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• I wonder, why is [uː] used for (food, loot, pool, soon, chew), when they sound more like [ɯː] in English language pronunciation? --Mahmudmasri (talk) 20:26, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on dialect. We're not saying it's [uː], we're transcribing it /uː/, which leaves the pronunciation unspecified. Pronunciation varies between [u(ː)] and [ʉ(ː)]. The transcription /uː/ is traditional, just as /r/ for [ɻʷ] ~ [ɾ] is traditional. kwami (talk) 20:30, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks a lot kwami. I want to know, please, which “u pronunciation” seems more common (or more prestigious) in General American English? --Mahmudmasri (talk) 21:17, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I should have said [uw], [ʊw] etc., since it's a diphthong. (At least in GA.)

I would guess [uw], though I'm not the best person to ask. A central vowel is the stereotype of a California surfer dude (especially in that word: "Du—de!" [ˈdʉːwd]). But as you suggest, even in the rest of the country, /uː/ may not be aybe not so far back as the IPA prototype for [u]. kwami (talk) 23:06, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Under the sound uː (ie food, conclude) has been given the example pool, which is should obviously be pronounced under the sound ʊ (ie good foot pull). In Australian English , the words pull and pool are hetrographs, with the same pronunciation, yet different spellings and meanings. This was obviously written with a very heavy southern American accent, not official English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ipfreely555 (talk • contribs) 04:30, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know how seriously to take a comment written by anyone who calls himself "Ipfreely", but "pool" and "pull" are distinct in most varieties of English, though there are many accents where they are homophonous (see English-language vowel changes before historic l#Full-fool merger, where however it is asserted that there is no merger in Australian English, the vowels in the two words having a distinction in quantity though not in quality). There are also accents where /ʊ/ and /uː/ are merged in all environments, not just before /l/, such as Scottish English and Ulster English. +Angr 11:04, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In Australian English pull would be transcribed [ˈpʊl], whereas pool could be transcribed [ˈpʉːl] or [ˈpʊːl], depending on where the speaker comes from and/or speaker's age. So Angr is partly right that there is a difference in quantity not in quality, but for some it is also a difference of quality. Because it's not uniform in Australia then [ʉː] and [ʊː] are considered allophones of /uː/. --58.164.107.103 (talk) 11:06, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Was there a consensus that /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ be included under monophthongs? Is this due to their historical phonetic values? Lfh (talk) 20:43, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I suppose "traditional" is supposed to mean. (And there are dialects where they sometimes are realized as monophthongs, especially in closed syllables, but that's not so relevant.) ___A. di M. 20:51, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

They are listed with their rhotic homologues, which the "diphthongs" are not. I'm not particularly happy with the labeling, but it hasn't been an issue. kwami (talk) 01:09, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There are some discrepancies between this list of states and the IPA given on the individual states' pages, tending (I think) towards more specific GA pronunciations on the central list. (E.g. /kɛrɵˈlaɪnə/ vs. /kærəˈlaɪnə/.) Nothing huge but it could do with some input from someone involved with this page to decide if any changes are needed. Lfh (talk) 13:08, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed the Carolinas. The dedicated pages were correct. And Louisiana was just wrong. Please let us know if you spot any others. kwami (talk) 20:01, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Now that I look through it, I notice quite a few - Arkansas (ɑː vs ɔː), Rhode Island (with that reduced ɵ vs oʊ), Kentucky (reduced ɨ this time), all the "New" states (yod-dropping vs. not), etc... I think some are subtle transcription choices that could have gone either way and some are artefacts of General American, whatever our policy is on that. Lfh (talk) 21:36, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"New" is a mess. Per conventions, we should go w /nju:/. However, doing that to New York will result in an edit war; since the pronunciation is obvious, I just haven't thought it worth the effort. I've fixed the others. (I don't know how general the reduced pron. of RI is, so I left the full form in the article as an alt.) kwami (talk) 00:55, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

How should we transcribe the vowels in hour, flower, hire, higher? For me the first two are both [aʊə] and the last two [aɪə], but clearly they won't be for most people and I'm not sure where to put the rs. Lfh (talk) 10:41, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the current transcription lacks triphthongs and you'd need to write /aʊər/, /flaʊər/, /haɪər/, /haɪər/. But you can put the syllable boundary in /ˈhaɪ.ər/ for higher if you want to. I would take the absence of a stress mark in /haɪər/ for hire as an indication that it's a monosyllable, and indeed one of my dictionaries transcribes "our" and "hour" as /aʊər/ and /ˈaʊər/ respectively. ___A. di M. 14:13, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I'll use the syllable mark then for "flower" and "higher". I know we're supposed to use that sparingly because people don't always agree where the boundaries lie, but presumably that's not controversial for "flower" or "higher". As for the stress mark, I thought it was customary to use that even for monosyllables (e.g. Thames) apart from particle words ("of" and the like)? Lfh (talk) 17:05, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's the perfect use of the syllable mark. I'll add examples to the table. As you note, monosyllables are frequently written with stress when they are stressed. kwami (talk) 20:36, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A. di M., another solution would be to transcribe rhotic vowels differently, as we do with other vowels: /ˈaʊr/, /ˈflaʊər/, /ˈhaɪr/, /ˈhaɪər/. Would that cause too much havoc, do you think? Dict.com has /aʊ^ər/, /flaʊər/, /haɪ^ər/, /haɪər/, which we might want to adopt to be clear that it's only one syllable. But there are so few distinctions in words we're likely to transcribe that I doubt there's much need. kwami (talk) 21:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That way we'd need syllable breaks to show whether /ˈhaɪrɪŋ/ is "high ring" or "hiring"... Of course, these cases will be much rarer than "hire"~"higher". But, on the other hand, I guess speakers distinguishing "hire" from "higher" are rarer than those distinguishing "high ring" from "hiring". So, we have to trade something off either way... ___A. di M. 22:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks you two. Would "lawyer" work as an example for /ɔɪər/? (Just thinking it's a more common word than "loir".) Hang on, no. Just my wacky RP accent. Lfh (talk) 10:02, 18 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

BTW perhaps you could add these vowels to the respelling key. Lfh (talk) 09:06, 19 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

After years of gazing at this pronunciation system, it is still so bizarrely peculiar to me, as a typical, educated American speaking American English. I'm sure, by now, you've heard many people raise this issue, so this is just another reminder, about how so many examples currently fail to convey the pronunciation to American readers. Something needs to be added to show real differences. For example:

• The expression "which witch is which" has 3 words that are all pronounced identically; I suggest as 3 of "witch" in American English.
• The words "finger" and "singer" make a perfect rhyme; however, "ginger" would be different, sounding more like "jihn-jer" (rather than "ging-her").
• The words "courier" and "tourist" have the same "ou" sound in mainstream America, so that "tour" would rhyme with a word "cour".

Those are mainstream American pronunciations. I am not giving a regional dialect, such as the dialect near Boston, MA, where the name "Cape Cod" is typically pronounced like "Cape Kowaud" to rhyme with "Quad". So, in summary, it's not just the vast number of peculiar symbols in the IPA system (spelling "yes" with "j"???), but also the many so-called "different" examples which are not different (at all) to speakers of mainstream American English. Of course, now we realize, Wikipedia must support both IPA & American pronunciations. After years of trying, the IPA system is still a failure for American readers. However, adding some American-like examples might help to understand IPA: I'm guessing "hw" is like in China's "Huang Zhe" or Mexico's San "Juan", and those I think many Americans would understand. Also, "k" as in "American: schedule" (etc.) -Wikid77 (talk) 22:25, 20 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what you mean by "American-like" examples. All of our examples are "American". I also don't understand what your bulleted comments are intended to demonstrate: yes, "which witch is which" are all pronounced the same—what's your point? BTW, finger and singer don't rhyme, at least not in standard American English. kwami (talk) 22:59, 20 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To continue to address the bulleted points, which witch is which has two words that most people pronounce identically. The first and last words are the same.

English speakers, in my experience, have difficulty perceiving a difference between [ŋ] (of singer) and [ŋɡ] (of finger) even if they produce them. So I'm skeptical of your claim that you don't make such a contrast. Even if it were true, though, that is such a rare feature that no dictionary or pronunciation guide would reasonably exclude such a distinction and Wikipedia's is no different.

On that note, because there are many readers speaking with many different dialects, it behooves us to indicate more contrasts than we probably need to than less, with the general instruction that if you don't make a particular contrast that you can, for example, /w/ and /hw/ as the same.

