind which side of the pond you are on, before accusing me anew of not being direct.

Yes, people do have a hard time using the IPA - the American people. In Europe and Asia the IPA is as common as Worcestershire Sauce, as is the European talent for being multilinghual Bit of a paradox really, with the USA being such a multi-ethnic nation.

I have never denied that Kwami is the major player on the Wikipedia in all things IPA & pronunciation - in fact I even pointed it out. I might have primary authorship of the Rhône wine articles (in fact I think actually Tomas_e does), but nobody has complained. In Kwami's case however, people are complaining, or rather not so much complaining but asking rather pointed, embarrassing questions, and getting disruptive edits to their articles in response.

Now, in the last 5 or so postings on this thread or on your user talk pages, I seem to repeating my Hyde Park Corner show, so please do not try to draw me into this thread again by posing more questions which good faith would force me to acknowledge and repeat my answers yet again. If you are all so keen to make any sense out of all this, then It's really up to you guys from the IPA to get this train crash of a discussion back on track. When you finally come up with some suggestions for some changes to your Wikipedia proprietary 'use of IPA' policy, and hold a straw poll on them, don't worry, I'll be watching, I may help with some suggestions for the poll question(s), and then and I'll come back to add one of two words: support or object. Unless of course it turns out to be yet another fiasco like the current talks about BLP, and citation templates..

--Kudpung (talk) 06:36, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, after months, you finally answered a basic question! Now maybe we can get somewhere! (I'll ignore your misrepresentations of what I've said as unimportant here.)

"Warwickshire" does not have a final r in RP. The only exception is when it links to a vowel. Since you're a trained linguist, I shouldn't have to point out that you've just agreed with me that Warwichshire has a final /r/ in RP. For the others in the audience, I'll explain:

The WP convention for transcribing English in the IPA is based on meaningful speech sounds known as phonemes. Now, let's take another language, as distance sometimes adds clarity. In Spanish and Italian, there is an en sound /n/ rather like English /n/ (we write these sounds between slashes to show they're meaningful speech sounds, not minor detail), but there is no independent eng sound /ŋ/ as in English sing. Therefore a Spanish or Italian speaker may have difficulty pronouncing the English word sing. However, the sound [ŋ] (we write phonetic details which are not independent sounds in brackets) does occur; whenever /n/ occurs before a /k/ or /g/ it is pronounced [ŋ], as in banco [baŋko]. That is, the speech sound /n/ is pronounced [ŋ] before /k/ and /g/, and [n] elsewhere. (More or less.) In linguistic terms, we say that [ŋ] and [n] are allophones of the phoneme /n/. Therefore, if we were to transcribe Spanish or Italian banco phonemically, as we transcribe English words, it would be /banko/ with phoneme /n/.

Now let's go back to Kudpung's example of Warwichshire in RP: before a vowel in ends in a sound [r] (let's not worry for the moment exactly how that [r] is pronounced; that's not important here). However, before a consonant or pausa (pause, end of a sentence, etc.) it ends in [] (that is, null, silence). This is somewhat more abstract that the Spanish & Italian example, but the idea is the same. We have two different pronunciations of the r depending on what follows, just as we have two different pronunciations of Spanish n depending on what follows. These two pronunciations are [r] and silence; they are two allophones of the English phoneme /r/. That is, in RP, English /r/ is pronounced [r] before a vowel, and [] before a consonant or pausa. Thus when we transcribe Warwickshire phonemically, we must write this final /r/.

You might ask, Why write r instead of nothing, since it's often silent? Because if we write /r/, you as an RP speaker will know that it's silent in certain contexts, but if we don't write it, you won't know whether there's an [r] sound before a vowel or not. (Of course, you can always go by the spelling, but English spelling is not always a reliable guide to pronunciation, especially in place names.)

For example, let's take the words bar and baa. One of them is pronounced sometimes [bɑː], sometimes [bɑr], depending on its environment. The other is always pronounced [bɑː]. Now, if we were to write bar /bɑː/, as Kudpung proposes, then you wouldn't be able to predict that it has an [r] sound before a vowel. You'd think it's just like baa. That is, the transcription would be missing information necessary for you to correctly pronounce the word. (I'm assuming of course that these words are unknown to you, just as place names are often unknown to people.) If however we transcribe bar as /bɑr/, then the pronunciation is obvious: You know that in your dialect, words like this (car, far, gar, jar, mar, par, tar, etc) drop their ars when not followed by a vowel. Therefore the transcription /bɑr/ is the correct one, as unlike the other it tells you how to pronounce the word in all circumstances. /bɑr/ is the phonemic transcription; [bɑː] is just the realization of the word in a particular environment, not a complete description of it. For the same reason, Warwickshire should be transcribed with a final /r/ even if we are only concerned with RP. Or in linguistic terms, final r is phonemic in RP. (This is not true for all non-rhotic dialects; some drop their ars entirely. But RP does not.) kwami (talk) 08:23, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung has just informed me that he doesn't want to discuss this with me ever again. Since I'm part of the discussion here, I suppose we can now consider this thread closed? Unless perhaps Fortnum has something to add? I think I overreacted in calling him a troll, and I apologized on my talk page, as he does seem to be sincere. Fortnum, do you have anything to add? kwami (talk) 09:54, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'm happy with the apology, and thank you for it. As for the matter in hand, it does seem to have reached a conclusion, and I don't feel it profitable to add any more to it. Fortnum (talk) 13:47, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, "Warwickshire" in RP does not have a final /r/. What is being described above is linking r. AFAIK, a transcription of a single word does not include linking r, e.g. "car" in RP is /kɑː/, not /kɑr/. 92.40.12.2 (talk) 04:31, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you have linking /r/, then car is /kar/. If it were /ka:/, that would mean there is no linking /r/. (See allophone.) The question is whether any RP speakers actually have linking /r/; it appears that some do after certain vowels but not others. But regardless, convention on WP is to transcribe a word AFAP so that speakers of all dialects can pronounce it from the transcription. kwami (talk) 10:33, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Car" in RP is /kɑː/, not /kɑr/. Linking r (r liaison) is completely irrelevant when transcribing a single word, it definitely is not included in a phonemic transcription. AFAIK, linking r in RP is random; some people sometimes say it after some words and at other times they don't. Please name a dictionary which has RP pronunciations that include linking r. OK I can see that the convention on WP is to transcribe according to rhotic English and that non-rhotic English users just have to ignore the syllable final /r/, but let's not pretend that in RP car is /kɑr/ or Warwickshire has a final /r/. 92.40.211.182 (talk) 21:10, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"when transcribing a single word" - you still don't know what an allophone is. Please read that article. kwami (talk) 00:57, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My Oxford English-French-Spanish-German dictionary (which transcribes in RP with a few "US" pronunciations) transcribes car as /kɑː(r)/. It is not the case that linking or intrusive r is "random" it is the case that you don't know what the context is that triggers it. For many speakers, it is triggered by a following word that begins with a vowel. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:12, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Please name a dictionary which has RP pronunciations that include linking r." - I have a Collins French/English in which the English pronunciations are non-rhotic - and presumably based on RP - but linking R is included. That said, the linking R is indicated not with /r/, but with an asterisk, which is the same symbol it uses to show absence of liaison in the French section. Lfh (talk) 08:18, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is not completely "random" but it's not completely determined, either. Robert Plant sings the line "Valhalla I am coming" in "Immigrant Song" without an R on Led Zeppelin III but with an R on How the West Was Won, for example. But what Ƶ§œš¹ described is the environment where it's most likely to be pronounced. ― A._di_M. (formerly Army1987) 12:55, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kwami, what you write about the phonemic status of linking /r/ is not correct. Your account is fatally confused about the meaning of the term phoneme, and the difference between surface and underlying forms (or phonemic and morphophonemic representations; label according to theoretical taste). The whole discussion on this page seems to be driven by your non-standard interpretation of what a phonemic representation should consist of, and by a reluctance to engage with the standard academic consensus on this matter. C0pernicus (talk) 12:29, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see what you're talking about. What has Kwami gotten wrong? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 15:20, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I do - what's the problem?--Kudpung (talk) 07:20, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The only thing I think Kwami has gotten wrong about linking-r is that it's the justification for our transcribing with r's in the syllable coda. We do it to represent the phonemic contrast in rhotic dialects, not to represent linking-r. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:43, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, he's certainly got something very wrong there, but that's not all.--Kudpung (talk) 19:30, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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.

1. It has been my suggestion that the IPA transcription of British place names should represent as closely as possible, the natural way that most speakers in that country would pronounce it, or at least most easily recognise it wen hearing it. This means that more attention should be given to the questions of Who are the readers of the IPA articles? and What are their needs? Too many editors think the only people who read the Wiki are the one who write it.
2. It has been my suggestion that a Standard Global English is a fallacy. Alone in the United Kingdom,my homeland, I do not understand one word of very broad Scots. As a lexicographer, and author of an American-British bilingual dictionary and grammar, I can vouch (I can't supply citations here for obvious reasons) for the fact that there are hundreds of fundamental differences between General American, and modern, common RP.
3. It has been my suggestion that where differences between AE and BE are great, then two pronunciations of a place name should be shown.
4. It has been suggested by those who opposed dual entries that this would mean every pronunciation in every accent of English would also then have to be shown. That is, IMHO, a silly argument to use in opposition.
5. Notwithstanding the current discussion, some editors have deliberately antagonised the debate and stretched the GF of participants by carrying out a programme of disruptive editing, by turning non rhotic place names into rhotic place names.
6. Serious editors who started the discussion felt they were not getting satisfactory explanations to their enquiries. They either gave up trying or they took their discussion elsewhere.
7. Finally, after all these weeks, the dicussion has been reviveed albeit through a particularly nasty echange, and we have a detailed explanation that could have been provided if Good Faith from its author had been demonstrated weeks ago.
8. I partly agree with that explanation, but do not agree to implement it on the Wikipedia for the reasons stated in the preamble to this message.
9. This thread is far from closed. Any suggestion to close this discussion prematurely is because the issue is too embarrassing to those who don't want to waste their time addressing questions from non IPA specialits. No consensus has been reached, and if it were it would represent my White House analogy.
10. Because of constant incivility, I'm not going to answer any questions on the above. If you can be bothered to read it (and some of you have admitted that you are not interested in reading every post in detail), and you find it in any way helpful, please dicuss it amongst yourselves and leave me out of it.--Kudpung (talk) 22:02, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Great! I think I finally understand what your objections are. If you had answered such simple questions when I'd asked them months ago, it would have saved a lot of frustration on all sides. I'll ignore your repeated and I can only assume knowing misrepresentations of what's going on here, and skip to the useful bits. (Yes, I've previously skimmed some of your missives, as I'd found them overly long and generally devoid of content. I'm glad we're back to the point where it's profitable to read what you have to say.)

It is true that our IPA conventions were not designed with the ESL student in mind. This is certainly worth discussion. How much should our transcriptions be targeted to the reader who knows English, and how much to the reader who's learning it? If we target the ESL student, should we then pick a representative dialect or dialects for WP, say just RP or just RP and GA, and ignore the other dialects of our native speaking readers? Should any of this be the job of the Special English WP maybe? Or is that inadequate for it?

We do use conservative RP as the basis for our pronunciations. For example, we maintain the hoarse, horse distinction, which is now merged among most RP speakers. This is because it's easier to make a merger than to undo one, if the distinction is not made in the transcription. Of course, this is also s.t. we can revisit.

We did use to have multiple transcriptions of a word, RP, GA, and Oz. It started to become a mess, and general consensus is that we should use a single transcription where possible. True, as you point out, there are numerous cases where this is not possible, as in the alt pronunciations of "graph", but it works the vast majority of the time. This is also s.t. that can be revisited, but I for one have no desire to go back to the mess that we once had. Of course, it would make a difference if we only used RP for English place names, but I can already see the objections to that.

We do, and always have, supported the inclusion of local pronunciations. No-one has ever had any problem with that, except in trivial cases. But although it's quite useful to know how locals pronounce the name of their town in their own dialect and accent, it's also useful to know how one should pronounce the name in one's own accent when talking with one's compatriots. If two Torontans are talking, and one of them mentions "Yawk", the other might not recognize that he means "York". Even if it were recognized, it might sound pretentious. So both are important, both are desired, and IMO where they differ, both should be included. Your POV would seem to be, based on your deletions, that only the local pronunciation should be provided. I find that unfortunate.

As for "Global English" being a fallacy, no-one has said that this is how people should speak. In fact, we've been careful to say just the opposite: the IPA is a key that enables the reader to decode the pronunciation of a word in their own dialect (within what we support; we have unfortunately not been able to support Scottish). Nowhere do we say that they should try to imitate our transcription as their pronunciation. If we've implied that, please point out where, and we'll change it. That is not our intent.

Once again, you say that we all need to carefully consider your opinions, and discuss them among ourselves, but that you have no intention of actually defending them or answering questions if we find them unclear. This is not due to any incivility, but has always been your approach. It's difficult to take you seriously as an editor with such an attitude. kwami (talk) 22:31, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Based on this post in my talk page, I think your interpretation of Kudping's stance is correct.

While Kudping may not be returning here, I'd like to point out that Kwami has shown that using multiple systems actually requires a more thorough knowledge of the IPA and phonology than a single system. People complain enough about our using IPA without us making it more complicated. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:01, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Coming from the opposite POV from Kudpung, I just got an objection that paradigm should have the "merry" vowel rather than the "marry" vowel, because that's how it's pronounced by most North Americans, and therefore by most English speakers.

