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The postvocalic ⟨r⟩ in our transcriptions makes them look a lot more American than British, especially given the fact that we use ⟨ɛ⟩ and ⟨oʊ⟩ instead of ⟨e⟩ and ⟨əʊ⟩. We may as well go one step further and get rid of the length marks, per American dictionaries. The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English also doesn't use the length marks for AmE (though it does for BrE).

In the US, /ɒ/ becomes a free vowel regardless of what it merges with. In New England, it merges with the free /ɔː/ whereas in the rest of the US (with very small exceptions) it merges with /ɑː/. In neither case does it remain a British-style checked vowel like /ɪ ʊ ɛ ʌ/.

We suggest that /i u/ (which aren't even phonemes) contrast with /iː uː/, whereas /ɛr ɛər/ and /ər ɜːr/ aren't even transcribed with the same symbols, even though it's precisely those pairs that participate in phonemic length contrasts in many (non-rhotic) varieties of English. Also, /æ/ is frequently as long as the free vowels before voiced consonants, at least in General British English. By that logic you may as well write it with ⟨æː⟩.

The vast majority of native speakers of English are HAPPY-tensers, so a separate ⟨i⟩ symbol is anything but useful for them and using it makes the slashes around our transcriptions even more confusing than they are. I know, HAPPY-tensing is variable in Scotland - but don't they have two or three separate NURSE vowels and a contrastive FORCE vowel? They do. So we can't say that we cover Scottish English here, because we don't. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 08:08, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We have discussed this three years ago, see Help talk:IPA/English/Archive 20#Should we stop distinguishing /i, u/ from /iː, uː/ and/or stop transcribing "length"? My opinion has not changed. I still oppose dropping the length symbols.

The point of our transcription system is not satisfying our preferred phonemic analysis, but matching reader’s expectations. In dictionaries that use IPA transcriptions, the use of length marks appears to be more common. I do not think this has changed in the past three years. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 10:50, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@J. 'mach' wust: Phonemic analyses aren't that important here (though of course, HAPPY mostly belongs to the /iː/ phoneme). Anyway, I think that I've come up with enough fresh arguments in favor of dropping the length mark to make my proposal not look like just a repeat of what I said in the past (I am saying that - I'm not saying that you're accusing me of that). Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 11:24, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What on earth is the point of making it look more like "American dictionaries" when most of them don't even use IPA so the only situations where most non-linguists encounter it are non-American/EFL dictionaries, most of which use quantitative–qualitative notations, anyway? Get out of your ivory tower and think of the practical impact. Nardog (talk) 12:34, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Nardog: Sorry, I got "descriptions of AmE" and "American dictionaries" confused in my head when I was writing the post. I guess I should've slept longer. I also believe that omitting the length marks usually coincides with using ⟨e o⟩ for FACE and GOAT, and that's something I forgot about. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 15:46, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You're missing my point (and Mach's). I'm asking what practical benefit your suggestion would bring. Nardog (talk) 22:54, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Nardog: We'd show a close relation between /ɒ/, /ɑː/ and /ɔː/ in AmE. /ɒ/ becomes a free vowel like /ɑː/ and /ɔː/ in all regions (save for New York, where it can be distinct). I don't believe that ⟨ɒ⟩ and ⟨ɑ⟩ are too similar to drop the length marks. If they were, Jack Windsor Lewis would surely know that and retain the length marks in his blogposts.

We'd show a close relation (actually, *no difference*) between /ər/ and /ɜːr/ and AmE. Again, I don't believe that ⟨ɜ⟩ is too similar to ⟨ɛ⟩.