You're right about /hw/, by the way, though I know a lot of people who say Juan just like they would say one or wan (that is, without the h). What do other people think? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 05:46, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've heard "Juarez" pronounced something like /wɜːrəs/ on the BBC. --___A. di M. 11:12, 22 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Read the "Understanding the key" box; that answers most of your questions. --___A. di M. 11:20, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Re. "schedule" for /k/ - it is true that some of the examples in the key are not very common words and could be replaced by better-known examples using the same orthography (e.g. "phone" for "phi", "half" for "caff", "choir" for "chi"), unless that would disrupt some systematic arrangement. Lfh (talk) 18:44, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In some accents (southern England, southern hemisphere, New England) "half" is usually pronounced with the vowel of "father", so that wouldn't work. As for "phi", "chi", etc., the point is having the examples as similar as possible except for the sounds being exemplified (i.e. the initial consonants, in those cases). But I agree that having words everyone knows is also desirable. Maybe we can have both a near-minimal set and very common words. --___A. di M. 19:54, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, we don't want to disrupt the set of /aɪ/ words, I should have spotted that. Still, for /f/, where the only words that fit the set are fairly obscure, I think we should include a better-known word as well, and/or change "caff" to "gaffe". (This is why I mentioned "phi" and "caff" - I wasn't looking at the vowel table at all, sorry for not making that clear. I have ɑ: in "half" myself as it happens.) Maybe an additional example for /hw/ and /ŋg/ would help too. Lfh (talk) 20:51, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If the point for "more examples for /hw/" is what Wikid77 said, keep in mind that this key is used to transcribe English pronunciations, or at least Anglicized pronunciations. So, essentially, /hw/ means "the sound of wh in which, whichever way you pronounce it"; using a word such as "Juan" misses the point (although many—but not all—of the people who pronounce "which" and "witch" the same, when speaking English, use that same sound in "Juan"). --___A. di M. 11:07, 22 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No disagreement - I wasn't proposing anything exotic for /hw/, just another traditional English word spelt wh - quite simply I noticed that two of the cases raised by Wikid77 were illustrated with only one example and it seemed that another wouldn't hurt. I hope I'm not overreacting to a minor issue, since the key is clearly very fine-tuned already. Possibly /hw/ was deliberately kept to one example because most English speakers don't make that distinction anyway; and I wouldn't use foreign names with variable pronunciation (I've never heard /wɜːrəs/ for Juarez in England, but I do use /w/, following Bob Dylan on "Tom Thumb's Blues".) And I would still support one further example for /f/ and /ŋg/ as above. Lfh (talk) 12:19, 22 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have a problem with several of the words given to help users pronounce certain consonants. Could someone choose less marginalized or outdated words than Phi, Caff (Seriously, why caff?), wye, and xi. A side note: How manny of these words are common, everyday words that an AmEng speaker would understand. Just putting my thoughts out there... Upakal (talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.5.212.88 (talk) 23:56, 11 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You bring up a good point. I believe wye is to contraste with why, though perhaps a different minimal pair would suffice. The examples for /f/ aren't too problematic since that's one of the IPA characters that English speakers have no difficulty with. I suspect some of the examples are used because they illustrate how a sound is spelled and are very short, xi being an example of this since it's better than xylophone. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 05:47, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, one of the problems is that many people's browsers only support very short popups, thus our very short words in the popups. If you want words that only differ in the consonant, to contrast the consonants, or only in the vowel, to contrast the vowel, and also to be very short, then you end up with some pretty esoteric words. But remember, the point of the popups is not to teach people the IPA! It's to remind them of those letters they've forgotten, without the bother of going to the full IPA key every time. A few esoteric words shouldn't be a problem for s.t. like that. kwami (talk) 06:33, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How Archaea should be transcribed?--Carnby (talk) 13:54, 21 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It was pretty close. I fixed the link to this IPA key. kwami (talk) 00:34, 26 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have the cot-caught merger, so when I'm adding pronunciations to articles, I basically have to guess whether to put /ɒ/ or /ɔː/. My dialect also merges /ɑː/, so I sometimes have a three-way dilemma. Any advice on how to make my guesses more accurate? Rules of thumb based on the spelling? The case that prompted this post is Cochrane, Alberta. I want to clarify that <ch> is /k/ not /tʃ/ but I don't know how I should transcribe the first vowel of name. Indefatigable (talk) 23:47, 25 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's not easy, esp. when locals have the merger. Generally, <o> is /ɒ/, but in the case of place names from non-English sources there are plenty of exceptions. kwami (talk) 00:31, 26 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The surnames Cochrane and Cochran are /ˈkɒkrən/, if this helps. Lfh (talk) 16:56, 26 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Something similar may have happened at John H. Hinderaker. It's been given as "hinder-rocker", but I suspect this may mean ˈrɑ:kər rather than ˈrɒkər, since it's spelt with <a> - does anyone know for sure? Lfh (talk) 17:08, 30 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Could someone who knows how to do IPA fix the first line of Rory Gallagher? I was asked, but this isn;t in my skills set. Thanks for any help. Tvoz/talk 19:01, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, the ad-hoc pronunciations can be imprecise enough that it's difficult to convert. I've made a stab at it, but I could be wrong. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:33, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. Honestly - and please forgive me for this - it's all Greek to me. Tvoz/talk 20:14, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A pronunciation key is supposed to help people understand how to say a word. Presenting them with symbols that are alien to them does not achieve this end and in fact, does the opposite. Neither I not 100 other people I've asked can understand how to read, let alone translate this crap into what it would sound like. If someone can read English, they would be able to understand a key that uses regular letters better than these seemingly made-up symbols. Find a different way, the system you have in place is useless to most of those who come across it.172.163.214.196 (talk) 08:53, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Only in the US. Everyone else uses the IPA, and this isn't a US-only encyclopedia. See notice at the top of the page. Banning the IPA would be like banning the metric system. But we are working on a system of hover-over pop-up cues to help readers raised on only US dictionaries. kwami (talk) 09:10, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Are we? I thought we dropped this issue for some reason, as it hasn't been discussed (at least here) since September. For the record, my latest proposal was: pronounced /fuː/^key. (To the OP: there's also Wikipedia:Pronunciation respelling key which many articles have.) --___A. di M. 11:14, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See examples at Template:IPAc-en and discussion at Template talk:IPA-en#IPA Amalgamation. −Woodstone (talk) 14:13, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This old chestnut has come up on my talk page. I believe I'm right that our convention is to transcribe every instance of historic postvocalic "r", even in non-rhotic contexts, whenever we link to WP:IPAEN and use /slashes/. But since this can sometimes cause confusion, I think there should be a paragraph somewhere to specifically explain how we deal with rhoticity, and why. It could go here and/or at WP:PRONUNCIATION. Lfh (talk) 15:33, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It most probably should not be the role of the encyclopedia to dictate to people of other countries how they should be pronouncing the names of their own cities. The IPA is a collection of symbols that represent sounds - all the sounds of all the languages in the world, or more accurately, all the sounds the human voice can produce. There are ones that can be used if American pronunciation is required to be demonstrated, and others to be used if other pronunciations of English need explanation. The IPA is mainly a tool of linguists, or for multilingual people who need a common reference for all these sounds. The IPA is not commonly used in America, hence the confusion, but in countries and continents where many, many languages abound, such as, for example Europe, or Asia, its use is widespread. To use a postvocalic "r" in non-rhotic contexts, gives a completely false rendering of a word's normal pronunciation, and is an aberration. As an example, according to the contention in the previous message above, the American states should all be be pronounced Alabammer, Dakoter, Arizoner, Nevader, Virginnier, Georgier, and Montanner. In a nutshell, the IPA is a system of sounds, not a prescriptive, arbitrary method for how a user of the IPA, or the Wikipedia thinks a word ought to be pronounced in a langiuage other than his/her own. Wether a language is rhotic or not is beside the point, and standard British English is not rhotic, whatever the Wikipedia says..--Kudpung (talk) 16:41, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There was never an "r" in any of those places AFAIK. The convention that I believe we have is to transcribe /r/ whenever it would occur in a rhotic pronunciation of a word - at least in our broad transcriptions - so that the guide can be used by rhotic and non-rhotic speakers alike. If one's accent is non-rhotic one can simply ignore postvocalic "r", just as people who pronounce "no" with a monophthong may do so even though it is written as a diphthong. The BBC does the same thing with regards to "r" - see Phonetic Respelling. Of course we can also give phonetically precise transcriptions, in square brackets, of how local people say a name. Lfh (talk) 16:59, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My knowledge of phonetics is minimal. However, WP should reflect the world as it is, not how WP-ians in other parts of the world think it should be. It is notorious that English orthography is not phonetic. Furrhermore the same word may be pronounced quite differently in different parts of the world. I live in the county of Worcester (pronounced Wooster) and next to the county of Warwick (pronounced Warrick). There is no reason why names should not be followed by a phonetic spelling, and at least one Warwick article (the castle?) used to have this. If US users do not understand a phonetic alphabet, that is their loss, but those who are not lingusitic specialists are probably in the same position. If this comment does not address the point raised, please forgive me: I am a historian, not a linguist. Peterkingiron (talk) 18:45, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Peterkingiron. Of course diffrent countries pronounce words diffrently. I live in Sydenham (pronounced Sidnem), in London and it should be how the country where the place is located pronounce it, not how other countries think I should be pronounced. We should not have to adapt to other countries ponunciation as there would be edit wars for every international reader. An example the US and UK pronounce "A" diffrently in words like status and data. Yes places like Worcester is pronounced strangely to international people but yet that is how its pronounced if someone said Worcester most people in the UK would have no idea where it is, but saying "Wooster", most would.Likelife (talk) 19:52, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To the OP: there's already such a sentence in the "Understanding the key" box. ― A._di_M.^{2nd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 20:41, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I know the sentence you mean, but it doesn't specifically mention the case of proper names, which is the issue here. The common misconception, and it is an understandable one, is that our IPA for a placename will be phonetically precise. In fact it sometimes is, but by default it is not, and we might make that clearer than it currently is. Lfh (talk) 20:55, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think we English nationals also need to be careful of assuming there is only one way within the UK of pronouncing a given place - often there are sub-local (such as village-level), local (such as a town or part of a city), county-wide or regional pronunciations, as well as "national" pronunciations such as those used by the BBC. In the case of -shire names, I recall that in some counties "locals" pronounce the "shire" ending in full, as in "warikshiirrre" and others don't. In fact, this is often thought of as a "rustic" pronunciation. Clearly there are many and varied ways of doing this. I don't understand the intricasies of the phonetic systems but it appears that Lfh is saying that this is just a technical convention in IPA which can be interpreted by the beholder and if so that's fine. However, from what little understanding I do have, it looks a bit as though the US pronunciation is being taken as the "correct" or "dominant" one. That would clearly be un-cyclopedic, surely? A casual viewer of Wikipedia articles would surely like to see how most "local" people pronounce a name and also perhaps how it is generally understood in the official language to be pronounced? All a bit of a minefield clearly, and no doubt a lovely thing to have a tremendously obscure major row about! Let's hope not. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 21:02, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello all- an interesting topic. From Wikipedia:PRONUNCIATION#Distinction between British, American and Australian pronunciation I find Local pronunciations are of particular interest in the case of place names. If there are both local and national or international standards, it may be beneficial to list both. I think this is gloriously vague. Place names clearly are a special case. I can speak only for the UK, but I guess this is equally applicable anywhere else. Occasionally a place name has a (very) local pronunciation that would not be recognised outside that town/village/etc - this is the first case (local), and would belong in square brackets. Then there is the nationally recognised form - the most commonly used, which would be the second case. Finally, a larger city may have an internationally recognised form. Most settlements will not have an internationally recognised form, as they are not internationally known, so I would expect the IPA transcription to match the nationally recognised form in most cases. It would be perverse to indicate a place name in a form that is not widely used or recognised. Lfh - when you say we can also give phonetically precise transcriptions, in square brackets, of how local people say a name, you do realise that local in this context is most of the country?