And why haven't people objected to Hampshire having an /h/? kwami (talk) 07:14, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The "paradigm" objection came from me. After having read the "Wikipedia:IPA for English" page, I think I have a better comprehension of what you're trying to do here, and I applaud your efforts. I am still concerned, though, that you may be fighting a losing battle against people who simply do not understand the problem, simply will not go read this page, and will continue to insist that various IPA transcriptions in Wikipedia are just plain wrong. And I'm not totally sure that readers should need to become dialect experts in order to understand pronunciation notes in WP — though I realize you've all been dealing with that question for a long time now, and I'm not sure if I have any useful suggestions that you haven't already thought of. Richwales (talk) 17:09, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Okay, let's try that. I hid it assuming that it wouldn't be needed after the first visit.

Do you not have the list of IPA symbols under your edit window that you can click on to place IPA in text? kwami (talk) 21:44, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but it's so hard to find the symbols that I need among all the jumble there that I find it much easier to copy/paste from this page. Grover cleveland (talk) 22:50, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'd even propose to keep the list of symbols itself hidden, with an instruction to read the "Understanding the Key" section first near the [show] link. ― A._di_M. (formerly Army1987) 16:12, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do you want to try that out? kwami (talk) 21:47, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that's a good idea. If we're expanding the "understanding the key" box because we think people might be missing it, we don't want to compliment that by hiding the actual key since there will be people who miss it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 23:07, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps there is a way to set user preferences so that regulars can default to hidden while newbies default to visible? Grover cleveland (talk) 07:51, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

That depends on your education. For most people, the IPA is easier. But yes, the other can be added; it's just that few editors are going to bother, for the same reason they don't bother with pounds or inches in an article. kwami (talk) 08:28, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Actually, it is done right. That's like saying we shouldn't use kilometers "if we can't do it right" because some people have to look up what a km is. An encyclopedia cannot be responsible for the educational deficiencies of its readership, whether it's the metric system, IPA, standard abbreviations, big words, dates in the Common Era, spelling conventions from across the pond, etc.

We do have a mod to the template that enables hover-over keys, but it will be a while before we can roll it out. But if we don't have the IPA where you'd most like to see it, tell us, and if we can confirm the pronunciation we'll provide it. kwami (talk) 19:13, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not a project like this is "done right" often depends on what exactly the goal is. If all you fellows are interested in is shoehorning a given set of characters into a given set of paragraphs, then--by all means--bravo, mission accomplished, this is the end of fighting in Iraq.

However, if the point is to help people to pronounce words they've not heard, then, I would argue...

Bah. You prally get my point by now.

And please don't be so disrespectful as to misrepresent my position. I did not claim that something other than IPA should be used. In fact, above, I stated the opposite. I only argued that it would be nice if information from the key (the pronunciation guide, found here, for the pronunciation guide) could be transposed to the article pages. I had actually been going to suggest the onhover thing you mentioned above, but I figured if anyone cared enough to implement it, someone would already have been working on it.

My point, as I felt I presented it above, was that if the stuff found here at this key is good enough to be found here at this key, it should also be good enough to appear in the articles themselves. Either it's accurate and effective or it isn't.

Oh, and my most recent annoyance was Aristeia, which I can't remember clearly from my classics courses. Tragically, the top zillion search results on Google are mirrors of the Wikipedia page, which does not include what I was looking for. Short of writing my old prof to ask how they pronounced it back when he was young (and Homer was in his sixties), I seem to be up a creek without a paddle. I don't remember any others at the moment, but I'll let you know if I run across any. :)

J.M. Archer (talk) 20:52, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I feel that equating other pronunciation guides to non-metric measurements is utterly ridiculous; people develop an instinctive understanding of "miles and "gallons," but the average person (for whom newspaper articles are written at a junior high reading level) is probably just as confused by Webster's pronunciation symbols as by any other form of rocket science. J.M. Archer (talk) 20:56, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it depends on what you learned at school. A lot of US kids learn s.t. like the Webster's system in elementary school, so they think that's what we should use, not realizing that it's gibberish to most of the rest of the world.

I'll take a look at Aristeia. kwami (talk) 21:04, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Until I get my OED back, I'm going to assume that it can be predicted by blending aristocracy and oresteia, so that's what I added. kwami (talk) 21:13, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah; I distinctly remember learning that Webster's gibberish in about second grade. It was only ever useful in second grade. Completely irrelevant to the usability issues that bug me about Wikipedia itself--and my contention with regard to pronunciation is about usability, not which pronunciation guide would be the more useful.

Thank you for looking into that funny Greek word. It's very useful, to the extent one can use it at all, in certain (rare) kinds of discussions--which happen way too often in certain lines of work.

J.M. Archer (talk) 21:21, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I nearly edit-conflicted with you, Kwami. I went the other direction and tried to resurrect the Ancient Greek pronunciation, which, happily, seems to agree with your English one. This reminds me: we really need WP:IPA for Greek, ideally covering the Classical, Byzantine, and Modern phonologies. That will be quite a chore. — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 21:31, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ugh! It's not so much that it'd be a chore, but the Greek 'pedians who would edit war over it, claiming that Classical Greek pronunciation is an English conspiracy to deprive Greeks of their heritage. (You do know that Classical Greek was pronounced identically to modern Athenian, don't you?) Well, maybe those editors have given up on WP by now. kwami (talk) 02:25, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Since we don't have a special letter for this vowel, we need two transcriptions. kwami (talk) 07:16, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Does that go for BATH as well? I note that Bath, Somerset is simply given as /ˈbɑːθ/. Lfh (talk) 10:11, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. That is the local pronunciation, and should be labeled as such. (Any GA speaker giving it that pronunciation would sound pretentious.) There was a semi-serious proposal to use /aː/ for the BATH vowel, but given the low frequency compared to how often that's erroneously used for /ɑː/, it was thought best to avoid it. kwami (talk) 10:37, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see the explanation now, above the key. Lfh (talk) 10:54, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, that makes sense. 82.124.231.186 (talk) 14:13, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

What vowel do you have in omission when reduced? Lfh (talk) 16:14, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know. Probably a centralized version of [o]. I'm willing to believe that the [ɵ] suggested by the table is accurate. My main point is that there's no rounding for me in kilogram. 82.124.231.186 (talk) 21:50, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK. Kilogram has been removed now anyway. Lfh (talk) 07:45, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Yeah, actually, it does make sense. Maybe we could transcribe the example words on this list into IPA? kwami (talk) 14:10, 3 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

yes, that would be a good idea. Also, the new Template:IPAc-en template is great, we need a bot to go through and replace all Template:pron-en templates with that one. and also break the word up into phonemes. e.g. : Template:Pron-en becomes /ˈsɜːrf/ (mouseover both to see the difference.) . The mouseover on individual phonemes is so awesome! --Rajah (talk) 04:14, 7 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That list is a good idea, but where to put it? The page is getting quite cluttered. Maybe a separate page, or a hover-over? Lfh (talk) 11:16, 7 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Most quality dictionaries (at least the ones from British publishers) include IPA transcriptions for their headwords. The Wikipedia on the other hand, is an encyclopedia, and is not intended to be an exhausitve, authoritative work on any subject. neither is istsupposed to be a handbook for use of the IPA, although the Wikipedia IPA and pronunciation articles may leave a reader with that impression. Most important before a bot does any mass changes, is to be absolutely sure that the Wikipedia is correct in its implementation of the IPA - something which however, is still very much open to debate.--Kudpung (talk) 07:27, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This article really really really needs an audio file to illustrate each of the sounds. 76.85.196.138 (talk) 04:40, 5 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On second thought, the entire use of an IPA on wikipedia is a tedious obfuscation compared to just inserting a widget that plays a sound file. At best, the IPA gives you a crude approximation of the pronunciation with some considerable effort at decoding it.76.85.196.138 (talk) 04:59, 5 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

One can actually do both. If we were to have a policy of using sound files to indicate pronunciation, we would have to create quite a few thousand sound files. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 06:12, 5 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There's also the problem of whose dialect we use. kwami (talk) 19:57, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

It's also problematic in that it's not IPA. Superscript <j> indicates palatalization, not an optional palatal glide; superscript <h> indicates aspiration, not an optional glottal fricative. Similarly, [ɑ˞] is an [ɑ] with retroflexion, not one with a following rhotic. We've got enough trouble getting people unfamiliar with the IPA to acquire our system, we don't need to also make it difficult for people who are familiar with the IPA. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 00:11, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed someone recently slipped in /ɝː, ɚ/ again. In my opinion we are trying to define a system for transcription. We should not make it confusing by allowing all more and more alternatives. Writing the /r/ is good enough and allows to add a simple line that it is optional in many dialects. Let's keep it simple. −Woodstone (talk) 01:22, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think a line should be drawn at the symbols /ɝː, ɚ/, because sometimes the /r/ is not appropriate, particularly in names. --58.165.2.250 (talk) 12:40, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what you mean by "particularly in names." Do you mean orthographic r is less likely to be present phonemically in proper nouns or do you mean that [ɚ] is more likely than [ər]. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:30, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What I mean is that place names that may include a rhotic vowel in its pronunciation, but have a majority of speakers that are non-rhotic (ie, Australia, most of England, NZ, etc), it would therefore be inappropriate to use an <r>, so the use of the r-coloured vowels /ɝː, ɚ/ are an appropriate compromise between /ɜː, ə/ and /ɜr, ər/, because there is a need for rhotic vowels to be included, even when native speakers don't use them. The same can also be applied to the pronunciation of a non-rhotic speaker's name. --58.164.107.103 (talk) 08:25, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I fail to understand why writing r-coloured vowels /ɝː, ɚ/ would be better than adding an r as in /ɜr, ər/ for a proper name of someone/thing from a non-rhotic area. What could be simpler than the general rule: "for non-rhotic dialects omit any r following a vowel in the same syllable". Not having these duplicate representations with special symbols makes applying IPA more straightforward, without losing accuracy or generality. −Woodstone (talk) 10:04, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Mainly because a minority of editors gets really upset by transcribing the /r/, even though they don't mind /h/ and other differences. Take a look at Kudpung's subpage on the debate for an extreme example. They don't object so much to transcribing them as rhotic vowels. Okay, that's not an academic reason, more of a political one. kwami (talk) 10:09, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

If I might, I'd like to offer one correction to "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": if that's the argument, then it's likely to be misinterpreted as many dialects produce an intrusive r that's similar to linking r; if we were accomodating for intrusive r (which is a lot more common) we would have to put a final r in transcriptions for nigeria and draw. The more agreeable (and consistent) justification for putting coda r's is that this marks a phonemic contrast that speakers of rhotic dialects still make. Just as with many of the vowel system we implement, there will be dialects that don't make such a contrast (i.e. most non-rhotic dialects) but we're trying to be inclusively accomodating. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:04, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Kudpung, for bringing this to a centralized location for discussion. You've heard everything I have to say, so I'll chime out now. kwami (talk) 18:49, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Here's an example of an English name that shouldn't be transcribed with an /r/: Matthew Le Tissier. AFAIK, rhotic speakers wouldn't have an /r/ either. — kwami (talk) 00:54, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Tissier example is off-topic - the name is French.--Kudpung (talk) 07:29, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's not off-topic at all. The given pronunciation is how even English speakers of even rhotic dialects pronounce it. Who cares of the name comes from French? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 07:51, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. Matt Le Tissier himself is not French, and there are millions more English-speakers with names of French or other foreign origin. Are they all off-topic? And there are assimilated French words as well, e.g. sommelier, which even rhotic speakers pronounce without /r/. Lfh (talk) 08:12, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