We'd show that HAPPY is unambiguously FLEECE in the HAPPY-tensing accents, which is the majority. This also means that readers who wish to use American dictionaries would simply write ⟨i⟩ in all positions. I mean, if we don't differentiate [ɪ] from [ɨ] we may as well drop the distinction between [ɪi] and [i] (which many speakers don't have anyway, or it's variable). It's overkill anyway, for a system like ours (like the ⟨u⟩-⟨uː⟩ distinction - or indeed, like flapping in LPD and CEPD (not an overkill in itself but *here*), which we don't show). Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 07:49, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unless you have empirical evidence to back those claims up you're wasting everyone's time. Nardog (talk) 08:22, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Nardog: Which claims specifically? At least a half of what I said falls under WP:CAPTAINOBVIOUS. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 08:33, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

First, we're not including the length mark to show which vowels are checked and which ones are free or because some letters look too similar. Gimson introduced the quantitative–qualitative system as a compromise between the two camps, and (most likely precisely because of its being a compromise) it has since gained wide acceptance. We're including it because it's widely used.

Second, you have yet to demonstrate why removing the length mark would "show a close relation between /ɒ/, /ɑː/ and /ɔː/". ⟨ɒ, ɑ, ɔ⟩ look different anyway, so the fact someone with the father–bother and/or cot–caught merger has to learn the value of each symbol in order to know that some of them might represent the same thing in their accent wouldn't change at all. Same with NURSE: ⟨ɜr⟩ suggests no more similarity to /ər/ than ⟨ɜːr⟩ does.

Third, and above all, let's say you did demonstrate with empirical evidence doing away with the length mark would indeed have said effects, then you would still have yet to demonstrate why those effects are significant enough to justify throwing away the current system, which largely mirrors the only IPA notation for English non-linguists are used to seeing. Nardog (talk) 09:10, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree with Nardog’s reservations. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 10:46, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In most of the United States, /ɒr/ is merged with /ɔːr/. In some parts of the Southern and Northeastern US, it is always merged with /ɑːr/.

Does that statement mean that in some parts of the Southern and Northeastern US there's a triple merge? --Backinstadiums (talk) 23:20, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

No, "some parts of the Southern and Northeastern US" are the rest of the US not referred to by "most". The full quote is: In most of the United States, /ɒr/ is merged with /ɔːr/, except for a handful of words such as borrow, tomorrow and sorry, which instead have /ɑːr/. In some parts of the Southern and Northeastern US, it is always merged with /ɑːr/. "Always" is clarifying that it is merged with /ɑːr/ not just in those handful of words but in all words. Nardog (talk) 04:16, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The section Dialect variation has grown to 1877 words, which take over 10 minutes to read. Let's remember that this is the help page for English in general. For more information, we have the dedicated articles already linked at the top of the section. A reader simply looking for “Help:IPA/English” is best helped by following the instruction stated above the tables:

If the words given as examples for two different symbols sound the same to you (for example, if you pronounce cot and caught the same, or do and dew, or marry and merry), you can pronounce those symbols the same in explanations of all words. The footnotes explain some of these mergers.

Why should that not be enough?

I therefore propose to delete this section, keep all detail information in the appropriate articles, and change the footnotes so they point there. ◅ Sebastian 10:10, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Forgot to include the count for the footnotes. They amount to 1857 words, or another 10 minutes to read. ◅ Sebastian 10:17, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I generally agree, the section has grown too detailed while most of it overlaps with the footnotes anyway. I'd say go ahead, except the last paragraph of the section should be kept somewhere. Nardog (talk) 08:38, 19 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You mean the one that starts with “Note that place names ...”? I agree that that merits mention here as it centers more on the particular transcription used here than on generalities about dialect variation. However, I find the wording unnecessarily complicated. At the same time, it is unnecessarily narrow, since there are other words that may lend themselves to a dialectal pronunciation. Wouldn't it be more helpful to simply add a footnote to the part quoted above along the lines of “This rule is generally employed in our pronunciation guide, even for local terms such as place names. However, be aware that not all editors may have followed this consistently, so for example if a pronunciation of an English town ending in ‑ford reads /‑fəd/, it doesn't mean that the /r/ would be absent in a rhotic dialect.” For a reader wanting to to recover the local pronunciation we could explicitly refer to the IPA chart for English dialects, which in its lede lists all major dialects, but since that is already linked from the previous paragraph, and the choice to consult information about the dialect in question seems quite obvious, I'd rather leave that out. ◅ Sebastian 12:19, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