The rest of the discussion appears to be based around confusion about the IPA, which I think Kudpung has explained. I don't think an IPA transcription relates at all to the normal spelling of the word. The fact that I might be a rhotic speaker should not affect the transcription one way or the other. The beauty of IPA is that wherever a reader is from, it specifies how a word should sound. How the reader chooses to reproduce that is another matter! The linked BBC document is not relevant here, as it does not discuss IPA.

However, a quick tour of English counties suggests that common Wikipedian usage is against us. I find this odd - maybe it needs changing? GyroMagician (talk) 21:20, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The quick tour abberation is because the phonetic spelling of the British counties was arbitrarily changed by a non-native speaker without consensus.
Lfh: There was never an "r" in any of those places AFAIK - Exactly, just as no final 'r' is uttered in English counties throughout most of the UK.
I'll try to explain again: The IPA exists as a written international set of symbols that illustrates noises made by the human vocal system; it is not a symbol-for-letter transliteration, and it is especiually useful for getting the pronunciation right when working with unfamiliar writing systems, e.g. A Chinese looking up a word in Roman script, or me looking up a word in Thai, Lao, or Devanagari. The "broad transcriptions" mentioned above would seem to be based on American English and to some users it may appear from the OP's comments that a Wikipedia policy exists that determines that pronunciation of British place names must default to a rhotic American type of English, and to introduce rhotic sounds for a non uttered 'r' into words that don't have them in either version of the language.
I personally accord every version of English its own particular merits, and its right to be pronounced in the way common to the majority of its users. I strongly suspect that the OP hails from North America. My position here therefore strictly concerns:

• The way in which Wikipedia policies concerning the IPA (if they do indeed exist) are interpreted.
• The way in which the IPA is allowed to be erroniously implemented in Wikipdia and applied across the board without consensus, and without expert knowledge of local or national majority use.
• How the current policy, if any, may need to be changed through a truly representative consensus in order to clarify the point that America can neither claim ownership of the Wikipedai, British Wikipeda articles, nor of British English place names.
• Ensuring that the encyclopedia editors do not attempt to redefine the use of the IPA.

If it is Wikipedia policy to regard British English by default as a rhotic language, then clearly it is at fault, and we all have a golden opportunity here to collaborate to rectify it.
.--Kudpung (talk) 22:10, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I could make a similar argument that British English is imposing its vowels on American English. No-one said anything about British English being rhotic - some is, some isn't. The point is using the most general transcription. In the case of vowels, that means using British vowels, because they are the most general: given RP vowels, one can generally predict the pronunciation of dialects outside Britain. The only concessions we've made are for three distinctions made within Britain itself: the horse-hoarse distinction, historic /h/, and post-vocalic /r/. We do this because that info is needed for readers to know how to pronounce words in their own dialect. Why is it that I never hear anyone complaining about us transcribing Hampshire with an /h/? Isn't that American Imperialism too? And we get Americans complaining that tune should be /tu:n/, not /tju:n/, though funnily enough they don't complain about us distinguishing /ɒ/ from /ɑ/. Also, Hampshire has an /r/ even in RP. But all of this is irrelevant: Brits (and Bostonites) know when to drop their ars and aitches, and Americans know when to merge their vowels. kwami (talk) 23:21, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What Kudpung & Peterkingiron said. It is nonsense to suppose that wikipedia should be proffering pronunciations that have nothing to do with the way in which a place name is pronounced in the country of that place, merely because a user has a notion that there's an undocumented convention suggesting that wikipedia apply rhotic pronunciations to non-rhotic languages. That's. Just. Crazy. And wrong in so many ways. We have a clear model to follow in WP's handling of US versus British spelling: if the subject matter relates to the UK, it gets British spelling; if to the US, US spelling. The underlying principle is that we respect local conventions and do not seek to impose alien conventions. To be clear: IPA representations of UK place names should represent UK pronunciations. IPA representations of UK place names should not represent bogus undocumented conventions yielding just plan wrong pronunciations. Any IPA representations that have been changed to include an R where no R is sounded should be reverted. And if, per Wotnow and others, there is more than one commonly used local pronunciation, we should consider providing IPA representations for each, explaining their context. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:34, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If what we transcribe has nothing to do with the local pronunciation, then of course we need to add the local pronunciation. We already say that, and no-one has ever contested that. Also, if you have examples of places where no /r/ is sounded, please let up know. I agree that those should be removed. But as far as having distinct US and UK transcriptions, why not have distinct transcriptions for each county in the UK? After all, locals might resent the imposition of RP. How local do you want to go? And what business is it of an encyclopedia to take sides in such issues?

As for Likelife's points, we already do what he would like. Sydenham didn't have a pronunciation, so I added one: /ˈsɪdnəm/. This is not the local pronunciation, which wouldn't have exactly those vowels, but a generic one; any English speaker would know how to pronounce it from that transcription, with the only thing left for the outsider being to pick up the local accent, which is beyond a simple transcription to provide. (We could always add a sound file for that.) Similarly for Worcester: /ˈwʊstər/. This is how everyone who's ever heard it pronounces the name; again, the only difference is one of accent. (And if you're still on your anti-rhotic kick, while I can't speak for Worcesterites, it should be noted that the name has an /r/ in RP.) kwami (talk) 00:07, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Emic and etic linguistics

A fascinating area indeed, that of linguistics, with concepts such as syntax and semantics informing a range of disciplines, including anthropology, computer programming, cognitive science, and philosophy (on the latter, syntax and semantics is central to Daniel C. Dennett's Intentional Stance). I've long known that, but steered a bit clear of it because it struck me as a discipline particularly prone to what John D. Barrow called "The Groucho Marx Effect": "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member". In epistemological terms, the better we understand a phenomenon or problem, the more likely it is to be oversimplified. Conversely, the closer we get to a description of reality, the more complex and incomprehensible the description becomes. I have not found a single discipline where this does not apply. In some disciplines this is quickly obvious, and It struck me years ago that linguistics is one such discipline. And local dialects are probably particularly poignant examples. So I've always been a bit shy of allowing myself to become too fascinated with a discipline that looked like it could consume me even more than other subjects I've delved into, and am still 'recovering' from.

Part of the problem appears to be that which is well explored by anthropologists, especially perhaps linguistic anthropologists - although any social anthropologist must necessarily grasp the concepts. That is, the contrast and interplay between etic and emic understanding, which has bedevilled researchers for decades. In speaking with people of some cultures, they tell you of the "formal" language, and "informal" language. The 'formal is what is taught. The informal is what the natives learn. And that is at the gross scale. It gets messier as one delves into the local dialects, as I'm sure some or all of you are aware.

Ironically, contemporary humnan globalisation may solve the problem in its own way, but only by reduction of diversity, which is well discussed in both professional and popular literature. Indeed it is the very reason for a renaissance in some native languages and dialects thereof. As we all know, language diversity is reducing. And this applies expecially, and obviously, to local dialects. As a youngster, I recall a well read Englishman telling me that at one time there were some 200 local dialects in the U.K., but these had dropped off. He even showed me a little book on English dialects, the title of which I can't recall, but the colour of which I can (blue).

There are some classic works on the subject of etic and emic understanding, which contributors here may well know of, along with others which I don't know of. I think here of some of the work of Clifford Geertz, or C. F. Voegelin, or Ward H. Goodenough (see e.g. Linguistics and Anthropology. As the saying goes, the solution is often in the problem. One can bog oneself down in debate on the details, which is likely unresolvable. Or one can step back to the conceptual level and say 'well hang on, there are etic and emic issues here'. For myself, if I was reading on the pronounciation of any language, I would fully expect a good work to inform me of both the etic and emic aspects of a language, or dialect. If I came across a work that omitted this, I would not consider it to be a good work.