...which even rhotic speakers pronounce without /r/. Gotta laugh this time ;) That's the best example yet of you IPA folks not reading what I wrote, and thinking that you have contradicted me, you have actually agreed with me! --Kudpung (talk) 17:14, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Marvellous, it's always nice to agree. Lfh (talk) 18:31, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Be nice if it were intentional, but it just goes to demonstrate yet again (sigh) that the IPA and pronunciation articles are dominated by a bunch of semi-intelectual clowns pretending to be linguists. What have they been smoking this time?--Kudpung (talk) 18:50, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, Kwami was pointing out that the current key distinguishes between final orthographic r's that are pronounced by no-one at all, and those that are pronounced by rhotic speakers only. And I was agreeing that "Le Tissier" is a valid illustration of this - i.e. not "off-topic". Lfh (talk) 19:14, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I don't get how "The Tissier example is off-topic - the name is French" could be construed to mean anything like what I and others have said in response. I'm getting the feeling that either Kudpung has himself not read what others wrote or that we are using the same words to talk about different things. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 19:40, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Precisely, and there's the practical joke played on Kudpung that's backfired on you all by trying to be clever and re-invent the IPA for use in the Wikipedia to support a silly claim. So having said that, you can also now go ahead and agree that there are a lot more final r's in British and rest-of-the-world English that are never pronounced, and that it's time for the Wikipedia readers to get some accurate pronunciation guides, instead of a hypothetical construct that tries to cover too many, widely differing accents in one go, among which there are confusing examples that simply just don't exist.--Kudpung (talk) 19:43, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In non-rhotic dialects there are many final (orthographic) r's that, essentially, are not pronounced. As intrusive r occurs even without an orthographic r in words like Nigeria and draw, we could even see this intrusive r as avoiding a certain form of hiatus. This phenomenon occurs quite frequently in utterances by speakers that exhibit them. Would you agree with this? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 19:57, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If Kudpung honestly thinks that our IPA conventions were drawn up to play a practical joke on him, I'm doubtful that rational debate will be of much use. If he doesn't think that, but says it anyway, I have the same doubts. — kwami (talk) 23:01, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kwami, the rational debate will have no success unless people read what other people post. Your comment above is totally off topic, wrong, and another dig. Are you now completely unable to follow the comments made by your henchmen too? If you are unable to comment sensibly in a mature manner why bother? The other thing is, why should I continue to respect Wikipedia civility guidelines, when you , as an admin to boot, don't give a hoot about them and still continue to harrass me?--Kudpung (talk) 00:48, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When have you ever respected WP civility guidelines, except to tell other people to follow them? And how is calling you out on your nonsense "off topic"? You make it the topic. You come here and call us all idiots, claim other editors are my henchmen (I assume they're my henchmen and not the other way around because you first came into conflict with me), and accuse us of playing a great practical joke, simply because you have so far failed to present your case coherently. That's not a swipe at you, but an explanation of my frustration and why I've "twisted" your words. (I find it difficult to paraphrase someone or respond to their arguments intelligently when I can't follow those arguments.) You've made things so unpleasant around here that we now have other editors throwing up their arms in disgust and saying they've had enough. Why should anyone take you seriously? If you want the English IPA conventions to follow multiple national standards, fine, make a straightforward case for that. It's a simple enough case to make. — kwami (talk) 01:09, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kwami, Check the diffs to see at whom the editors are 'throwing their arms up at in disgust', and who does not observe policy, and why editors are afraid to defend themselves in this unpronounced 'r' business.--Kudpung (talk) 16:56, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Done. — kwami (talk) 18:29, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So does that mean Jape are wrong (or joking) in the song "Phil Lynott", where they pronounce it "LINN-ott"? Lfh (talk) 18:46, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Me, I have no idea. I'm just an IPA drudge. — kwami (talk) 23:57, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you greatly. You folks with IPA are a real blessing. Both sounded out sound correct. :) --Leahtwosaints (talk) 23:07, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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:

−Woodstone (talk) 07:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is an example of a set of contrasts that not every dictionary encodes but that we accomodate for in our diaphonemic transcription. Help:IPA conventions for English is supposed to elucidate which dictionaries encode which contrasts, though it's not quite finished.

Your alternative of using semivowels in the onset to contrast the two may appropriate, but I notice that this then makes /a/ into a monophthong of English when it isn't as such. We would thus have to convert that into another low vowel phoneme of English (either /æ/, /ʌ/, or /ɑ/), the choice of which may depend on dialect. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 08:44, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In the examples, the diphthongation of the vowel may be considered induced as a glide to the following semivowel. But my remark was meant in a bit more general sense behind all these (and more) cases. Many of the syllable splits I see being introduced en masse, seem more based on orthographic conventions of line breaking, than on a phonological principle. Line breaking would create break-ing, whereas in speech it is more like /[invalid input: 'bre.kɪŋ']/. −Woodstone (talk) 15:24, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I see what you're saying. I believe line-breaking is based on morphology, which it seems the syllable splits in question may also (arguably) be based on. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 19:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Shouldn't /n.k, n.ɡ/ just about always be /ŋ.k, ŋ.ɡ/? In which case, do we need the syllable separator? On another note, I'm not sure how I feel about indicating one syllable break in a (trisyllabic-plus) word without indicating all of them. Not doing so seems to imply that the unbroken sequence is a single syllable. I know when I'm adding IPA for French, and feel a dot is necessary, I go ahead and mark all the breaks—which is much easier for French than for English (damn ambisyllabicity...) — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 21:37, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's the problem, they almost always are. So when they're /nk, nɡ/, as it Vancouver and Feingold, it's hard to tell whether they're really /n/, or if the transcriber just made a typo. (Okay, I guess I'm using the dot as more of a morpheme break there, but I think it gets the idea across.)

Personally, I'd go with Wells's ideas on syllabification, but I've had nasty fights with editors who insist that English is phonemically V.CV, never VC.V. And it's a hard call to make in many cases, even for Wells! (I'm not convinced myself that "mattress" is really /matr.ess/.) — kwami (talk) 21:59, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is Wells's idea of syllabification maximization of the onset? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 22:15, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm guessing from that example that it's maximization of the stressed syllable, though /tr/ is not an acceptable coda cluster otherwise, so I don't know...
Actually, I think I may have read Kwami's comment wrong, but in any case, my intuition is that English stressed syllables "pull" consonants towards them, but still have the same phonotactic restraints (more or less) as monosyllables. Thus marble /ˈmɑrb.əl/, but mattress /ˈmæt.rɨs/. — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 23:07, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Morphology is a conceivable base, but I think trying to sing the word on long notes brings out the phonological split better. That leads often to CV.C, or indeed a maximised onset. I could not possibly sing /[invalid input: 'mætr.əs']/, but I must confess that /[invalid input: 'mæː.trəs']/ isn't very musical either. The examples above with n.g show ambisyllabicity best, try /[invalid input: 'ˈsɪŋ.ŋɪŋ.ɪn.ðə.ˌreɪn']/. −Woodstone (talk) 23:22, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wells presented it a lot as Xyzzyva said. I'd always felt that a following consonant became the coda after a short vowel, but not after a long one, but Wells makes a convincing case that it's a coda after either. Clusters as codas as well, and they're not ambisyllabic but simply codas, as in self-ish. The matr.ess thing comes about in an effort at parsimony of phon rules: tr behaves as an affricate, affricates become codas after stressed vowels like any other C, therefore tr is the coda. Well, a bit more sophisticated than that, but at that point I balked.

Ah, here we go: [1] It's a fun read. — kwami (talk) 08:07, 1 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So, going back to Woodstone's original post, it seems that if we're maximizing the stressed syllable then even if we interpret employer as /ɨmˈplɔjər/ with a semivowel, this system proposed by Wells would put the semivowel in the coda of the stressed syllable. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:13, 2 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Not an answer to your question, but I seem to have access to that paper, in case there is anything in it that you're wondering about (within copyright of course). Lfh (talk) 13:59, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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 /ah_f/ (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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

I agree with you, assuming of course she has the distinction. I had assumed this was due to the merger. If she makes the distinction but still says /ɛr/ then yes, IMO that's how we should transcribe it. It might be a good idea to add an inline comment to the coding ( < ! --- > ) mentioning this, so it isn't reverted later by some doofus like me who doesn't know any better.

BTW, what would you do with "Marylander (sometimes Template:Pron-en MARR-lənd-ər)"? Since /ær/ does not appear before consonants, I suppose it would have to be /ɛər/, but I hesitate to change it. — kwami (talk) 01:00, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dhavernas spoke with a General American (US west coast) accent when talking as herself in the special features on the DVD. Assuming she had an anglophone Quebec accent as a child (essentially the same as the southern Ontario accent), this would suggest she completely "lost" her native accent and intentionally acquired General American speech — a dialect which has undergone the Mary-marry-merry merger (i.e., she doesn't make the distinction any more at all, even though it's likely she did as a child). I'm still not sure I go along with your reasoning that her pronunciation matters only if she makes the distinction with other words. As for "Marylander", I've never thought about that word before; I'm inclined to use /ɛər/, but I've never had a distinction between "merry" and "Mary" in my own speech, and I'd prefer to hear opinions from people who do have a full threefold "Mary-marry-merry" distinction. Richwales (talk) 02:13, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think either approach would be fine, but that we should notify the reader which one we're using. As it is, the key specifies that the transcription is diaphonemic, so IMO an unmarked transcription should be diaphonemic. For a local pronunciation (in place names) or a personal one (in personal names), we should alert the reader that that is what we have done, and not randomly use sometimes one and sometimes the other and leave it to the perhaps puzzled reader to decipher which one it is this time. — kwami (talk) 04:40, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a phonemic transcription in French. I'm dissatisfied with the French template, because it uses brackets, making the narrower [kaRɔlɪn davɛRnɑːs] more appropriate.

As for the English, I don't see the point of using /ɛr/. Either she never makes the marry-merry distinction, or she is pretending not to. It seems unlikely that she would normally make the distinction, but not for her own name. I think it should remain /ær/.

Also, I think replacing [ær] with [ɛr] deliberately seems unlikely. "General American" is broad, and a person who uses [ær] doesn't stand out by any means. 82.124.101.170 (talk) 08:24, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Anon, do you think you could go to Wikipedia talk:IPA for French and make a case for adding the length marks? We've gotten flack for using a transcription system that is largely (but not completely) phonemic while using brackets but I don't know of very much French allophony.

Richwales, the logic goes something like this: In dialects that distinguish between /ær/ and /ɛr/, Caroline (a common name) is pronounced with the former. If Ms. Dhavernas doesn't make the distinction between the two, then her pronunciation with [ɛr] is not different from the usual pronunciation. If she does make a distinction between the two, then the pronunciation with [ɛr] is not reflective of the merry-marry merger. If it's not reflective of this merger, this would mean that any speaker who distinguishes /ær/ from /ɛr/ shouldn't pronounce her name in the usual fashion (that is, as the former) and we should transcribe it with /ɛr/.

The best thing to do to figure out if she makes that distinction is to check her pronunciation for the distinction in the same conversation that we hear her pronounce her name with [ɛr]. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:48, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

It's meant to be a minimal set, to illustrate the reduced vowels. — kwami (talk) 00:45, 14 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the variably-pronounced indefinite article a is context dependent, but a mission gives a rather clear context. Outside of a stilted reading voice that produces "ey mission", how else would it be pronounced? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:43, 14 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Having read through this page and some of the archives it seems to me that a very far reaching decision has been taken by a small number of editors.

We have a very difficult problem how to give pronunciations for a language where there are many different accents spread across many countries. At one extreme there is much commonality in English. Speakers using most English accents can usually understand one another. On the other hand no two people's pronunciation is exactly the same. Martin Hogbin (talk)

I have not seen much discussion of alternatives (although I admit I have not read all the archives). Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:43, 15 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This has been the consensus for several years. It's not just the editors who came up with the compromise in the first place (and I don't think any of us got exactly what we wanted. I know I didn't: I wanted something more phonemic), but also the many others who have used it. Since it's now found on 10,000 articles, and there have been few complaints (and those mostly from newbies who haven't read the key), I don't think anyone can say that there isn't general consensus on this convention. There is far more complaint about using the IPA in the first place than about this key.

What else would you suggest? If we choose a particular national or dictionary standard instead, then there will be accusations of cultural imperialism. (And should we use RP, because English started in England, or GA, because the US is the largest anglophone country?) If we counter this by adding the pronunciation in the national standard of every English-speaking country which has enough editors to demand that they too be represented, then the entries will quickly become unwieldy, and we'll get complaints that WP is not a dictionary. — kwami (talk) 23:19, 15 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The wrong vehicle

I support the use of IPA pronunciation in WP but, if we are going to go down the route of inventing a new general English pronunciation, I suggest IPA is the wrong vehicle. The IPA was created to represent different sounds accurately, specifically not to require interpretation. To use the IPA in a situation where readers are expected to interpret it according to their own accent is a significant diversion from it original purpose. In other words, if someone was going to try to create a system for accent-free representation of English, the IPA would not be the way to do it. Martin Hogbin (talk) 23:16, 15 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is the difference between broad and narrow transcriptions, between phonetic and phonemic (or in this case, diaphonemic). The IPA has long been used for both. /r/ is not the same thing as [r]. We also have very broad consensus that the IPA, as the international standard, is the way to go. The only exceptions are Americans whose provincial education did not prepare them for the outside world, rather like demanding that we jettison the metric system as being unworkable because they aren't familiar with it. — kwami (talk) 23:21, 15 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For a concept that our transcription hinges on, the article diaphoneme is atrociously shallow. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 03:44, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's a convenient label, but I'm not sure it's the best. "Diaphoneme" is sometimes (and I think originally) presented as something cognitively real, part of the speaker's lexicon, which is of course nonsense apart from those of us who are bi-lectal. Someone who speaks both Cockney and RP may have them cognitively unified diaphonically in their mental lexicon (or maybe not), but these RP vowel distinctions I'm transcribing here on WP have nothing to do with my own speech, and are no more real in my brain than the /r/ in "York" is for locals. So I don't think "diaphonemics" offers any kind of theoretical justification. The word is simply a label for an orthographic convenience, because the WP system isn't exactly phonemic, and calling it that as we used to could cause some confusion. The AHD system is also like this, but I've never seen a name for it. It's like the asterisked forms you see in language reconstructions: are those phones "phonemes"? "diaphonemes"? "eophonemes"? — kwami (talk) 06:37, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's something that can be researched. It may not be cognitively real, but beefing up that article and representing the work of scholars who have done in the past what we do with {{IPA-en}} are the best ways to avoid accusations of unwarranted original research. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 08:26, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the IPA is the way to go for precise transcription of sounds (as you see, I am not a linguist but I hope to learn the correct technical terms as I go) but it is ill suited to the purpose that editors here seem to have in mind. If we are going to use the IPA then why not stick to giving RP, GA, and any other accents required. Why has this practice been abandoned? What editors here are attempting to do is more that a broad transcription of IPA. I understand the objective here to be to give a transcription that represents in some way the pronunciation in more that one accent. What it actually does is give a transcription in an accent that nobody uses.Martin Hogbin (talk) 08:47, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The IPA is a code. Substituting some other code letter by letter makes no difference in content whatsoever. WP has decided to primarily use the IPA, and jettisoning that for some provincial system like AHD for zero gain in content makes no sense to me. As for why we abandoned multiple transcriptions, would you really want us to list the Australian, New Zealand, South African, Jamaican, Irish, Scottish, RP, GA, Canadian, and Southern US pronunciations of "chamois"? What's the point? Yet if you were to decide that any one of those nations was not important enough to warrant their own transcription, you'd be "oppressing" them. — kwami (talk) 10:42, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The IPA is indeed a code but it is a code with a purpose, which is to accurately represent speech. The IPA lets us represent all the multiple pronunciations of 'chamois' accurately and unambiguously. Up until this policy decision, that is exactly what it was used for on WP.