“pronounce those symbols the same”

So, I wanted to start with this project as outlined above, but I realize that it was based on a wrong assumption. The statement “If the words given as examples for two different symbols sound the same to you, you can pronounce those symbols the same in explanations of all words”, which I liked for its simplicity, is not correct. If it were, then someone who pronounces “ladder” like “latter” should also pronounce “dye” like “tye”, which is obviously wrong. Can someone think of a way to fix that problem? Generally, we seem to make far more distinctions in the footnotes than our examples provide.

Another problem with that statement is that it uses examples which are not among the examples in the list.

So, should we put “do” and other distinguishing words in the list for uː? I think it will be very hard to come up with a minimal pair for each of the Cj (apparently under the unspecified condition /_uː) cases. θjuː + θuː, anyone? Or, maybe we should, instead of listing all possible Cj /_uː for all C, just list juː /C_ and uː /C_ (without distinguishing C)? ◅ Sebastian 11:18, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Can we not just provide brief (perhaps one-sentence-long) descriptions with links to relevant phonological articles that already do the explaining? For example... For dialects that realize “ladder” and “latter” as homophones, see Flapping. For dialects that realize "do" and "due" as homophones, see Yod-dropping, etc. Wolfdog (talk) 14:49, 7 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, of course, reducing the text was already implicit in my proposal in the previous section. As you can see from this edit, that's what I had in mind, but I also learned that it's not quite as simple as it may appear at first glance: Sometimes we need to do more than that, since this article is also the appropriate place for at least mentioning differences to other pronunciation guides the reader may have gotten used to. Still, that's not what I'm asking about; I can handle such problems as I encounter them.

Now to the more urgent and important topic of this subsection: What about “... you can pronounce those symbols the same”? This is a promise to our readers, which we're not keeping. Is there any way to keep that promise? Or can we replace it by a similar elegant and simple explanation of dialect variation? Or do we have to remove it without substitution? What implications for the organization of the article does this decision entail? This promise functioned a program for the article, which determined how we treated dialect variation in the main text, and should also have impacted the footnotes. We'll really have to think about how to solve this problem. Should we abandon the whole idea of writing the main text so that it easily makes sense to speakers of different dialects, and instead relegate everything that has to do with dialects to the footnotes? In that case, we will have to find our path between the extremes of repeating the same information in many footnotes, forcing readers to continuously skip between main text and footnotes, or giving up discussing dialect variations altogether. ◅ Sebastian 19:59, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Just found that this promise came from none other than Kwamikagami (already back in 2014). That gives me some hope that we should be able to keep it. ◅ Sebastian 20:44, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, don't have time to respond now. Can you ping me again when you have a solution? — kwami (talk) 21:00, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Under weak vowels, I, the E in edition is made bold. Must be an error? I am not fixing this as I am neither familiar with IPA or an English native speaker. SilicaQuartz (talk) 10:38, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

<edition> is pronounced as /ɪˈdɪʃən/ or /əˈdɪʃən/, so the <e> being pronounced as /ɪ/ poses no problem. However the second vowel is also pronounced as /ɪ/ as is not bolded, which is strange. I have gone ahead and bolded the first <i> as well.--Megaman en m (talk) 11:16, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, had no idea it could be pronounced that way, but that makes sense! Issue resolved. And thanks. SilicaQuartz (talk) 13:42, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Ghost of Tsushima § Inclusion of pronunciation respelling and inaccurate (impossible!) IPA key in lead sentence. Nardog (talk) 18:36, 20 October 2020 (UTC)Template:Z48[reply]