Applying this to Wikipedia, the solution seems a bit obvious to me. Those dealing with international standards are clearly dealing primarily (but not exclusively, nothing's ever clear-cut in reality) with the etic perspective. Conversely, there would be, for any given community of humans, people who natively understand the emic perspective. Where such combinations exist (etic and emic), Wikipedia, and discerning readers, would clearly benefit from a description of both where possible. If I as a reader encountered that, I would consider myself to be encountering an informative article. Wotnow (talk) 23:11, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Again, you're misrepresenting the case. Not intentionally, I hope, since you say you've read the comments in the previous section? No one is pushing American English on the UK. I would join you in objecting to that. This is not AmEng--if anything, we're pushing British English on the US. After all, there are rhotic non-aitch-dropping dialects in Britain, whereas RP vowels are AFAIK not found in the US. This is basically generic English English that we're also using outside of England. kwami (talk) 06:24, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

a consensus?

The OP's opening message here rather clouds the true issue on the user talk pages that originally provoked him/her to post it. Reading carefully, very carefully through the comments on this topic, and looking back over those other talk pages, and to answer in simple terms, as many might not immediately appreciate the nevertheless very important emic and etic connotations mentioned by Wotnow, or his most apt conclusion, it looks after all as if the Wikipedia does not exercise a policy of imposing alien pronunciation on the British articles. I am most relieved to hear this, and was sure that the mere suggestion that it does would turn out to be nonsense. It does look therefore, as if the OP, although having acted with the best of intentions, may have misinterpreted the Wiki policy (and possibly also the usage principles of the IPA), and had erroneously included in British place names, an IPA symbol for a final 'r' where any literal r is not in fact pronounced by (the vast majority of) British English speakers, and by doing so, instead of "making that clearer than it currently is" had added more confusion, and hence requiring discussion.
There is no reason why the most general transcription should be assumed to be AE by default. British English is in no way confined to the terrestrial limits of that small island, and although it would make more work for the contributors (::sigh::), I suggest that a possible solution would be the one the publishers of a leading brand of dictionaries have agreed upon recently: To include the IPA phonetics for at least the most popular pronunciations of the headwords: i.e.: AE and BE (and possibly in some instances also ANZ). It would be fallacious however, to suggest that they should have incuded every one of the hundreds of other variations, but they felt they had addressed the requirements of the majority, and particularly those non-native English speakers in countries where people are learning the language and getting a confusing mixed bag of vernacular utterances from their various native ESOL and/or indigenous teachers. Those who don't generally deal very much with a multiplicity other languages, can rest assured that other languages also have very strong regional and/or national variations in pronunciation (Canadian French for example is very different from metropolitan French, although in Roman script they look the same). A line has to be drawn somewhere, even in the Wikipedia where there are no space limitations.--Kudpung (talk) 05:21, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Again, you're misrepresenting the case. Not intentionally, I hope, since you say you've read the comments in the previous section? No one is pushing American English on the UK. I would join you in objecting to that. This is not AmEng--if anything, we're pushing British English on the US. After all, there are rhotic non-aitch-dropping dialects in Britain, whereas RP vowels are AFAIK not found in the US. This is basically generic English English that we're also using outside of England. kwami (talk) 06:25, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

One other possible approach: at York, the /r/ has been placed in brackets: /jɔ(r)k/. How do people feel about this solution? Does it make things clearer or murkier?

While editing Hampshire I noticed somebody had inserted this note: "Yes, this has an /r/, which you can hear when a vowel follows, even in Hampshire." I take this to refer to "linking r" - nearly everyone in Britain would pronounce "Hampshire is" as [ˈhæmpʃər ɪz], or "Hampshireite" (if such a word existed) as [ˈhæmpʃəraɪt].

(One other thing - I'm not saying every written "r" should be transcribed /r/ - that would be phonetically egregious, since I do realise that some "r"s really are silent, e.g. Marlborough, which should not correctly have an /r/ in anyone's accent.)

If any change does arise from this discussion, let's remember to be consistent - we're not only talking about "r"s, and we're not only talking about Britain and America. Any systematic change would have to be applied across the board. At the risk of sounding like some brutal prison guard, I was only trying to apply the rules as I understood them. Of course "rules" (or conventions) are open to debate, and I thank Kudpung for acknowledging my good faith. Lfh (talk) 07:38, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that is exactly the point - it does apply equally to all place names, and not just "r"s. Worcester is a good example, because we also have Worcester, Massachusetts, and even Worcester, Western Cape. I would expect all three to be pronounced differently, and the IPA is designed to express this.

I'm not sure about the "r" in parentheses - is there any example of this usage in IPA elsewhere? As Wikipedia didn't invent IPA, we should follow the normal convention. I hear your point about rules. While I'm not sure the rules support you, common usage certainly appears to. But, to me at least, this appears wrong and needs updating. GyroMagician (talk) 08:26, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't like the r in parentheses. There are a number of instances were dialectal variation includes the deletion of consonants and the way this guide is designed is that, if your dialect has historically deleted this consonant so that you don't pronounce it where other dialects do, then you ignore it. This is how we deal with /h/ (both in general, and before /w/ in which) and /j/ (that is, after /t d n/). Also, because we can't do this sort of thing with vowels, there's a consistency factor.

I'd be surprised if non-rhotic speakers really had a legibility problem with the r's being there. They spend the whole of their literate lives not pronouncing postvocalic rs present in the orthography. On the other hand, /n(j)uː ˈjɔ(r)k/ is pretty chaotic and less readable even to the IPA-literate. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 08:37, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What I understand several people to be saying is that our transcriptions should describe a local pronunciation in precise phonetic detail. We could do that, but it would be quite complicated - for example Darwen in Lancashire and Darwin in Australia would have to be different, even though any given speaker will pronounce them the same. There would be as many different vowel systems as there are dialects of English, which is a lot. It also means we'd have to decide whose pronunciation we take as a model - should "London" be Michael Caine's pronunciation of it, or the Queen's? And the result would essentially be a partial description of the (or a) local accent, which should already be covered in detail elsewhere. What we give currently (in most cases) is really a "generic English" representation from which readers can derive their own pronunciations, rather than a precise phonetic snapshot of any particular person's speech, notwithstanding the phrase "phonetic" alphabet.

Re parentheses - ok, let's forget that. Lfh (talk) 08:56, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Gyro, do you pronounce Worcester, Eng., Worcester, Mass., and Worcester, SA, differently? That's the point of the IPA: to tell you how to pronounce it. If any given person pronounces all three the same, then all three should have the same IPA transcription. The rest is local accent, which we can but don't need to include. However, if we have only the local pronunciation, then our readers won't know how they should say it. kwami (talk) 09:17, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's a point of the IPA. I think the issue here is that another point of the IPA is to describe an utterance exactly - hence Kudpung's emphasis on the IPA as a means of encoding all human speech sounds; and we all can't agree on which of these two functions WP should be providing its readers. Lfh (talk) 10:22, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I stand corrected. I should have said the point of us including the IPA to provide the pronunciation of a topic is to show a reader how to pronounce a it. People are generally concerned about how they should pronounce a word. Proper nouns are something of an exception, but the reader's concern for their own pronunciation is still there, and probably their main concern. kwami (talk) 11:06, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

aeusoes1 - the general feeling among those opposing rhoticity is, I think, that since this is the Int. Phonetic Alphabet, it shouldn't include any symbols that don't correspond to a spoken phone/sound in the local pronunciation. In this view (which isn't mine), letters which are tolerable in the orthography, or in non-IPA pronunciation respellings (such as those of the BBC), are not tolerable in IPA if they represent a sound which isn't pronounced locally. The standards are held to be different; it's not a legibility issue. Lfh (talk) 09:21, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's definitely true. Non-rhotic speakers who object to /r/ in the IPA will nontheless use it themselves in pronunciation respellings, and don't seem to mind it in AHD-type systems. kwami (talk) 11:06, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is my feeling. IPA and respelling do something different. Respelling makes sense to a native speaker (and often dramatically not to a non-native speaker), while IPA works for anyone who knows IPA, whatever language(s) they speak or accent they have. Whether we like it or not, the usual purpose of IPA is to describe an utterance. I think it is unusual to include phonemes in an IPA transcription that are not normally voiced (Care to comment Kudpung? My knowledge of IPA is thin at best). I pronounce all Worcesters same, because I am familiar with one and then apply the same pronunciation to all. But what of a reader coming from, say, China or Germany? Should they be told to pronounce Worcester, Mass. with a British accent, or Worcester, England with a US accent, or each one in a manner commonly recognised in the given country? GyroMagician (talk) 11:19, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We do have a respelling system, which I believe Kwamikagami took the lead in designing. Do you envisage something like this: "Worcester - pronounced [ˈwʊstǝ], WOOS-tǝr"? Lfh (talk) 11:44, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Using a respelling system as well as IPA is another discussion. For this discussion, I think we've agreed that IPA encodes exactly how a word is pronounced, but have yet to decide how to specify place names. I'm arguing (with others) that the pronunciation should be given in the common form of the country of that place. To do otherwise would seem odd. GyroMagician (talk) 12:56, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So I take it that you don't fully agree with Kwami's comment above: "People are generally concerned about how they should pronounce a word." If our transcriptions are phonetically precise, this gain in precision is offset by a loss in generality - people with a non-local accent (i.e. nearly everyone) will find it harder to judge how the name would be pronounced in their accent. For example, Melbourne would be transcribed [ˈmælbən], and non-Australians might be unsure whether they should say "Mal" or "Mel". Similarly, Cochrane, Alberta would be [ˈkɑkrən] (I think?), and British readers would not know whether to say "kok" or "kawk" or "kahk" for the first syllable. The majority may prefer this tradeoff - let's just be clear that it is a tradeoff. If the majority do prefer to prioritise the documentation of local speech, I for one will stand aside. Lfh (talk) 13:45, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's not primarily a matter of accent. The first syllable of Chochrane, Alberta rhymes with "Mock" whatever accent you have, since if your accent shifts, both pronunciations change in the same way. Whereas, what I'm perceiving here is that people are trying to say that the last syllable of Warwickshire rhymes with "hire". No Briton would pronounce it that way. It rhymes with "huh". --Ukslim (talk) 14:25, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not "shire" - "sher" (as in "washer"), or for some people "sheer". You are correct that "Mock" shifts predictably according to accent - so do "sher" and "sheer". Lfh (talk) 14:34, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Conclusions?