One option is to allow multiple pronunciations covering different accents, this would not be easy but that does not mean that we should not do it. WP as a medium allows solutions that are not applicable to a written encyclopedia, user settings, for example. My point concerning multiple transcriptions is not that we must do this, just that we have not considered other options seriously enough.

In the case of your example, how does the use of a special version of the IPA solve the problem? Martin Hogbin (talk) 11:26, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The IPA is designed to give accurate phonetic transcription. It is also used to represent the underlying phonemic ("broad") representation of sounds, which is slightly more abstract but is supposed to be cognitively real. The word cat, for example, ends in a glottal stop [kʰæʔ] for many speakers. However, because of the way the glottal stop patterns and because the word cats is [kʰæts] with a [t] in that same place, it is understood that the glottal stop is a contextual realization of an underlying /t/ phoneme. Our system goes one step further to represent underlying representations of multiple dialects, which isn't cognitively real but I believe has been done elsewhere. An outline of English structure by Trager and Smith (1951) might be a good start. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:33, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the book recommendation. Perhaps you could explain how the use of your scheme helps with the problem that kwami has identified above. Martin Hogbin (talk) 18:38, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly. The scheme attempts to encode the phonemic contrasts of all the relevent dialects, including those that aren't common to all. This way, one can take the transcription given and apply phonemic mergers of a particular dialect to represent said dialect. For example. The transcription /njuː ˈjɔrk/ for New York has a palatal approximant after the n. If you, like me, speak a dialect that features yod-dropping, then you know to ignore the /j/ after alveolar sounds (/s l z θ t d n/; speakers of dialects that don't feature yod-dropping make meaningful contrasts between words like loot and lute, and it's easier to ask readers to apply a merger than to undo one. At the same time, there are dialects that don't pronounce an r the syllable coda so that speakers of those dialects can ignore the /r/ in that transcription. By doing it this way, we can provide one transcription that covers all dialects.

By the way, just to clarify, I haven't read that book so I don't know how good it is. I'm just starting to do research on information related to diaphoneme and that name came up. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:56, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was actually asking how the scheme would help with the example kwami gave above, but in any case it seems crazy to me. How is the reader to know to ignore the /j/ after alveolar sounds when it is specifically shown in the IPA transcription? This requires even more knowledge from the reader than simply knowing the IPA. On the other hand, with a suitable respelling scheme, which in this case could just have 'new' for the first word (with an appropriate key of course) the variation in pronunciation between yod-droppers and non-yod-droppers would be completely intuitive and no alphabets get hurt in the process. Martin Hogbin (talk) 20:08, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, my bad. I missed the example in Kwami's poist. Chamois is not a good example because the differences in pronunciation between UK and US go beyond phonemic differences. There are a handful of such words and, in those cases, our diaphonemic transcription doesn't work. However, let's take another example. Imagine if our article reindeer began like this:

The reindeer, (Received Pronunciation [ˈreɪndɪə]; General American [ˈreɪndiːr]; Canadian English [ˈreːndir]; Australian English [ˈræɪndɪə]; New Zealand English [ˈræendɪə]), Rangifer tarandus, also known as the caribou (General American [ˈkɛrəˌbu]; Canadian English [ˈkɛrəˌbʉ]) in North America, is a deer from the Arctic and Subarctic, including both resident and migratory populations...

Under our diaphonemic system, it would look like this.

The reindeer (/ˈreɪndɪər/ Rangifer tarandus), also known as the caribou (/ˈkær[invalid input: 'ɨ']ˌbuː/) in North America, is a deer from the Arctic and Subarctic, including both resident and migratory populations...

It's simpler, easier to read, consistent, and easier to manage. This very page describes how to read the transcription. We can't expect everyone to read the key, but if anyone is confused by the transcription system, then they'll be prompted to visit here and read "understanding the key." As far as knowledge of the IPA goes, using multiple systems actually requires a more thorough knowledge of the IPA (see Kwami's post above dated February 28). — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 00:14, 17 May 2010 (UTC

Has it still never occurred to the IPA experts here that most people looking at an IP transcription are not obsessed with linguistics? Has it never occured to the IPA specialists here that the IPA uses a character set that more or less looks like the Roman alphabet? Has is never occured to the IPA 'specialists' that non linguists will probably tend to voice an IPA character in the way way they pronounce a letter from the Roman alphabet, and that they most likely will not bother to look up something in a key that is going to baffle them even more with science? How many of the IPA specialists here have actually tried teaching the IPA or better still, a foreign language? In the Wikipedia, the IPA and all its keys and explanations should try to appeal to a wider, non specialised audience, rather than the IP editors writing for themselves or for each other in order to show off their knowledge of the subject.--Kudpung (talk) 00:28, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are you saying that a reader who sees /ˈreɪndɪər/ might pronounce it as if it's spelled reindier? Do you see this as more or less likely than a nonspecialist reader seeing /ˈreɪndɪər/ and actually pronouncing the /r/ in the syllable coda despite speaking a non-rhotic dialect? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:54, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That is exactly what the reader should do. That is the whole point of the IPA. As I have already suggested, a respelling scheme based on the pronunciation of well-known English words solves this problem much better. I see on the project that you are linking IPA symbols to standard lexical sets. This is crazy and completely against the spirit of the IPA. If you really want to do this kind of thing it would be better to devise a completely new set of symbols rather than abuse the IPA in this way. Actually, the answer is much simpler. Just use the well though out lexical sets that you already have directly as the basis of a respelling scheme. You are halfway there. Martin Hogbin (talk) 09:58, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My question was directed at Kudpung, who has now said that readers of non-rhotic dialects would be prompted to pronounce a word-final r and that they would also be prompted to read IPA transcription as if it were not written in IPA at all. These seem contradictory issues to me and require different solutions. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:11, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If I were going to Dublin I would not start from here

The first thing we need to do is to consider whether we should be devising some diaphonemic (is that a real word?) transcription scheme for English. The alternative is to give multiple IPA pronunciations covering the maim English accents. There is a good case for doing this, which is that it gives the most and the best quality information to our readers, and I would suggest that there should be very wide consensus before changing this practice.

If it is considered that a diaphonemic transcription scheme would be beneficial for WP then I would suggest two things, firstly that it is used, at least initially, along side accurate regional transcriptions using the IPA.

Secondly, the natural medium for transcribing English in such a way that readers will hear the words in their own accent would be a respelling scheme based only on the Latin alphabet. All English words can be spelled using the Latin alphabet and readers already find it natural to interpret the pronunciation differently according to their individual accent. To devise such a scheme would be a significant undertaking and it would first be worth checking whether this idea has been proposed before, but if we are going to try to do this job I believe we should do it properly. The current scheme is a compromise at best and will annoy readers at both ends of the spectrum. Those not familiar with the IPA will still dislike it and many regular users of the IPA may see it as an abuse of a system that was designed to avoid ambiguity.

Sorry to pour cold water on your hard work folks but I think you need to stop and think about what exactly you are trying to achieve here and what is the best way to do that. Martin Hogbin (talk) 08:47, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You do realize that we already allow a pronunciation respelling to go alongside the IPA, right? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 08:58, 16 May 2010 (UTC

Yes, and I support that. My point is that if we are intending to develop a diaphonemic transcription scheme this should be done by using a WP diaphonemic respelling scheme rather than by mangling the IPA. The IPA should be used to give accurate and specific pronunciations only. Martin Hogbin (talk) 11:12, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Can I just repeat what you said (in support of it)?: The IPA should be used to give accurate and specific pronunciations only. --Kudpung (talk) 15:06, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What do we use for all the phonology articles, then, if we shouldn't use the IPA for phonemes? A phoneme, after all, is not specific, and generally does not correspond to actual pronunciation. — kwami (talk) 02:21, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not exactly but very closely. Here we are talking about significant and easily noticed differences. Most people can easily hear the difference between GA and RP even if they cannot explain exactly what the difference is. In your scheme you are asking readers to intentionally misread the IPA.

It is not even clear how the readers are expected to get to the correct pronunciation. Are they expected to look at the IPA representation and change it according to a set of rules and then read the new IPA spelling, or are they supposed to listen in their heads to the rather odd mid-Atlantic accent represented by the actual IPA transcription given and imagine how this would sound in their own accent? The IPA for English gives little clue on how to do this at all. Indeed, some readers may not even know how their own accent is described.

I fully understand and support the intention to give multiple pronunciations easily and conveniently but you simply have not thought this one through properly. There are several other options, including technical solutions, that you have not even considered. If you want to use a written scheme to solve the multiple accent problem then a respelling scheme based on English spelling of common and well-know words is clearly the way to do this, as people automatically render such spellings into their own accent. I am not in any way against using the IPA, but it should only be used for its proper purpose of precisely representing speech. Indeed, I still support its use for giving accurate pronunciations in specific accents, for example local pronunciation of geographic names. Using repelling may seem a backward and unscholarly step to some but it is the way that best suits the purpose we have of giving the reader a simple indication of how a given word would sound in their own accent. We can never hope to do this precisely because we can never know the exact accent of an individual reader. On the other hand each reader does know how they pronounce common English words.

My suggestion is also far less contentious in that, because WP policy already allows respelling to be used in addition to IPA we can simply devise and recommend a WP multi-accent respelling scheme that could be optionally added to articles. I can assure you that this will go down much better than (apparently) telling people from Worcester how to pronounce the name of their home town.

I may not have the perfect solution but I would ask you all to stop and think before demanding that everyone in WP follows this new policy. Martin Hogbin (talk) 09:45, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't a new policy. It isn't a policy at all, it's a guideline, but it isn't even a new guideline. It's been in place for years, and all of your arguments are the same ones that were brought up and taken into consideration when the guide was being worked out. And if you think that the only "proper purpose" of the IPA is "precisely representing speech" and "giving accurate pronunciations in specific accents" then you severely misunderstand the IPA. The IPA can be used to represent speech phonetically, but it can – and always has – also been used to represent speech broadly and phonemically and, yes, diaphonemically. You say "If you want to use a written scheme to solve the multiple accent problem then a respelling scheme based on English spelling of common and well-know[n] words is clearly the way to do this, as people automatically render such spellings into their own accent", but that simply isn't the case. A respelling scheme based on English orthography will be no easier to learn or to recognize or to convert to one's own pronunciation than the IPA is. We've tried it; we even have a pronunciation respelling key which we use alongside IPA, and it's no simpler and no more intuitive than IPA is. Both systems require learning how to match up a set of symbols to a smaller set of phonemes. And using the respelling key will certainly not solve the problem we're currently having at Talk:Worcester: non-rhotic speakers will reject WOO-stər just as much as they reject /ˈwʊstər/ and for the same reasons; and yod-dropping speakers will reject nyoo-MEK-sih-koh just as much as they reject /njuː ˈmɛksɨkoʊ/ and for the same reasons. +Angr 16:10, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If this is not a policy it certainly is being used like one. You yourself said on the Worcester page, 'Responding to the RFC: WP:IPA for English is quite clear; the transcription should be /ˈwʊstər/'. I have had a quick look through some of the talk page archives and have not yet found a proper discussion of all the possible alternatives to the current scheme. Perhaps you could direct me to this discussion.

I admit that I am not an expert in the IPA. Can you give me examples of other places where a single IPA symbol is used to represent such a wide range of sounds as we are doing here here?

The current pronunciation respelling key might be a good place to start but it is not exactly what I meant. Firstly, it does not have the stated aim of giving a pronunciation using a single transcription to represent many different accents. The key does not do this either since it has IPA values for the respelling symbols. Well-known ordinary English words are automatically transcribed into the accent of the reader, this is how reading works. In the example you give, use of the English word 'new' solves the problem completely.