We're getting really off topic here now, and some of us (including me) are beginning to repeat ourselves, but at the risk of over simplifying things, and for the benefit of latecomers who have not read the background to this discussion:

• The case of AE vs. BE was used to demonstrate 1. what rhotic means, and 2. that some people genuinely perceive an American cultural hegemony within the pages of the Wikipedia. But it is not the subject of this discussion.
• Nobody is forcing BE on the Americans - the IPA (in the present discussion) is to demonstrate, in the absence of a sound recording, what a Britsh place name sounds like in British English, in an article about Britain, (w)ritten by British Wikipedians. By the same token, (although again, it's not the subject of discussion here) I would assume the Americans to be perfectly within their rights to use /ˈɑrkənsɔː/ on a page if that will help the Brits (or anyone else) avoid making fools of themselves by using the pronunciation inferred by its Roman orthography.
• There is no final 'r' in York - the discussion is about final literal 'r's that are not pronounced in either AE or BE, but have been forced on the readers by an editor's understandable misinterpretation on what the roles of the encyclopedia and the IPA are.
• It might help to understand that not everyone who reads the Wikipedia is a linguist, but that most people who read it are expecting to get reasonably accurate information.
• Although he was the one that began the confusion in the first place, the OP is now advocating that the situation should be clearer - and if that's what he feels, then he's probably quite right. I think that if we sort out the relevant comments in this thread, the consensus follows common sense, and to be quite honest, if I looked up everything in the maze of Wikipedia bureaucracy before I wrote anything, I would never get a new Wiki article off the ground, much less get one through a GA review.
• No one is saying that the BRITISH nationals use the same pronunciation throughout the land. There is however a standard British English (RP) that is extremely widely used and in particular is taught to billions of learners all over the world. Local British accents have become very much less marked over the last 50 years or so. Even the Mancunian in Coronation Street is "nowt" (IPA:/naʊt/) like it was it was fifty years ago (for those of you who remember) when Ken Barlow was already stating: "You can't go on just thinking about your own street these days. We're living with people on the other side of the world."
• There cannot be a technical Wiki convention that conflicts with everything we linguists have learned about phonetic writing systems (the IPA is not the only one in use).
• There is only ONE way of pronouncing IPA script and it's not open to debate (at least not here) - that's the whole idea of it!
• There is no such thing as generic English English - unless the poster means RP - and there is most definitely no such thing as a standard international English pronunciation.
• The mention of the intrusive linking 'r' is not a subject of this discussion. (Some languages insist on a linking letter)
• It is definitely not recommended to reproduce on every article page the hundreds of variations of the way in which British place names can be uttered. Do see my earlier comments about how my dictionary publisher has addressed the issue.

To conclude: If an 'r' at the end of a word is not pronounced, and in Worcester it ain't, then the IPA must not include its symbol for a final r. And if the Wikipedia guidelines in this respect are so unclear (WP guidelines often are confusing in spite of the fact that they are arrived at by consensus), that they confuse the likes of Lfh who honestly thought he was doing the right thing, then let's get it changed! Wiki rules are not (w)ritten in stone.
--Kudpung (talk) 17:33, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I can't tell what we agree on and what we don't.

First of all, the IPA is both a phonetic alphabet and a phonemic alphabet. We're putting it between slashes, so we mean it to be a phonemic alphabet. So, pace Gyro, we don't agree that "that IPA encodes exactly how a word is pronounced", but just the opposite. I also disagree with the idea that "the pronunciation should be given in the common form of the country of that place". Rather, it should be given in the form common to English, and if that differs from the not just country but county of place, then we give that too. It's not uncommon for a name to be unpredictably different locally vs. nationally. Predictable differences I think we can safely ignore.

I'm not saying that Americans feel that BE is being pushed on them, just that our transcription is closer to BE than it is to AE. I'm glad that isn't the topic of discussion.

"Worcester" does have an /r/ in BE, or at least in RP, which isn't quite the same thing. (A final /r/, that is. No-one has transcribed that name with an internal /r/.) Unless maybe you're arguing that Worcester England is pronounced differently than Worcester Mass.?

"the discussion is about final literal 'r's that are not pronounced in either AE or BE, but have been forced on the readers". I agree with you there. Could you supply an example of such a word for the discussion? I don't know of any off-hand.

And as was raised above, why this concern specifically with /r/? Why not with /h/ or /j/ or /ɒ/ or any one of numerous other sounds that differs from dialect to dialect?

To take Ukslim's point above, that "the first syllable of Chochrane, Alberta rhymes with "Mock" whatever accent you have", that would no longer be clear if we followed only the local pronunciation. If we do that, [ˈkɑkrən], then a British reader would have no way of knowing (apart from the spelling) whether they should pronounce the vowel /ɑː/, /ɒ/, or /ɔː/. Okay, they'd probably figure that out from the spelling, but the whole point of the IPA is that the spelling is often insufficient. Take Launceston, Tasmania. If we were to give the local pronunciation, [ˈlɔnsəstən], the naive British reader might take that to mean that they should pronounce it [ˈlɔːnsəstən], when actually they should say [ˈlɒnsəstən]: "[ˈlɔːnsəstən]" is considered erroneous by locals. kwami (talk) 19:30, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

kwami (talk) 18:26, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"York" is pronounced rhyming with "cork" by all English speakers, wherever they are from, so why should it be transcribed differently? That the /r/ should not be pronounced by non-rhotic speakers unless before a vowel is already explained. ― A._di_M.^{2nd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 20:14, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung - are there any changes that you would like to see apart from the deletion of syllable-coda /r/ from English place names? Lfh (talk) 12:49, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My two penn'orth (IPA that...)

Much of the preceding discussion is, as is common with discussions of this type, bogged down in unnecessary (albeit interesting) detail, and the broad picture is being lost therein. I shall, thus, not add more detail. However, Kudpung efficiently sums up this argument in his 'to conclude' section above. If a final 'r' is not pronounced then there should be no IPA symbol for that 'r'. It's a simple concept. If editors are trying to change the way IPA script is pronounced, then I suggest they submit their work to an appropriate journal for peer review. However, there is at the moment one, and only one, way of pronouncing IPA script, and the inclusion of of a final 'r' in the IPA script for 'Worcester', for example, is incompatible with this. If the wikipedia guidelines are not clear in this, then they ought to be rewritten. Fortnum (talk) 17:35, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You are mixing up phonemic with phonetic. We are using a phonemic transcription. Worcester is /ˈwʊster/ in British English, at least in RP. kwami (talk) 18:01, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The broad picture is basically this - the IPA can be used to describe a particular speech utterance precisely ("phonetic"), or to show only the necessary bare structure of a word's pronunciation so that everyone can pronounce it naturally in their own accent (roughly, "phonemic"). The presence of /r/ in a phonemic transcription is not a command that everyone must produce the sound they associate with the letter "r" every time they see it; if your accent systematically excludes its /r/ sound when it is not followed by a vowel, then don't pronounce it in these cases, just as normal. When the IPA is used in this way, it's not true that there is only one way of pronouncing it - the details are left to the reader.

Nobody is trying to revise the IPA, and nobody is claiming that the majority of Britons have a rhotic accent. "Worcester" is transcribed with final /r/ simply so that people who do have rhotic accents (Scots, Irish, Americans, Bristolians etc) can pronounce it correctly in their own accents. Lfh (talk) 18:42, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"There is at the moment one, and only one, way of pronouncing IPA script" only when it is used phonetically (square brackets), not phonemically (slashes). In the latter use, anyone can pick whichever symbol they like for phonemes (or, in our case, diaphonemes). Or would you suggest that we cannot transcribe /rɛd/ but /ɹɛd/ on the grounds that the /r/ isn't pronounced as in Italian? ― A._di_M.^{2nd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 19:30, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion has reached reductio ad absurdum, and much of the side tracking is probably due to participants who may be chiming in without reading the thing from the top, while others may have simply lost the plot. Here again is a bulleted explanation - the items can be taken in any order - readers can take them how they like, but it won't change the facts!

1. The discussion is primarily about the inclusion of sounds in the IPS's rendering of a word, that are neither normally, usually, nor regularly pronounced by the majority of speakers In this instance, it concerns a final, litteral "r' that is hardly pronounced by anybody, whether from New England, Texas, the Scottish Highlands, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Delhi, here in Isan, or in the British colony of Arpeeland.
2. The discussion is secondarily about the false interpretation that Wki editors are making of the IPA, based on flawed Wikipedia articles about the IPA.
3. Unfortunately, some people here are trying to redefine the IPA, or at least being intransigent over their personal interpretation of it.
4. The Wikipedia pages over which the OP has got into a dilemma (those that treat or refer to the IPA) are flawed. So if it's broke, fix it - but please let us listen to what the experts have to say!
5. It is neither logical to defend the encyclopedias erroneous interpretation or implementation of the IPA with statements such as "but here we are using the IPA phonemically", nor to cloud the issue with dubious academic presumptions.
6. Anyone who is mixing up phonemic with phonetic, has clearly failed to notice that IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet - a writing system that contains a very large set of symbols that are capable, when used correctly, of describing fairly accurately all the sounds from the many different 'r's, to the glottal stops, clicks, burps, and prosody that the human voice mechanism can produce. Some of what is written about the IPA on its Wiki page is correct.
7. it is the role of this encyclopedia,at least according to the guidelines, to provide reasonably accurate, reliable information, and in a way that is comprehensible to a broad readership. One gets the impression that some of the participants in this discussion expect the average reader to have a PhD in linguistics - you or I might have, but most readers will want a simple guide to pronunciation without having to follow even more links to translation, transcription, transliteration, phonetic, phonemic, or take a course in linguistics, before they can decipher a prescriptive Wikipeda editor's own way of telling them how they ought to be pronouncing the names of their own home towns.
8. The IPA has been around since before any of us - even me - were born, and it has its own governing body, so if it ain't broke, let us not try to fix it.
9. The Wikipeda is not a 'How to'. Thus it is not an authoritive handbook on the use of the IPA. (See 'prescriptive' use above.)

As previously suggested earlier in the discussion, if anyone feels strongly enough about how the majority (or the minority) of people pronounce a word, then - especially where there are significant differences between 'split' majority use such as AE & BE - they can easily include both variations in the lead of their articles without fear of reprisal (WP:BOLD) and without a silly debate, but please, please, please, take care to get the IPA spelling right. Furthermore, if local minority vernacular also demands clarification, it could be an interesting topic within the body of the article, and in the case of place names, there are thousands of settlement stubs that could do with some extra content!
--Kudpung (talk) 22:57, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As several of us have patiently explained to you, the IPA can be used phonetically or phonemically: that's what the [brackets] vs /slashes/ are for. Also, you have repeatedly failed to provide us with an example of a name/word with the non-existent /r/ that you find so troubling. kwami (talk) 23:36, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I've changed your bullets to numbers so I and others can more easily respond.

1. It is irrelevant whether the amount or variety of non-rhotic speakers are a minority or majority. Rhotic speakers are a significant portion of our readership.

2, 4. what is the flaw?

3, 8. No one is trying to redefine the IPA. A transcription method that you disagree with is not a redefinition. If you've got a problem with this method, that's understandable, but it is absurd to use the label "intransigent" for people arguing for a transcription method that is, itself, reflective of a compromise that you don't seem to believe in.

5, 6. It is also absurd to use the name of the alphabet to argue that our transcription system can't or shouldn't be phonemic. Using IPA for phonemic transcriptions is done all the time and doing so is perfectly correct. That's where the convention of /slashes/ comes from.

7, 9. It's fair criticism to argue that the IPA takes some time to comprehend, but your beef isn't with the IPA and it's not with a pronunciation indicator per say (so the appeal to WP:NOTHOW doesn't fly), it's with our transcription system, which isn't much harder. There's nothing prescriptive about the system, certainly not any more than any other pronunciation indicator.

I'd like to stress that this system is pan-dialectal. It represents the belief that we can use one transcription to represent the pronunciations of all major English dialects. What this means, though, is that the transcription is less phonetically accurate than other systems. As one editor argued last year, nobody pronounces things this way.

Personally, I don't see a benefit of having an article like York feature two pronunciations where the only difference is postvocalic /r/. I would say this even if the tables were turned and American English was non-rhotic and RP was rhotic. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 23:43, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, for other words it is turned around. "Pier", for example, is transcribed as RP (non-rhotic) /ˈpɪər/. Although I instead have /ˈpiːr/, as many (most?) rhotic speakers do, I think it's unnecessary to have two transcriptions, rhotic /ˈpiːr/ and non-rhotic /ˈpɪər/. kwami (talk) 00:18, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

/iːr/ would imply that non-rhotic speakers pronounce "beard" and "bead" the same (and would require explicit syllable boundaries to distinguish "keyring" from "hearing"). (Of course, using /ɑr ɔr/ rather than /ɑːr ɔːr/ implies that some non-rhotic speakers might have a contrastively longer vowel in "father" than in "farther", but a proposal of mine to switch to the latter– and to /ɜːr/ for consistency's sake– was rejected for some reason but which I cannot remember right now.) My personal preference would be using /ɒ ɔ ɔː/ for LOT CLOTH THOUGHT, and consequently /ɒr ɔr ɔːr/ for LOT+/r/ (e.g. sorry tomorrow) CLOTH+/r/ (e.g. foreign origin) NORTH, the difference being based on English-language vowel changes before historic r#Historic "short o" before intervocalic r. But no-one else would agree with that.― A._di_M.^{2nd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 10:58, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ƶ§œš¹, Several of us have explained that this discussion has lost the plot, and that I may not be as wrong as you contend. have you read it from the top? The onus is not on me to provide anything here and I don't need a lecture on the IPA or patience (WP:CIVIL) - This discussion was started because someone who had a problem with a bunch of IPA reverts found out what my job is and asked my advice was asked on my talk page I don't usually get involved with linguistics on the Wikpedia, the encyclopedia is my hobby and invoves mainly places in the UK Midlands, French wine, and Educatioin in Thailand - I prefer to shut off from linguistics when I get home from work.

1. You are perfectly right - It is irrelevant whether the amount or variety of non-rhotic speakers are a minority or majority. Rhotic speakers are a significant portion of our readership. But you have not read what I wrote. Please do so, it will help simplify matters.
2. If you are an expert on the IPA, please find the flaws yourself - see my statement above on my involvement in the Wikipedia - if I were to point them out to you, you would start another discussion. The Wikipeda discussions are supposed to be about the articles we write, and not about the stuff we write about (there is a short cut to that policy too, somewhere.)
3. I do not disagree with the IPA - I think it's a fabulous tool. I(ve been using it for 50 years and I've been teaching it for 30. I do disagree with the way Wikipedia editors are, IMHO, putting their own slant on the way the IPA should be interpreted for use in the Wikipedia, especially when used in the case of words with mute letters in British place names. I do not want my graduate students of ESOL basing their studies and/or research on a totally false pronunciation of Worcestershire, Hereforedshire, or RPshire that had been decided up by the Wikipedia.
4. Who and what is 'our' transcription system? Which are you claiming ownership of? The Wikipedia or the IPA?
5. I never said that York should have two transcriptions, besides which the word has got nothing to do with the current discussion.
6. The belief that we (who again is/are 'we') can use one transcription to represent the pronunciations of all major English dialects, is totally flawed, even if the doyens of the IPA committee think so. The differences are enormous - or have you never travelled? In some parts of Scotland, the spoken English is comletely indecipherable to Brits from the south or the Midlands. Furthermore, if you uphold the pan-dialect notion, what are you going to do about Canadian vs. Metroploitan French, High German vs. Bayerisch, Austrian, and Swiss German, and Lao vs. isan, in all of which I use the IPA as a daily tool (with stress on the International).
   

This discussion has sparked comment on the subject of a more serious nature on other talk pages. At the risk of throwing my toys out of the pram, I won't be replying or trying to be helpful here again.
--Kudpung (talk) 01:52, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My, and I thought that your bulleted list was to help people with a WP:TLDR glaze in their eyes. I have read what you wrote. If you think subtly alluding to "flawed" Wikipedia articles is "helpful" then you're mistaking an encyclopedia talk page for a Victorian novel. Be direct, man.

Other languages are another issue taken up in their respective pronunciation pages. The answer is different for each. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 03:18, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also different because we can assume our readers are familiar with English, though not with our own dialect, but we cannot assume they're familiar with other languages. So a very different approach to transcription is called for: one designed for a native speaker vs. one designed to describe an unknown language.

And I agree that trying to cover all English dialects gets a bit unwieldy, which is one reason we don't cover e.g. Scottish English. kwami (talk) 06:58, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is also one of the last things I'll say here, as sadly we don't seem to have made much progress. Kudpung has consistently distinguished between word-final /r/ ("Worcester") and other instances of post-vocalic /r/ ("York"), and seems to object only to the former. (He says that "York" has nothing to do with this discussion.) I don't understand why, because both /r/'s are silent in RP and sounded (in some form) in rhotic speech. He may be under the impression that rhotic speakers don't distinguish final schwa ("manna") from final rhotic schwa ("manner"). (This is a guess, based on what he has posted; he hasn't given any specific examples.) But if I'm right, then one neat solution is to use /ɚ/ instead of /ər/ for all English names. This is something of a kludge, in that it doesn't really address the underlying cause of dispute - the transcriptions would still be rhotic - but it removes the /r/ which people find so troubling. It couldn't be applied to York or Berkshire, but that is, apparently, another discussion.

The "tear everything down and start again" alternative would be to abandon the pan-dialectal project and collapse the current WP:IPAEN into a set of separate, parallel, mutually exclusive national standards. These would require a lot of work to create (and enforce the use of), and would have at least three drawbacks: the reader would have to navigate multiple IPA keys; there would be necessary ambiguities (see "Cochrane" and "Launceston" above); and it would be unclear which key to use for international words, e.g. "colonel". Kudpung may approve of this idea - he has stated that we shouldn't use the IPA to represent multiple dialects. But I don't think it's likely to happen.