I do not want to deprecate the hard work that you and others have put into this page but I strongly suggest that some kind of review is called for before you force the results (as you have been doing) onto other WP articles Martin Hogbin (talk) 17:24, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What I'm confused by, Martin, is that this page-both in the "understanding the key" section and at the top of the talk page here-address some of your concerns. Let me be explicit about this:

"In your scheme you are asking readers to intentionally misread the IPA.... it should only be used for its proper purpose of precisely representing speech. " AFAIK, the IPA has been used for diaphonemic/poly-dialectal purposes for quite some time. I gave you a historically early example. A more recent example includes Jack Windsor Lewis's A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English (1972). Examples in other languages and between similar dialects of English are even more common.— Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]}17:37, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot get immediate access to books such as those you refer to. Are there any online sources using the IPA in the way that you describe? Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:25, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, I don't know of any online availability of these resources. My local university has Lewis’s pronunciation dictionary, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to check it out. I have read a review of it on JSTOR (and a scathing one at that) that clearly states that it’s diaphonemic between AE and BE and a 2003 article by Windsor himself (in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association clearly states that the transcription system used IPA. I mentioned it as an example of the IPA being used for diaphonemic transcription. I don't know if you have access to JIPA online, but the article by Lewis is "IPA vowel symbols for British English in dictionaries" volume 33, issue 2, pages 143-152. The 1975 review was by Wolf Friederich and appeared in Foundations of Language, vol. 12, issue 3, p. 423. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 22:20, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If there is already an IPA diaphonemic transcription scheme in existence, why do we not use that here. Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:52, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's my understanding that Wikipedia editors came up with what we now call a diaphonemic transcription before anyone thought to connect it to the term diaphonemic/diaphonic. For a while, we were calling it "poly-dialectal" or "accent neutral." On top of this, it seems that editors have not (yet, anyway) researched previous diaphonic transcription systems. The one done by Lewis was criticized for reasons I'm not sure about and I don't know if he even encodes all the contrasts that we do. I'm in the process of doing research to beef up our article diaphoneme, which is why I even know this in the first place. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 01:37, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"It is not even clear how the readers are expected to get to the correct pronunciation. The IPA for English gives little clue on how to do this at all." I'm assuming you're saying it's not clear to readers, as the procedure has been explained to you here already. In "Understanding the key" (at WP:IPA for English), it says, "If, for example, you pronounce cot /ˈkɒt/ and caught /ˈkɔːt/ the same, you can simply ignore the difference between the symbols /ɒ/ and /ɔː/, just as you ignore the distinction between the written vowels o and au when pronouncing them." There are further examples in regards to a few consonants, as well as contrasts that readers may make but that we don't encode for. This is clear enough to me that it almost seems as though you haven't read "understanding the key." You don't strike me as the kind of person who would miss that sort of thing, so how could this be worded differently to be more clear to lay-readers? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]}17:37, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is not clear what process the reader is expected to go through to get the correct pronunciation. Do they: match the IPA symbols used to the lexical set in the key, then read the lexical set to get the sound, in which case the IPA serves no real purpose, any symbol set would do; or is there some other process such as those I described earlier, that they go through, in which case what? To make clearer what I mean, suppose the reader sees /ˈbɔːt/. What is the exact process that they go through to get the pronunciation in their own accent? Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:25, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I believe you understand the process asked of readers as you have described it clearly and succinctly. You are correct that any symbol set would do (as I mention below with my "/&r/ and /%r/" example below. The IPA is used for a number of reasons, including those listed at the top of this talk page. Even people who disagree with the diaphonemic transcription agree that the IPA is the best choice. For readers who are more familiar with the IPA, we also have IPA chart for English dialects. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 22:20, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I understand the process you expect now that you have made clear which of the options that proposed is the expected one. Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:52, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"some readers may not even know how their own accent is described." Yes, and this is why we use lexical sets so that people can figure out that, since they pronounce merry and marry the same, that /ær/ and /ɛr/ indicate the same pronunciation in their own speech. This requires no linguistic training nor knowledge of the IPA. If we had a pronunciation scheme where these vowel sets were /&r/ and /%r/ it would be just as clear (though, perhaps, harder to remember). Since readers know how they pronounce common English words, using lexical sets to explain these contrasts means we don't have to know the exact accent of an individual reader in our scheme. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]}17:37, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Again, it seems the IPA plays no significant part in this process. It is the lexical sets that do the work. Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:25, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"I can assure you that this will go down much better than (apparently) telling people from Worcester how to pronounce the name of their home town." Are you saying that the diaphonemic transcription gives this impression, that the IPA does this, or what?

It looks that way from the reaction at Worcester. Many people will see the IPA and assume that it represents the exact pronunciation they should use, just as I would do on seeing an IPA pronunciation in my dictionary. Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:25, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I can understand that someone might have that impression. This is why transcriptions link to here and why we want to explain clearly to such people, with as little fuss as possible, how the transcription is designed. I happen to be of the belief that, as people who become upset over something in our transcription would be likely to click the link and read “understanding the key,” we have a good setup to help people understand the way the IPA is used for transcribing English pronunciation. Is there something else we can do to make it more likely for people to get an understanding of the system we use? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 22:20, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Martin, can you tell me what dictionary you are referring to? I have never seen a dictionary that gives a precise phonetic rendering of the pronunciation of every headword, because such a dictionary could only ever cater to speakers with one narrow accent. Instead, all dictionaries I have seen, pronouncing or otherwise, have used a broad phonemic interpretation. Grover cleveland (talk) 01:48, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Collins English Dictionary gives IPA pronunciation for headwords. It refers to standard Southern English in the guide at the front. Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:29, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Right now, at Wikipedia talk:Pronunciation respelling key‎, there's a discussion going on about changes to that system. Since you've brought up a policy about a respelling scheme, I’m sure you could provide some valuable insight from there as well. For many English sounds, you are correct that people automatically render spellings into their own accent (though Angr has pointed out some flaws in this, which makes respelling also imperfect). — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]}17:37, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I will have a look in there. Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:25, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Any respelling system will run into difficulties because of homographs. I've simply deleted some that I've run across, because I could think of no way of fixing them apart from changing the system, which would merely shift the problem onto other words. The IPA has the advantage of not being confused with English orthography.

The debate at Worcester, BTW, is primarily from an editor who understands the system but is philosophically opposed to using anything but national transcriptions. — kwami (talk) 01:18, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kwami, this discussion would run much more smoothly if you and Kudpung would stop sniping at each other, and if you would stop trying to misrepresent a complicated question as a simple disagreement between two editors. The debate at Worcester has involved several editors trying to say 'this doesn't make sense', but who don't really know a whole lot about linguistics. I'm one of them - I've largely given up because the debate oscillates between 'this is really simple' and a whole load of technical jargon I don't want to untangle. I can spend my time more productively, with less frustration, elsewhere. However, I'm still watching the debate. Martin - everything you've said so far makes a lot of sense to me. I look forward to a solution coming out of this discussion. GyroMagician (talk) 07:34, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse me? That was not sniping. There was nothing malicious or disingenuous about it, simply a statement that Kudpung wants transcriptions based on national standards. AFAIK, that's a correct statement. Worcester was mentioned as an example of people being confused by the IPA conventions. However, the criticism at Worcester is almost entirely by Kudpung, and he is not confused by the system, simply opposed to it. Again, AFAIK, that's a fair statement. If you were confused by the system itself, I'm sorry, but your voice got lost in all the drama. I've found it quite difficult to understand what the point of that debate is, and no-one but Kudpung has come to me directly, so my primary impression is of him. If you are still at a loss, I'd be happy to try to explain it, to the best of my ability. — kwami (talk) 08:50, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whilst I ought to feel flattered that my name is being taken in vain (again), review of the pages and pages of various discussion on the fallibility of the system contrived exclusively for use in the Wikipedaia, will reveal that alas it is not Kudpung, sondern he is speaking for several editors and visitors to the encyclopedia who requested his intervention. I also feel that I have mentioned this, time and time again.--Kudpung (talk) 15:47, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some more thoughts

Can one of the supporters of this scheme please answer the following.

Previous diaphonemic IPA schemes

Are there any existing diaphonemic IPA English transcription schemes? If so then why do we not base our system on them, if not then we are moving the IPA into new territory. Martin Hogbin (talk) 12:39, 18 May 2010 (UTC

I was under the impression that I answered this question above. There are diaphonemic transcriptions elswewhere, the only one I know of (after a very brief search) that encodes both American and British pronunciation is A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English. The system we have now was, to the editors who constructed it, an exercise of WP:IAR; specifically WP:SYNTH to satisfy WP:NPOV concerns. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:20, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not to my knowledge. Even Wells suggests that panlectal solutions are a linguists construct and that the diphonemic approach runs into difficulties as soon as we have to deal with systemic differences between accents rather than mere differences in phonetic realisation. So it's hard to understand why the creators of the Wikipedia construct persist in maintaining that their system is a panacea. The more one reads, even as a linguist, on the IPA in this encyclopedia, the more one reaches the conclusion that the Wikipedia IPA authors are writing for themselves, (or at least for each other), rather than for the common good of the average encyclopedia visitor. This is therefore suggestive of original research i.e. 'new territory' which strictly speaking is not allowed in the Wikipedia.--Kudpung (talk) 16:17, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

With all due respect, I would suggest that the exercise in WP:IAR is really WP:OR.--Kudpung (talk) 16:38, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ƶ§œš¹, I am not terribly worried about WP policies at this stage, but if there is an existing published scheme, why did we not just use that? Martin Hogbin (talk) 16:53, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Like I said above, I don't think people knew about them. I'm just finding out about them myself.

Kudpung, Wells is not the only one who speaks about diaphonemic transcription. In the 1950s there was sharp disagreement about this very issue (whether a phonemic analysis can be applied to multiple dialects). I'm not sure if that disagreement has subsided or which way it's gone since. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:04, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ƶ§œš¹, so the position is that, at the time this project was started, we thought were taking the IPA into new territory but we have since found out that others have been there? Martin Hogbin (talk) 17:24, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If by "project" (which is a term that can also be used for Wikipedia itself) you mean the diaphonemic/poly-dialectal transcription, then that sounds about right. Woodstone's comment (below) also gives the impression that editors who designed this scheme felt they were only going a little bit further than what dictionaries already encode for. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:37, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Quite right Aeusoes, and that's why I don't think we at Wikipedia should be trying to reinvent the wheel and constructing our own solution. BTW, Wells (1982) is far more modern than the 1950s, and ASFAIK he didn't evoke any earlier arguments.--Kudpung (talk) 17:24, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think a multi dialect representation is "new territory". Applying IPA is always an abstraction of the many different ways a language is pronounced by different persons and groups. It is just a matter of how wide you draw the boundary. The variants covered by the current key are not essentially more diverse than what is done in dictionaries. Listing all individual variations is just not practical. −Woodstone (talk) 18:20, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Which dictionaries are you referring to, presumably not A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English? Martin Hogbin (talk) 18:28, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not yet familiar with more recent debate on this issue. The tables at Pronunciation respelling for English and Help:IPA conventions for English (the latter of which is incompletely done) show the contrasts made in various dictionaries compared to our own.

Does anyone know if the similarity of dictionary.com's IPA system is copied from us or not? They're remarkably similar. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:37, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It was already there in dictionary.com at the time we started using it in WP. −Woodstone (talk) 20:26, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How do you get the IPA pronunciation in dictionary.com, I can only see respelling? Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:27, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There should be clickable text that says "show IPA" in brackets next to the pronunciation. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 03:10, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And there is a question mark bringing you to the key. −Woodstone (talk) 07:29, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am not convinced that there is anything diaphonemic about the scheme used by dictionary.com, it uses the IPA with a key referring to standard lexical sets but this does not prove any intention to cover more than one accent. Collins dictionary does just the same thing but refers only to Southern English pronunciations. Martin Hogbin (talk) 18:03, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If we are to understand a "diaphonemic" system to be one that relates multiple dialects directly to a single transcription on the basis of which they may be compared and derivable into their distinctive phonological characteristics, then all dictionaries do this to some extent. If we are to take "diaphonemic" to mean that all contrasts from all dialects are represented, then not even our own system is such. We can place pronunciation schemes on a gradient between very specific to one dialect and incorporating all dialects. Help:IPA conventions for English shows that we only go a little bit further than dictionary.com and the symbols we use for each diaphoneme aren't all that different from those used at dictionary.com. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:41, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ausoes, you say that you are not terribly worried about policy at this stage. Ironically, we have been told repeatedly throughout this talk page that the contrived sytem is policy, is laid down in the MOS, and therefore cannot be changed. I think what a lot of us are asking is for som diffs to wherever such a policy was made my a consensus. Some contrubitors to this discussion have suggested that your consensus is nothing more than an unchalleneged decision by two or maybe three editors who game the system by saying that no comment means tacit consensus.--Kudpung (talk) 00:41, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung, no-one has said it can't be changed. Policies are changed all the time. But to do so you need consensus. As for "unchallenged decisions", that's practically the definition of a consensus! You need to approach this as anything else: change through convincing the community, not change because in your opinion you're right and they're wrong. — kwami (talk) 00:56, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kwami, I'll ask you yet again to discuss the topic and/or related policy, and not the editors in these pages. At the root of the problem is that some editors game the system of Wikipedia's decision-making mechanism; any clique of two editors appear to be able to write a rule, vote it among themselves, and declare it "consensus". I want to see the diffs - It appears to several editors that that is what happened with the adoption of the policy concerning the use of the IPA in Wikipedia articles and the development of its key. Morover, most of the work in this encyclopedia on the IPA is the effort of a single contributor and containsa lot of as yet, unchallenged POV and/or OR. We all hope that this current debate will be more open, that the criticisms and comments of all participants will be heard, and that the adoption of ANY new schemes will be met by a clear acceptance of a representative number of editors, authors, and encyclopedia visitors. By contrast, the recent adoption of a new BLP policy was the work of over 400 contributors and commentators - that's what I call collaboration and consensus.--Kudpung (talk) 03:48, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My god, what hypocrisy. To ask us not to discuss other editors, and then to launch immediately into discussing other editors. And of course with your usual gross misrepresentations. If you don't want it to be personal, quit making it personal. — kwami (talk) 04:10, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Minor correction: it was Martin (telling me) who wasn't concerned about policy. I believe it was in the sense that he was concerned about feasability first.