How easy would it be to automate the substitution of /ɚ/ for /ər/ in non-rhotic countries only (so excluding principally North America, Ireland and Scotland)? That would be my vote at this stage, and I can't think of much else to add. Lfh (talk) 08:13, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(Though thinking about it some more, there certainly are users who object to all post-vocalic /r/'s - e.g. it's been removed from Dorset - so maybe this won't solve anything. Running out of ideas here.) Lfh (talk) 08:46, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How about an optional tag to indicate dialect? Transcriptions would be assumed to be pan-dialectal unless they were tagged; Worcester would say something like RP: /wʊstə/, and in these cases only, rhotic speakers would just have to guess which "r"s are silent. Cf. the little subscript tags used for foreign pronunciations, e.g. at Bayreuth. Lfh (talk) 09:47, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, Lfh, I've transcribed quite a few placenames with <ɝː> and <ɚ> for precisely that reason, and you're right, people hardly ever object to it. It's the combination of the IPA and the letter <r>, but not respellings and the letter <r>, which is odd. We could go with <ˈdɔ˞sɨt>, I suppose. The weird thing is that in RP it really is /ˈwʊstər/, with a real /r/. You hear that if you put "is" after it. Well, in real RP, anyway. Maybe not in local Worcester dialect. So we might could say "locally /wʊstə/", but not "RP: /wʊstə/".

As for tagging dialects, we already do that! It's just that for most place names, people don't feel it's worth the clutter. But the primary reason people look to a transcription is to answer the question, "How do I say that?". Not "How do they say that?". kwami (talk) 09:56, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you're right about that last point, then this may all have been a fuss over not very much. Kudpung's no. 1 point above is that people from Texas, New England and Scotland don't pronounce the final "r" in words where we have transcribed /r/, including Worcester, Warwickshire and Hampshire. But they do (well, the ones with rhotic accents do). It only makes a small difference, and using <ɚ> in place of <ər> may help make that clearer. (Ditto <ɝː> vs. <ɜr>.) Lfh (talk) 10:48, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are a fair number of local IPA transcriptions for Aussie place names. For a while, a couple Aussie editors insisted on a narrow phonetic transcription of names that was almost completely opaque to outsiders. I even made an IPA-en-au template for them to use. But you could only make sense of it by referring to the AusEng phonology article. It ended up being a pain, and we eventually agreed to do away with it, with a few place names that are particularly notable being transcribed twice, in generic & in Oz. The rest are mostly just generic now, after other Aussie editors started switching the AusEng IPA to a more traditional transcription, which didn't differ much from what we have here and so lessened the apparent divide. kwami (talk) 11:03, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"The belief that we can use one transcription to represent the pronunciations of all major English dialects" is quite correct. (Whether we should do that depends on what one means by "major".) See Lexical sets: they are groups of words pronounced with the same vowel (modulo allophonic variations) by all speakers of a particular group of dialects. The vowel in "cut" as pronounced nowadays in southern England differs from the way it was pronounced fifty years ago, or from the way it is pronounced in Wales or America, or from the way it is pronounced in Scotland; but everyone pronounces "cut" rhyming with "strut", as well as with "shut" or "hut"; so they are in the same lexical set. There are words which don't fit in the scheme, such as adult which has different stressed syllables on different sides of the Atlantic; for them, we need give dual transcriptions, but they are rare.

The list of Standard Lexical Sets by Wells (1982) is intended to cover Received Pronunciation and General American; it happens to cover all accents making no more distinctions than that, e.g. Canadian English. Note how the vowels of our transcription system closely map to Standard Lexical Sets, except for BATH and CLOTH; but that's not a big deal, because very few accents have a three way TRAP-BATH-PALM distinction, and AFAIK none has a three-way THOUGHT-CLOTH-LOT distinction.

There are lists of lexical sets which cover (almost) all extant English dialects, such as KIT, DRESS, TRAP, BAD, LOT, STRUT, FOOT, BATH, DANCE, CLOTH, NURSE, TERM, DIRT, FLEECE, BEAM, FACE, TRAIL, FREIGHT, PALM, THOUGHT, GOAT, SNOW, GOOSE, THREW, PRICE, CHOICE, MOUTH, NEAR, SQUARE, START, NORTH, FORCE, CURE. It'd be more complicated to have a transcription covering all them (how do you transcribe stirrer so as to show that it's not a "pan-dialectal rhyme" with either mirror or referrer?), but not impossible in principle; the reason why we don't do that is that of WP:OR: I don't think we'd be able to find many reliable sources stating whether gauge has the FACE vowel, the TRAIL vowel, or the FREIGHT vowel; or whether colonel has the NURSE vowel, the TERM vowel, or the DIRT vowel; or whether axion has the TRAP vowel or the BAD vowel; and so on. ― A._di_M.^{2nd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 13:59, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When should we use this? Is it ever phonemic? On WP I've only ever seen it used for what is phonemically /t/ (in English). Lfh (talk) 18:17, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Hawaii". I suppose that could be made a local pronunciation using IPA2, and glottal stop dropped from here. kwami (talk) 21:49, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, I forgot Hawaii. Feel silly now. Ah well; last question - is there any reason (in terms of this key) not to drop the /ə/ from syllabic /l/, /m/, /n/, so that e.g. /ˈkɛtəl/ and /ˈkɛtl/ would be interchangeable? Or should it always be with /ə/? Lfh (talk) 22:05, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Same question. I think there are speakers who distinguish Severn /ˈsevən/ ~ seven /ˈsevn/. In this particular case it happens not to matter because we'd transcribe the former as /ˈsevərn/ in the diaphonic transcription, but the point is that our system doesn't allow this distinction, in general. (For some speakers, there's not much difference in monomorphemic words but there's one in compounds, e.g. simpler is monosyllabic but tunnelling is disyllabic; a way to transcribe that would be /sɪmpl/ and /tʌnəl/, even if you couldn't tell the difference from the pronunciation of the base words alone.) ― A._di_M.^{2nd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 22:24, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We'd have to add syllabicity marks under the /l/, /m/, /n/, which would have the usual problems of diacritics, but we could go that way if people feel it's preferable. kwami (talk) 02:07, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Would there be any problem if (for example) simple were transcribed /ˈsɪmpl/ with neither a schwa or a syllabicity mark? After all, that's what most dictionaries do. ― A._di_M.^{2nd Dramaout} (formerly Army1987) 16:06, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not bothered either way, but I brought it up because someone objected to the schwa that I added to Oundle, and I wondered if this was a common issue. It's hard to tell what most users prefer, or if most even have a preference in this case. But I see Wiktionary often uses neither the schwa nor the syll. mark. Lfh (talk) 17:18, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Funny, I just got done with a dispute over the pronunciation of Wednesday, with an editor using that very Wiktionary convention to argue that /ˈwɛdnzdeɪ/ is disyllabic! It would seem from that exchange that this is not always clear to people. Better IMO to stick to an obvious indication of syllabicity, of which schwa is the easiest. (At least, that was the consensus when we set up the IPA-en table.) kwami (talk) 08:36, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

One of the arguments people have used in rejecting the generic English IPA is that we don't use it at New York. I figured that wasn't worth the headache, since everyone knows how "new" is pronounced, but in the interest of balance and consistency, we really should. I made it IPA-en compatible about 3 weeks ago, and it was stable until tonight. Now I'm at 3RR (but so is the other guy). It doesn't appear that he is interested in reading the MOS. A little help please? kwami (talk) 08:30, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This study found that pronouncing new with a /j/ was perceived by North American native speakers of English as second-least serious in a selection of common errors in GenAm pronunciation by Dutch learners. Even pronouncing tell as [tʰɛlˤ] instead of [tʰɛlˠ] was in average deemed more serious. So where does all that drama come from when anyone tries to transcribe it with /nju:/? ― A._di_M. (formerly Army1987) 11:17, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

From the same place that opposition to /ˈjɔrk/ in England comes from, I guess. Most people are used to reading dictionaries based on a single national standard, and the notion of a "generic English" is unfamiliar. They don't always realise straight away that "generic English" is not a specific dialect but an abstraction from several. Lfh (talk) 11:35, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The opposition is often put in nationalistic terms. The first person to revert the IPA for New York objected to using a "British" pronunciation for the US. The objections of the quite hostile person reverting the IPA for Melbourne was that it was an "American" pronunciation.