Kwami is right to point out how consensus works. You say that the current system is propped up by 2 or 3 editors who act in bad faith. I'd like you to count the editors who participated in the policy's proposal. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:37, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that link. It shows that many editors were against the system from the start. Martin Hogbin (talk) 14:31, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, many editors were opposed to it in the beginning. You may notice that Angr was one of them. You may want to ask him what changed his mind. There's another editor who was also opposed to the diaphonemic system when he first discovered it but has come around. I'll give you a hint, his name also starts with A. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:49, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lexical sets

Do you all agree that the use of standard lexical sets is the best way to enable a reader to obtain a pronunciation in the accent of their own choice?

If that is agreed then this discussion becomes one of deciding the best way to encode that information in the articles.Martin Hogbin (talk) 12:39, 18 May 2010 (UTC

One of the things we're working on implementing is {{IPAc-en}}, which encodes lexical sets in mouseovers. Thus, instead of /ʃɪər/, for shear, we have /ʃɪər/. You can then hover the cursor over the transcription to see what the characters mean. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:20, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That is a neat idea, but why bother with the IPA, why not just hover the mouse over the original text?

Do I take it then that you agree that the use of lexical sets is the best way to enable a reader to obtain a pronunciation in the accent of their own choice? Does anyone disagree? Martin Hogbin (talk)16:44, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose it's because the diaphonemic transcription came after we'd already been using IPA for so long. I do agree that lexical sets are the best way to enable a reader unfamiliar with the IPA to do this. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:04, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I do not agree. I have suggested simply showing both phonetic transcriptions where the pronunciation in AE and BE is significantly different; and dropping the idea that a final /r/ should be included when it is not pronounced. There is no reason why an average dictionary or encyclopedia user should have to learn all about linguistic jargon and the use of yet another construct to be able to get a fairly accurate idea of the pronunciation. This seems to be the approach favoured by the majority of readers who have ventured comment in this and other related discussions. However, if one wants to get really technical, we could introduce a system where the site software recognises from the IPA, the language zone, and displays the appropriate IPA transcription. --Kudpung (talk) 16:56, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ƶ§œš¹, maybe you have misunderstood my question. I was simply asking if you thought ultimate reference to a (Latin) lexical set was the best way to enable readers to get a pronunciation in their own accent. Martin Hogbin (talk) 17:20, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree that it's the best way. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:37, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So the question now becomes, 'What is the best way to direct the reader to the set of lexical sets that will define the pronunciation?'.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Martin Hogbin (talk • contribs)

Mouse-overs with lexical sets are great when they work, but aren't always practical. I have great difficulty using them with my current setup; they're basically too much of a pain to bother with. A footnote would be much easier. But the argument for abolishing the IPA strikes me as a bit like saying that since the majority of readers are unfamiliar with the metric system, we should abolish it and replace it with a comparison to standard measures. Is it too much to ask readers to be educated enough to use either the IPA or the metric system, especially when we provide them with links to a key that explains them? — kwami (talk) 23:01, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The point is that you are changing all the current IPA transcriptions to your own version of the IPA. My question was asking how readers are expected to know how to pronounce your particular version of the IPA. The answer given to me was by reference to the standard (Latin) lexical sets in the 'IPA for English' key. Do you agree with that? Martin Hogbin (talk) 23:16, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also, as far as the "r which isn't pronounced" (notice again that no-one is objecting to the h which isn't pronounced!), that will be a problem regardless. Look at the argument at Worcester: the British Library and several dictionaries would place an /r/ there. Other dictionaries would drop it, but I don't know if they claim that's phonemically accurate. So even if we transcribe Worcester in RP, should it have a final /r/? — kwami (talk) 23:01, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was not asking about any specific case. The question is, 'How does a reader know how to pronounce your IPA transcription in their own accent?'. What is your answer? Martin Hogbin (talk) 23:16, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Using the new template {{IPAc-en}}, the reader would see for example /ˌæləˈbæmə/, and by mouse-over would get an example word for every phonemic segment. Because the explanation of the symbols is based on real words (a lexical set if you like), the adaptation to the reader's dialect would be automatic. −Woodstone (talk) 07:56, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is what I already understand but I just wanted to make sure that that was kwami's understanding too. Perhaps kwami would confirm this? Martin Hogbin (talk) 08:55, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That and this key, which does the same thing. You always need definitions with a phonemic transcription. — kwami (talk) 09:34, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Technical solutions

Has anyone looked at possible technical solutions, such as a 'preferred accent' user setting so that articles would only show the IPA pronunciation in the accent of their choice? Martin Hogbin (talk) 12:39, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

According to a completely unsourced (needs PRODing BTW) article in the Wikipdia: A diaphonemic transcription... would thus cover both (and other) dialects, but exactly describe neither. Diaphonemic transcription is useful for dictionaries which are not intended for a particular dialect. In actual fact therefore, it is totally useless for the dictionary user. Most quality dictionaries are edited either for a specific language region, such as AE or BE, or, where differences in pronunciation are important, they show both. I have suggested that we show both. It wold not pose any particularly technical problems.--Kudpung (talk) 16:34, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

But it would pose problems, because by what measure do you limit it only to AE (General American?) and BE (Received Pronunciation?), and not the myriad other varieties? — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 16:53, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it would. Experience made by publishers of leading dictionaries, and isogloss research has shown that by and large, BE and GAE account for the vast majority of use worldwide, and in fairly equal proportions. I think it would be fair to assume that we at Wikipedia can go along with what the professional dictionary publishers are doing.--Kudpung (talk) 17:00, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On top of that, there is the appeal to verifiability. AE and BE are the accents most widely available in dictionaries. It's also fairly easy to encode for several other varieties once you accomodate those two. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]}

Surely we could have a table of several pronunciations but the reader would only see one according to their set preference? Martin Hogbin (talk) 17:21, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(repeat of an earlier post that got missed) I have suggested simply showing both phonetic transcriptions where the pronunciation in AE and BE is significantly different; and dropping the idea that a final /r/ should be included when it is not pronounced. There is no reason why an average dictionary or encyclopedia user should have to learn all about linguistic jargon and the use of yet another construct to be able to get a fairly accurate idea of the pronunciation. This seems to be the approach favoured by the majority of readers who have ventured comment in this and other related discussions. However, if one wants to get really technical, we could introduce a system where the site software recognises from the IPA, the language zone, and displays the appropriate IPA transcription. --Kudpung (talk) 17:29, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean when /r/ is not pronounced by speakers of AE or by speakers of BE? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:44, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that Kudpung's idea, a system whereby the appropriate IPA for the user's own dialect is shown, is an excellent one. Ideally this could be implemented through user preferences. I'll take a look at the technical possibilities, although I'm no Mediawiki technical expert. Grover cleveland (talk) 20:17, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You do realize that the vast majority of our readers are not logged-in editors and therefore have no Preferences to set? +Angr 20:42, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That could be a problem. Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:29, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Two problems I see, besides user prefs:

1. The pronunciations on WP are quite erratic. We're unlikely to get three transcriptions for each. What started off the transition was Australian editors insisting that their dialect be represented too. They used a transcription system that was nearly unintelligible to those of us only versed in RP and GA. And if we have three transcriptions for three nations, why not more? That could quickly become a real headache.
2. We can't predict whether a reader would like the local pronunciation or their own dialect. I expect that often the would want both. Although perhaps a bit extreme, someone once asked me about Montreal, and I had no idea what they were talking about, because I didn't recognize the pronunciation. I'm glad now that I know it. I would never use it, as it would sound pretentious, but I could see similar things happening with place names in other countries. So I'd want both in an entry.

— kwami (talk) 22:42, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. is not really a problem. If Australians want the Australian pronunciations to be present they (or someone else) have to add them. Similarly Cornish, Cockneys etc.
2. I would suggest giving the local pronunciation in addition to the selected one. Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:54, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Okay for #2. As for #1, how would that work, then? I don't think we'd all want to see a paragraph of the pronunciation in various dialects. If we only display one, then we can either go with user prefs (I expect the default might need to be General American), or go by IP address. I suppose then that we could have it so that readers in Australia would see the Australian IPA if that's available, the RP IPA if not, and the GA IPA if the RP is not available. They'd all have to be labeled, so for one word you'd get "Australian English pronunciation X", for another "Received Pronunciation Y", and for yet another "General American Z". Or maybe we could set it up so that the diaphonemic transcription is displayed unless the local one is available. Either way, the reader will need to learn several different IPA transcription systems rather than just one. And for all I know, English readers might still end up with an /r/ at the end of names like Worcester, depending on which dictionaries and institutions we take to be authoritative. — kwami (talk) 23:10, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

User prefs would be the way to do it. If somebody sets their prefs to Cockney and finds that the most of the pronunciations are missing that is their hard luck. They can either lump it or start adding them or change their setting to RP.

Really, my point at this stage is simply that we should be discussing other options before you force your scheme on the whole of WP. Martin Hogbin (talk) 23:29, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're a couple years too late for that. This is the established consensus. Your point can only be to change to a new consensus. Which is fine, consensus does change, but in the meantime I'm going to continue to assume the validity of our established conventions. — kwami (talk) 00:00, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are no established conventions. There is a consensus on this page by a small number of regular editors to use this system but the record shows a continuous stream of dissenting editors even on this page. There have been a number of heated discussions and edit wars on article pages. I suggest that much wider consensus is required before this scheme is forced on the whole of WP. Perhaps an RfC is called for. Martin Hogbin (talk) 09:00, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Since this transcription system is present on thousands of Wikipedia pages, and silence can be construed as a form of consensus, the consensus is not isolated to just this talk page. . Kudpung mentioned something about an RfC but I haven't seen it come about yet at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Language and linguistics. It looked like he put some work into collaborating with other editors on the proposal, too.

BTW, have you checked out the proposal and discussion of this system? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:28, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kwamikagami: the current IPA format is sufficient to derive pronunciations for RP and GenAm. AusE and NZE are largely (though not wholly) derivable from RP. So, in theory, the information is already there, if we can process and present it appropriately. Grover cleveland (talk) 00:17, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I believe you're right. And the only thing lacking for extending it to GA would be the dropped ars and aitches, which is why we decided to go with an RP representation modified only to accommodate rhotic and aspirated dialects. (Oh, and to maintain horse-hoarse, since that's easy to do from our sources.) — kwami (talk) 00:55, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Bad news. I had hoped that it would be relatively easy to write templates that, given the current IPA-en format as input, would be able to generate either RP or GA output (or both). This would mean that we wouldn't have to go back and re-edit all the current pages with pronunciation information. In Perl such a function would be easy. While it is probably not impossible here, the severe restrictions imposed on the string-processing functions currently available in Wikipedia mean that it's far harder than I had hoped :( I haven't given up, though. Grover cleveland (talk) 00:06, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I've looked into doing this kind of thing before, and gave up. But then, you probably know what you're doing better than I. — kwami (talk) 00:19, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

After much blood, sweat and tears, I've come up with a proof of concept: see below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grover cleveland (talk • contribs)

There is one solution that would work even for non registered visitors. It's a standard procedure in web design. from the visitors IP (Internet protocol number), the area where he is connecting to the INternet would be identified, and the appropriate IPAwould be shown by his browser. Not difficult at all really. I'ts a compromise, because a few (probably not Americans) would be on the move and accessing the WP from different countries. --Kudpung (talk) 16:56, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, could you try not thinking in stereotypes? What makes you think it would be "probably not Americans" who would be accessing the Internet from different countries? For that matter, what makes you think that everyone accessing the Internet from a U.S. IP address wants GenAm pronunciations and everyone accessing the Internet from a UK IP address wants RP pronunciations? And what about people in non-English speaking countries? +Angr 17:39, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Angr, In the interets of keeping this discussion on--Kudpung (talk) 23:58, 19 May 2010 (UTC) topic, I'll answer this in detail on your talk page.[reply]

Can I just jump in here from the ancient history of this discussion? I think that an ideal solution would be to stick with the current convention, but have some kind of "pop-up" when you click on the pronunciation that offers options for displaying it in different dialects. This would all have to be done with JavaScript, but it is definitely technically feasible with the current technology. I will try to prepare a prototype/demonstration of my concept to better explain it. nohat (talk) 17:48, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do you know whether Wikipedia allows a solution like this to be implemented? Grover cleveland (talk) 14:44, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So why the IPA?

It is clear that the ultimate arbiters in the current pronunciation scheme are the standard lexical sets used in the key. This the IPA symbols serve only the purpose of encoding the sounds described by the lexical sets in the key. So why use the IPA. It might be argued that using the IPA gives s rough (but contentions) guide to the pronunciation without using the key but those who are familiar to some degree with the IPA, as it is used in UK dictionaries for example, expect it to be purely phonetic and thus find its diaphonemic use confusing. On the other hand, those who are mot familiar with the IPA will just see it as gibberish. So why use the IPA?

Oddly enough, the US dictionary symbols might be better. They were never very precise, they are familiar to Americans and they, or something similar, have been used in UK dictionaries in the past. Is there a key to the symbols anywhere?Martin Hogbin (talk) 18:18, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Please read "The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?" at the very top of this page. +Angr 18:25, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps you should read it, then read my question again. Martin Hogbin (talk) 19:35, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

AFAIK, non-IPA symbols haven't been used in the UK dictionaries for decades. For those in the UK familiar with the IPA, the scheme we have here is very similar to what they're already used to (the Gimson system). The most significant difference is that we also encode for /r/ in the syllable coda, which might trip them up a bit, but once they understand the key, it's not difficult for them to ignore the coda /r/'s at the ends of words and before consonants. They do it all the time when reading English orthography anyway, right? Help:IPA conventions for English and Pronunciation respelling for English if you're curious about the symbols used by various dictionaries. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:51, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am still hoping that someone will explain to me what the advantage is of the IPA when we are just using it as a code to link to the lexical sets. As has already been pointed out, we could just use numbers. Why the IPA? Martin Hogbin (talk) 19:37, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• The IPA already exists, and is an international standard for representing the pronunciations of words. Lexical sets, on the other hand, are not a feasible way to represent the pronunciation of words. nohat (talk) 20:06, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The IPA is an international standard for phonetic transcription (the clue is in the name) that may well have been extended to phonemic transcription in some cases but there is very little, if any, evidence of usage for diaphonemic trancription. The only claimed online example of diaphonemic use of the IPA (dictionary.com) turned out to show no evidence of diaphonemic intent whatsoever. I am completely unconvinced that the IPA was ever intended or has ever been used for this purpose.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Martin Hogbin (talk • contribs)

The IPA has been used for all kinds of linguistic transcription—phonetic, phonemic, morpho-phonetic, diaphonemic, etc.—for as long as the concept for that kind of transcription has existed. No other alphabet has been used in such a widespread way for such a wide variety of transcription types. nohat (talk) 21:29, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Exhaustive searches don't end with the internet. I've given you a couple of bound examples and, if you'd like, I can provide more examples of diaphonemic sytems of English or other languages. I also disagree that dictionary.com isn't diaphonemic. Have you seen the table at Help:IPA conventions for English? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 23:39, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I have seen that, and I do not cliam that the problem is easy but I still dispute that the IPA is the right character set to use. Clearly the IPA was originally developed to be strictly phonetic. Why else would diphthongs (usually) be represented by a pair of symbols. I would expect a scheme desigend to be phonemic to use one symbol per phoneme. A diaphonemic scheme should try to encompass problems with variations in rhoticity. The IPA is not good at this either. Martin Hogbin (talk) 11:07, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Your logic breaks down very quickly when you consider how many different kinds of diphthongs (and affricates) there are; creating symbols for every possible diphthong would be much too cumbersome and would require a constantly evolving repertoire of symbols as linguists discovered new ones. It's the same with affricates, such as [tʃ], which are represented with two characters for the same reason. In a number of cases, whether affricates and diphthongs are phonemic is also dependant on one's analysis. Spanish, for example, has many diphthongs; are they phonemes on their own or are they instances of vowels running together? Chinese, which also has triphthongs, has a similar but more complicated situation. The affricates of Catalan are arguably phonemic, but not according to everybody who studies the language.

If your argument is that the IPA shouldn't be used for anything but phonetic transcription, then there is a lot of linguistic literature that exists in defiance of this, including the Handbook of the IPA and your position would be one of WP:OR purism. But you may be confused as to the difference between phone and phoneme, in which case I recommend you take a look at those two articles. The IPA can, and dictionaries do, present phonemic transcription. While as clear a case hasn't been made that diaphonemic transcription is widespread, you simply can't question that the IPA is used for phonemic transcription if you're going to be taken seriously. As for diaphonemic transcription, I haven't taken a look at Trager and Smith's book, but you might want to take a look at it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:45, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• It's an internationally recognized alphabet used for pronunciation and the transcription is very similar to ones many readers are already familiar with. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:09, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is indeed an internationally recognised alphabet used for pronunciation. That is the problem. You are using it simply as a coding mechanism for standard lexical sets. Readers such as myself and many others from the UK who are familiar with use of the IPA for phonetic transcription find its use for diaphonemic trancription confusing and annoying. This is exactly what has happened at Worcester. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Martin Hogbin (talk • contribs)

Yes, that's what any transcription system would be. Including a less diaphonemic transcription system. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 23:39, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Martin: I don't know whether this is still an active dispute. But take a look at the authoritative manual on the IPA: the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. The very first example of its use includes a set of "Conventions" (Google Books link) which includes statements such as [t] is a voiced flap, resembling [ɾ]. This shows that the paradigmatic definitions of the IPA symbols are subject to reinterpretation in any particular usage. Grover cleveland (talk) 15:01, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Because for most people outside the US who know how to use a dictionary, the IPA is all they need. And if you understand the IPA, it's much quicker than lexical sets. — kwami (talk) 20:13, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is completely incorrect if you are using the IPA for diaphonemic transcription. You have all agreed that the final arbiter of sound in your scheme is the standard lexical set. The normal values of the IPA symbols are irrelevant as they are to be overridden by the users own pronunciation of the lexical set shown on the key. This may be substantially different from the pronunciation actually indicated by the IPA. Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:10, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, which contains the official specifications for the IPA in front of me, but if my memory serves me correctly, it specifically says that there is a long history of the use of the IPA to represent phonemes and other linguistic entities that don't exactly match the official definitions of the symbols, and that that is a perfectly legitimate, reasonable, and acceptable use of the IPA. Not to mention practical and historically sound. nohat (talk) 21:34, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Martin: consider an example. Most dictionaries that use IPA (including ones aimed at Englishmen) would represent the word "bill" as something like /bɪl/. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of residents of Southern England today, and very probably the majority of overall residents of the UK, have no phonetic consonant corresponding to /l/: their pronunciation is phonetically something like [bɪʊ] or [bɪo]. This shows that dictionaries tend to use a phonemic, not a phonetic, transcription, where in this instance /l/ in syllable coda is vocalized by rule. Grover cleveland (talk) 23:28, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, dictionaries use phonetic pronunciation is a specified accent. Martin Hogbin (talk) 15:39, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, they don't. It's widely understood that dictionaries use phonemic pronunciations in a specified accent. This is why those that use IPA present it in /slashes/. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:57, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Martin, you asked whether lexical sets were the "best way to enable readers to get a pronunciation in their own accent" not whether they were "arbiters" (a term I'm confused by in this context). The lexical sets are a tool in teaching the system. The transcription is based largely on transcriptions already available in dictionaries like that at dictionary.com, as well as some others. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 23:50, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I just want to say to Martin Hogbin that I think the general thrust of this section—that use of the IPA to represent linguistic transcriptions that are not purely phonetic is somehow not appropriate—is really not a supportable claim. I recommend you try a different tack in this debate. nohat (talk) 21:37, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I hope you can excuse my being a little sceptical about the use of the IPA for diaphonemic transcription. From what is written here I might assume that diaphonemic usage is commonplace and would therefore expect there to be many online examples of such it, yet no one has yet directed me to a clearly diaphonemic use of the IPA. Perhaps you could help. Martin Hogbin (talk) 15:12, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Martin, you deny that dictionary.com encodes a diaphonemic transcription. If it doesn't do this, then what accent would you say it encodes? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:57, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I would not put as strongly as 'deny' but there is no convincing evidence that the IPA on ditioary.com is intended to be used diaphonemically. They may just have chosen a mid-atlantic accent. In fact, I have found a site that uses the IPA diaphonemically but I still cannot accept that such use is widespread or even beneficial. To exixting users of the IPA it is confusing. Martin Hogbin (talk) 10:57, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dictionary.com marks a distinction between the vowels of moral, horse, and hoarse, as well as between word pairs like dew/do and which/witch. AFAIK, no accent does all of that. Certainly no commonly known one. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:45, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Let's be fair first of all and admit, without thinking in stereotypes, that the needs of Americans, British, and foreign learners for a pronunciation guide are not identical. This is however not a reason to assume that the IPA is not widely used outside the US, and thus not wanted in the Wikipedia, or should be substituted by yet another contrived scheme. It is possible the majority of average American people might not have as much high frequency first-hand exposure to numerous foreign languages as, say, the Brits, the Europeans, and the Asians, where their regions are made up of clusters of small countries each with their own language and culture. In Europe for example, nobody lives more than two or three automobile hours away from another country.

As to the use of the IPA, remove the few linguists from the scene, and we will see that the vast majority of users of the IPA are language learners - and that does not make them linguists per se. Until now we have been discussing how dictionaries use the IPA , but we have not mentioned the use of the IPA in the hundreds of different language textbooks that are in use by millions of students worldwide. A look at some of them, will reveal whether the IPA use is phonetic or phonemic.

We should decide whether the focus of this discussion is a purely academic argument between linguists, or whether we are genuinely striving towards a solution that will appeal to the majority visitors to the encyclopedia, who are most probably not linguists, and taking due note of what the non linguists here in this discussion are saying.--Kudpung (talk) 00:27, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with what you have said here, Kudpung. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:30, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the sentiment. I don't know about the vast majority of English speakers outside the US being language learners. I would think most are familiar with how their dictionary works. But I think it would be a fair statement of Americans. — kwami (talk) 07:30, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung's is an excellent comment. I think all of you are trying to produce a system that is useful for non-linguists. The problem is that you are linguists, so it's hard to remember what the rest of us don't know! As a non-linguist and reluctant language-learner, I have a vague knowledge of the IPA from using a dictionary, but mainly from attempts to learn other languages (or at least a few phrases). I'd guess I'm pretty common in this - i.e. as Kudpung says, "the vast majority of users of the IPA are language learners". However, I think the problem of describing words in an unknown language is different to describing unknown words in a known language - as Kwami has repeatedly pointed out, if you say an English word to me, I'll quickly repeat it adjusted to my own accent. If you tell me a word in Polish, I'll try my best to repeat the sounds I think you made. I guess this is the crux of your phonetic/phonemic discussion? GyroMagician (talk) 11:30, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that anyone who has used IPA when learning a language, remains an IPA user for life. Therefore the learners are not the majority of users. Just as native speakers, the people using a secondary language, will occasionally meet new words, for which pronunciation cannot be easily predicted from spelling. It is for those cases that in this English enclopedia, an English phonemic pronunciation is needed. Readers will usually not be interested in dialectical differences, except where they break regular patterns (like in tomato). −Woodstone (talk) 13:58, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Kwami, I don't know whether my experience is atypical, but I will share it anyway. I grew up in the UK, where I learned several foreign languages in {secondary/high} school. I also did a lot of fairly advanced classical choral singing in multiple foreign languages. In all that time I never once heard the acronym "IPA", let alone learned or used it. I later moved to the USA and almost immediately was confronted with widespread use of IPA in classical singing in non-English languages. It was also forced to learn it to take an acting class that I signed up for. So, based on my personal experience, IPA is much more widely used in the USA (at least in singing and possibly acting) than in the UK. Of course that is just one person's anecdotal evidence, but it does lead me to question whether the USA is really so relatively benighted when it comes to knowledge of IPA. Is there any real evidence on this front, or is it possible that you have been burned by a few confrontations with some US-based Wikipedians? And is there any evidence that a different system would both be as accurate as IPA, and be so widely accepted? Given the number of articles with IPA-en transciptions, I am not surprised that the system generates queries. Grover cleveland (talk) 14:30, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Grover, you seem to be completely missing the point here. The term 'accurate' has no meaning when applied to the IPA used diaphonemically. With the system set up as it is now, we could replace the IPA symbols with numbers and it would be just as accurate. Martin Hogbin (talk) 15:19, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Martin, with respect you are the one missing the point. Your criticize the current Wikipedia convention for IPA in English by saying that "[w]ith the system set up as it is now, we could replace the IPA symbols with numbers and it would be just as accurate". To the extent that this critique is valid, it also applies to 99% of uses of IPA in published literature, to all uses of IPA in dictionaries, and to all uses of the IPA given as examples in the chapters of the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association dedicated to separate languages, in fact to all uses of the IPA except those known as "impressionistic" transcriptions. Please read the brief section entitled "Broad and narrow transcriptions" from the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. You can find it on Google Books right here. In particular, note the paragraph beginning Any transcription is connected to a speech event by a set of conventions. For an example of such conventions in use, see this section from the same Handbook. Cheers. Grover cleveland (talk) 17:06, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Martin, your objection is not coherent. The IPA is just a set of symbols. Each symbol even has an official number associated with it. The symbols also have nominal phonetic denotations, but it is understood that no use of the IPA is an exact mapping from the symbols to the nominal phonetic denotations. The nominal denotations are just a guide to help you select the symbol that is best suited for the transcription task at hand. That is, you should probably use /i/ to transcribe a high front unrounded vowel and not a voiceless velar fricative. In the case of dictionary transcriptions, they're all what we're calling here "diaphonemic", meaning that the symbols are used to designate sounds that may be different from dialect to dialect. That is why all dictionaries have phonetic transcription keys showing example words for each sound in their transcription system. But which symbols are picked is ultimately arbitrary. You have to be arbitrary if you're picking symbols that represent more than one sound. This is already the case when picking symbols for even a single dialect because as a phonemic transcription system you have to pick one phonetic representation for each phoneme, which could have multiple phonetic realizations. For example, the /l/ phoneme is usually transcribed as /l/ even though it is often produced as [ɫ] or [o] in some positions. So whether the system is phonemic or diaphonemic, sometimes the nominal phonetic denotation for symbol used does not match the actual phonetics of the sound it represents. No matter what IPA transcription scheme is used, this will always be true, so the fact that it is true of the scheme we are using now is not a valid indictment of that system. nohat (talk) 17:55, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So, in conclusion, we use IPA because it is the international standard for phonetic transcriptions, whether those transcriptions be narrow impressionistic transcriptions or broad (dia)phonemic ones. The IPA is used for all kinds of phonetic transcriptions, regardless of the level of abstraction they represent. There is no point at which one says "this is too abstract a level of phonetic transcription for IPA", and even if there were there is no other system to use. nohat (talk) 18:00, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That is your opinion and it is presumably the opinion of those who developed the current scheme but there are many editors who disagree with you. I have still seen no convincing evidence that IPA has be used for diphonemic transcription anywhere outside this project. Martin Hogbin (talk) 07:53, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A concise pronouncing dictionary of British and American English (1972). This is the third time I've referred this book to you. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:45, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I did notice the first two times and I will take your word for it that it is indeed diaphonemic but if (wide) diaphonemic use of the IPA is common then I am surprised that there are not more online examples. Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:51, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

All dictionary uses of IPA are diaphonemic. The only difference is which dialects are included in the diaphonemes. nohat (talk) 18:44, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you are absolutely right. The question is, how wide a range if dialects can be described with one diaphonemic set of symbols? Would you agree that it is possible to have too wide a range of dialects to be represented by one set of IPA symbols? Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:51, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A helpful term here might be "core inventory" (or "common core"), which refers to the phonemic contrasts shared by all the dialects represented. When a diaphonemic transcription represents dialects that share all phonemic contrasts, there's very little doubt (especially by dictionary publishers) that it's feasable. When you start getting contrasts that only some of the dialects represented make, it becomes more contentious. I don't think the answer to the line you draw on what's feasabile and what isn't is something that can be said objectively, but a search within the literature might be illuminating in this regard. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 23:01, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think as long as several dialects are said to belong to the same language, I think it should be reasonable to expect that a common broad transcription should be possible. And even beyond that, closely related languages can have a common representative phoneme set. −Woodstone (talk) 12:36, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think the point at which it becomes unreasonable to make a diaphonemic representation is not at a certain range or breadth of dialects, but rather at a place such as when you start to contemplate making a 4-way diaphonemic contrast between the vowels of spa/pat/bath/pasta ( BrE–AmE /ɑ–ɑ/ /æ–æ/ /ɑ–æ/ /æ–ɑ/), and use a different symbol for all four. However, that's just where I draw the line, and I have certainly seen proposed diaphonemic representations that encode exactly this 4-way contrast. Probably the person who made that proposal would draw the line at a /ɛf–juː/ diaphoneme for lieutenant. The point is that the line at which diaphonemic systems are unreasonable is when you are loading your diaphonemic inventory so much that it is encoding not just phonetic differences but also lexical ones. This is where I think the diaphonemic principle becomes unreasonable. The existing system used on Wikipedia, however, is well to the reasonable side of this line. nohat (talk) 17:38, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am not talking about the point where the phonemically principle becomes unreasonable, I am talking about the point where it becomes unreasonable to use the IPA for diaphonemic transcription. The point is that the IPA symbols already have relatively fixed phonetic values. If the IPA is used for wide diaphonemic transcription we reach a point where, for some accents, the pronunciation represented by the standard phonetic interpretation of the IPA is very different from the diaphonemic interpretation. Martin Hogbin (talk) 19:03, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

They only have relatively fixed values when used phonetically. When used phonemically, they're quite loose. For example, in the IPA handbook itself they have /c/ for [tʃ]. Loads of texts use /r/ for English [ɹ], and /o/ for anything from [ɔː] to [əʊ]. Spanish /β ð ɣ/ are used for [b d g]. In conventional RP, /r/ is even used for silence. That's inherent to phonemic description, but also a long long tradition of the IPA itself. — kwami (talk) 19:30, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

—Digression Alert— Do Spanish-ists really use /β ð ɣ/ for [b d g], or do you mean that the other way around? Lately, I've noticed that /β ð ɣ/ would make more sense, since they're only stops in very limited circumstances, but I still thought the norm would be /b d g/.

I've seen it both ways. Then general tendency is to use ASCII letters for phonemes wherever possible, and that sometimes overrides the 'elsewhere' principle. Usually does in this case. — kwami (talk) 19:50, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And was there ever a serious discussion of using /oː/ and /eː/ for what we currently have as /oʊ/ and /eɪ/? Many texts do transcribe them that way. — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 19:42, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That was years ago, but they were at least on the list of options we chose from. I think people wanted to stick w s.t. that made it clear these were diphthongs, so readers wouldn't mistakenly think IPA [e] and [o], when used for other languages, were close to English /e:/ and /o:/. — kwami (talk) 19:54, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I will have a look at the IPA handbook. Martin Hogbin (talk) 19:34, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

AFAIR, /c/ was used that way for Hindi. But it's not uncommon with other languages. — kwami (talk) 19:50, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Here's an sample of what the template does: given only the IPA-en format as input it now generates both RP and GenAm output. For example:

Template:Ipa-en-test

The idea here is that perhaps we could get out of the diaphonemic squabble by generating both RP and GenAm output from the current diaphonemic input. The end result would be similar to a pronouncing dictionary like Wells's LPD. Many more examples on the link given above. Please -- any comments, positive or negative, will be welcomed! Demo is at User:Grover cleveland/IPATest. Cheers. Grover cleveland (talk) 06:09, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I had a look and indeed it's intolerably slow. But aside from that, it shows that in many cases there is no difference. This should at least be filtered out to avoid duplicate transcription. In most other cases it takes a while to actually notice the difference. In all, I think the added value would be nil or negligible and create additional clutter. −Woodstone (talk) 08:25, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If Kudpung et al's RfC comes about, this might be mentioned so that the community can discuss this as a feasable possibility. I suspect that most users wouldn't even care about the difference but the only way to really know is for an RfC, right? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:05, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Woodstone: thanks very much for your input. Here are responses to some of the issues you raise:

• Slowness yes it is indeed very slow at the moment, but I can work on fixing this. I have already had some ideas on how to improve the speed. Working with string manipulation using the tools Wikimedia makes available is definitely challenging -- rather like climbing a tree with one hand tied behind your back :) But I have had very little experience in working with these tools until now and I have already had some ideas on how to make things considerably faster.
• Duplicates: definitely they can be filtered out. That will be easy (but see the next item).
• Clutter: As some have discussed above, it might be possible to use user preferences to show only the accent (RP or GA) that the user selects in their user preferences.. If the user doesn't select a preference, or for IP users, we could either default to showing the current IPA-en format, or show both RP or GA, or do something else (not sure what right now).
• Potential: If I get skilful enough in the templates, I have dreams of allowing the user to select respelling format instead of RP or GA, which should theoretically be able to be generated from the current input. Because of the difficulty of working with the Wikipedia String tools, however, I am not sure how practical this will be.
• Motivation: While I am personally very happy with the current diaphonemic IPA transcription format, and I commend everyone who has worked on developing it, it is evident that some users are not so happy. The idea behind this little project is to allow users to see whatever format they prefer, while also allowing editors to continue to add pronunciations in the diaphonemic format. There are also some (don't know how many) users who object that the current format constitutes Original Research. Without taking any position on the merits of this objection, I think that it would be good to allow such users to choose to see either RP or GA (or both) formats, so that this objection would then presumably go away.

Cheers. Grover cleveland (talk) 19:00, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Grover. I appreciate your attempts and realised the speed might be improved. But a while ago a similar debate raged about UK/US/International date formats. There it became clear that the vast majority of readers is not logged in, and so cannot have preferences. Guessing their preference is fraught with difficulties. Even if you might be able to guess their location, that does not imply a preference, especially outside places where English is the native language. So the only option would be to show both (all?) dialects or just the diaphonemic form. So either there would be (a lot of) clutter or no progress. The same effect crushes your dream of automated "other" representations. −Woodstone (talk) 20:30, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. Anyway, I have now changed the template so that the template converts to RP format only if the user has set "en-GB" as his/her "Internationalisation/language" user preference: otherwise it leaves it in diaphonemic format. Unfortunately Wikipedia does not provide a specific "en-US" language setting, which otherwise might have been appropriate to use for GenAm.

I appreciate your point about most users not being logged in. However, I suspect most of those who raise a ruckus about the current scheme are logged in users. Wouldn't it be useful if, when a non-rhotic user starts complaining about the IPA format being "American" or whatever, we could reply to him/her: "Just set your user preference to en-GB and you'll see everything in RP?" Grover cleveland (talk) 21:10, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Same reasoning goes as for the date debate. Implementing this template for logged-in users, would hide to them what ordinary readers would see. However, entering pronunciations correctly is most likely dependent on logged-in users, which would be hampered if they do not see the same thing as most readers. −Woodstone (talk) 21:51, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This idea seems worthy of further investigation to me. Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:53, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Kwami -- does this comment belong in another section? Grover cleveland (talk) 01:20, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A method of automatically displaying the possibly most appropriate transcription system for non logged in users, would be regional IP identification. This has been mentioned before but appeared to receive little or no comment. It would seem to be the technically easiest solution to implement. One would assume that this being an encyclopedia, the majority of visitors are looking for information and not seeking to become Wikipedia editors. Thus a probable majority of visitors have no intention of ever registering and logging in. --Kudpung (talk) 00:09, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It did receive a comment from Angr, which I hereby echo. It seems extremely crude to attempt to deduce someone's pronunciation from his or her IP address. In addition, I disagree with the claim that this would be "the technically easiest solution to implement". We would almost certainly need help from members of the Wikipedia developer team to make it possible, and their time is extremely scarce. Consider that even getting access to the "internationalisation/language" setting, a comparatively easy task, was only feasible because of a hack that a template expert told me about. Grover cleveland (talk) 01:20, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Deducing an Internet user's location from his IP is a common feature of web design. It's used all the time.--Kudpung (talk) 02:44, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think they're arguing its feasability, just its appropriateness. What are some of the things websites do with this sort of deduction? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:55, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are two kinds of feasibility:

• If we had full access to the Wikipedia source code and configuration then, I agree, IP deduction would be trivial. However we do not have such access, so we would have to request help from the Wikipedia development team, which as I mentioned above, is extremely busy, and additionally might not be inclined to give us this kind of access. (I am certain they would not allow us to get IP information for logged-in users, because only CheckUsers are allowed that power).
• Assuming that we do not have help from the Wikipedia development team, then I do not think that Kudpung's suggestion is feasible. I admit that I have not investigated this extensively, but I base this on the fact that even getting a user's preference in a template is not, in general, possible.

I should also reiterate what I said above, which is that I don't think that this use of IP addresses would be appropriate, even if it were feasible. Grover cleveland (talk) 05:34, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Using IP to identify an Internet user's location is an extremely easy and common technical process. Wikipedia does it all the time, that's how we know the IP numbers of unregistered editors. It is clear however, that if one has have never used the Internet from outside one's native USA, one will never have noticed how website content changes according to one's location. Google, for example, automatically renders its page in the language of the country one is surfing from, while online shops, such as the Apple appshop, display the currency of the country one is in. One may also see notifications such as 'The service you have requested is not available in your region;', or 'This software is not available for download in your region;', or 'Please wait while we transfer you to our web page for your region.'

Wikipedia is more than a bunch of people creating artticles and arguing about policy. Whatever solution is eventually adopted it will have site-wide implications, thus it might probably not appropriate to suggest that Wikipedia's web development team cannot/will not have time. In fact it's precisely what they do. They do as they are told based on consensus and feedback.--Kudpung (talk) 00:36, 29 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have a suspicion that part of the confusion that some users may have with our key is the way we explain it to them in the text that appears below "understanding the key." I understand it perfectly fine, but I'm a linguist and so I don't even perceive some of the conceptual hurdles that the average reader will encounter. As Kudpung has said, we can also expect speakers from different areas to have different needs; this includes how we go about explaining the system. Speakers from areas that commonly use the IPA, for example, are likely to be unfamiliar with the diaphonemic approach. Speakers from the US are more likely to be confused by the IPA itself, etc. How might we frame it better for our readers? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:55, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The first sentence may sound a bit less scary if we change it from

The pronunciation of English words in Wikipedia is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using the following diaphonic transcription, which is not specific to any one dialect.

to

The pronunciation of English words in Wikipedia is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using the following transcription, which is not specific to any one dialect.

When people find themselves at a page on John Donne, for example, they are usually interested in learning about John Donne. People who find themselves at Wikipedia:IPA for English page, however, are usually not interested in WP's IPA for English scheme, so a minimum of unfamiliar terms is best. I would also make the "Understanding the key" box hidden by default -- it looks less daunting to have only two sentences before the key instead of a dozen. --Atemperman (talk) 18:04, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I like your point about avoiding jargon. As to changing the default of the box, we agreed (above) that we should have it defaulted at unhidden, otherwise people may miss it, which (IMHO) is worse than being intimidated by blocks of text. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:28, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I had originally had it hidden, but then people went straight to the table and said "I don't have an ar in that name!"

Perhaps we could collapse the box and add a line suggesting that people read it if they haven't been here before? — kwami (talk) 18:30, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think something to consider is that the other IPA for X keys are pretty straightforward and not nearly as abstract as this one. The large box of text gives a subtle indicator that something is different here. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:40, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]