But in this case, we have <j>, which Americans find rather off-putting. We even substitute <y> for <j> when using the IPA in the US! kwami (talk) 11:39, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'd also say that there's a difference between auditory perception and phonetic transcription. American Ears aren't really cued to hear the yod after alveolars, though we can clearly see the j transcribed. Is it irrelevant that New York dialect#vowels includes a marginal diphthong /ɪu/? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:03, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We could certainly add that to the local transcription. kwami (talk) 20:13, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Local transcriptions? Does this mean we have the final go ahead to write our British place names in IPA the way we Brits pronounce them, without risk of the Americans tying to teach us how we ought to be speaking English and reverting our edits?--Kudpung (talk) 02:48, 19 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This has been the policy for quite some time. IMHO, local transcriptions are more appropriate when they're not predictable from the diaphonemic transcription. I'd also hesitate to include pronunciations from any of the standard accents. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:06, 19 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung, you don't seem to grasp the point of including the IPA. It's not for the locals: they already know the pronunciation of their town. It's for others who don't already know. And of course we need to give the pronunciation in a way that readers will be able to use it in their own dialect. That means Brits knowing how to pronounce US place names in RP, if that is what they speak, as well as Americans knowing how pronounce British place names in GA. It doesn't do much good to tell s.o. how to pronounce it in the local dialect if they don't speak the local dialect. The only concession to GA is that the system is rhotic -- but then half of the UK is rhotic! Meanwhile, the vowels are those of RP, without all the mergers that GA has undergone. Yanks have more reason to complain about the Brits pushing their language than vice versa. And I really don't understand the stance of so many English, such as apparently yourself, that the rest of the UK is unworthy of consideration. kwami (talk) 08:52, 19 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure where else to post this, but here goes. Instead of clicking on the typical IPA representation and being taken to this page with a huge chart of all the symbols and example pronunciations, why not dynamically put the word that was clicked on at the top of the webpage and extract out the relevant rows from the IPA chart in order. And the reader can then read it off quickly without going through the whole chart. This might be more suitable as a browser addon or greasemonkey script, but I just wanted to get the idea out there. If this would be better posted somewhere else on Wikipedia, please let me know, or just cut/paste it yourself. Thanks. --Rajah (talk) 01:45, 19 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know any details, but something vaguely like this seems to be in development. Try taking a look at Template:IPAc-en, or asking the regular contributors to that template. Lfh (talk) 09:13, 19 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have seen "ɑ" in pronunciations for various articles (and treated as something separate from "ɑː" and "ɑr" in linguistics articles), but I don't see it on the table here. Can someone help? -Rrius (talk) 07:54, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"ɑ" is a common way of writing the North American pronunciation of vowels like "hot" or "father", but it shouldn't really be used here because we use /ɒ/ and /ɑː/ respectively, which are the RP pronunciations. Any instance of /ɑ/ on WP should be corrected. But you'll see it in other sources. Lfh (talk) 09:25, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Could you tell us which ones? We clean them up occasionally, but there are tens of thousands to go through, so we avoid that if we can! kwami (talk) 19:34, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The most recent one was Maori, but I've run into the same problem before and been stymied on looking here. It's long enough ago that I don't remember where exactly. -Rrius (talk) 07:22, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It seems Maori originally had /ˈmɑːɔri/, before being changed to the current confusing version. I guess that should be reverted. That's not actually a US/UK thing though, just an anomaly. Lfh (talk) 10:57, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

From kwami's talk page

[...] I would like to link the IPA symbols to the respective phoneme articles like I have done for Wikipedia:IPA for French and Wikipedia:IPA for Mandarin. I think doing this is quite useful, because those articles normally contain a sound clip to illustrate pronunciation. I'd be interested to know what you think about the idea. Thank you. 122.25.253.166 (talk) 09:24, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

[...] Links to sound files would be harmful, because you'd be choosing a specific dialect as the Wikipedia standard for English; no matter which sound files you chose, you'd exclude large numbers of people. (French and Mandarin are not a problem, because we transcribe Parisian French and Beijing Mandarin. But we don't specify English words and RP, GA, Oz, etc.; when we do, we link them to the generic IPA template, not the English one.) Remember, this is a (dia)phonemic system, not a phonetic one, so there aren't actually specific sounds associated with the IPA letters. kwami (talk) 09:54, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks.

IPA: From the IPA article, "The general principle of the IPA is to provide one symbol for each distinctive sound". It is therefore a language-independent, one-to-one map from symbols to sounds. The various English variations map one word to many regionalised sequences of IPA symbols. See this entry in the Cambridge dictionary for example, showing /pɒd/ for UK and /pɑːd/ for US. So /ɒ/ still maps to the same sound for both dialects, and likewise /ɑ/, only they are used in different .

In this respect, I think much of the contents of that article, especially the "Understanding the key" section, are wrong and confusing. This should probably be brought up in the talk section of the article. 122.25.253.166 (talk) 10:23, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, go ahead. That's what the talk page is for!

Not quite. "One symbol, one sound" means it is language dependent. There are uncountably many sounds in human languages; it would be impossible to create a separate symbol for each. Rather, the idea is that each language should be able to distinguish its own phonemes with one symbol for each—unless, of course, no-one speaking that language sits on the board of the IPA, in which case it's not important enough to bother with. (There are hundreds of languages for which the IPA attempt at being phonemic is inadequate.)

Each symbol does have a defined sound, or range of sounds, but this approach to the IPA is incompatible with the first. For example, pod is /pɒd/ in the UK but /pɑːd/ in the US. So if you had a sound file for pod, would you use it to illustrate /ɒ/ or /ɑː/? And would that mean that speakers of the other dialect don't know how to properly speak English?

We distinguish these two uses of the IPA with [brackets] for phonetics and /slashes/ for phonemics. You have a phonetic approach. It won't work for a phonemic transcription. kwami (talk) 10:38, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I confess that I never really understood the difference between phonemics and phonetic approaches, which is probably why all my beliefs are crumbling apart in this conversation. I will give it another think, thank you for your help.

In any case, I do think that there is a misunderstanding. I am not proposing we add sound files for the words in the examples. I am proposing we link the IPA symbols to the respective articles. Please do have a look at my recent changes in Wikipedia:IPA for French and Wikipedia:IPA for Mandarin. For example I would link "ɑ" to Open back unrounded vowel. That page already has one single sound sample (which is language-independent) which is univocally associated to that IPA symbol. If for some reason doing the same thing in this article would make it more confusing, then it is in my opinion a signal that there is something fundamentally wrong with the article itself.

In fact, I do believe that having words as examples to explain the symbols is in general just backwards; it deliberately introduces exactly the kind of confusion that IPA aims at resolving! So, if we use (as we are using) "pod" as an example for /ɒ/, then according to one reliable source this is going to confuse American readers, who will think that /ɒ/ stands for the /ɑː/ sound.

So, to answer your question, if I had a sound file for "pod" (pronounced how by the way?), I would not use it, certainly not in this page. It might be a better idea to put an American pronunciation of "pod" as an example for /ɑː/ in an American version of this article, and a British pronunciation as an example for /ɒ/ in a British version of this article.

I just had a look at IPA chart for English dialects, and that to me looks like Carrollian nonsense. The table for vowels is saying that /ɛ/ is pronounced in two different ways depending on your accent. Recursively, these two different ways are also described with IPA, as /e/ and... wwwwhat?? /ɛ/.

I have probably stepped in a parallel universe, it's like someone is trying to prove Goedel's theorem with phonetics. :-) 122.25.253.166 (talk) 12:15, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You touch on two different issues.

Firstly, this key includes some distinctions that are made in British English but not American English. For example, "bomb" (/ˈbɒm/) is distinguished from "balm" (/ˈbɑːm/). Those words have the vowels [ɒ] and [ɑː] in Britain, but in America they both have [ɑː], because American English has merged those vowels and doesn't actually have [ɒ]. So if you're American, you simply remember that they are (from your perspective) the same thing, so "bomb" and "balm" would be homophones for you. The catch is that if /ɒ/ were actually linked to open back rounded vowel, it would provide Americans with the wrong sound for their accent. But by giving written examples (e.g. "bomb" or "pod"), the key is just saying 'whenever you see /ɒ/, pronounce it as you would in "pod"'.

Secondly, some other vowels differ depending on accent, not because they have merged with anything else, but just by way of regional variation. This is your [ɛ, e] example: the vowel of "bed" has a quality that is closer to [ɛ] in Britain and America but closer to [e] in Australia and New Zealand. It's not a meaningful difference, just a trend in accents. So we can write that vowel as /ɛ/ invariably, and how you actually pronounce it depends on where you come from. It's not recursive, because /ɛ/ is not meant to be a specific sound: where you see /ɛ/, that just means 'give it whatever vowel you would give "bed"'. That specific vowel may be [ɛ] or [e]. Lfh (talk) 13:52, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your patience, I think I'm starting to understand.

Basically, IPA symbols are used for two purposes:

• With slashes, the sounds they refer to are a function of the region of the speaker's dialect. This function is found at IPA chart for English dialects.
• With square brackets, they refer to specific sounds (still with a certain level of tolerance of course!), and this is what an article like Open back unrounded vowel are about. (This is the background I'm coming from.)

Correct?

If so, I still think that it was a poor idea to re-use the same symbols for a different meaning. However, I accept that this confusing mess may be the state of the world. Therefore, one thing I would definitely suggest is that we (i.e. Wikipedia) *always* make it clear whether it's a /ɛ/ or a [ɛ] we are talking about, starting with this article, but also IPA chart for English dialects, which should make it crystal clear that it's mapping /ɛ/ to [ɛ] and [e], and not just randomly mapping ɛ to ɛ and e, because that is just illogical.

I'm still wondering if the whatever is pointing to the current page shouldn't list all pronunciations (like the Cambridge dictionary is doing) in those cases where there are regional differences, but maybe this would be too much work and more importantly it would look too cluttering on such pages... So maybe I'm starting appreciating why a page like this has been created.

But then, why not bypassing this article altogether and make it point to IPA chart for English dialects? Once we use // on the left (diaphoneme) and [] on the entries on the right (phones) and we link the phones to the appropriate articles, that's much better I think, no?

Sorry for the rambling post.

205.228.108.185 (talk) 07:19, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Further, shouldn't the Template:IPA disambiguate which IPA-based meta-language it's referring to? Currently it says, "Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)", but according to what we said that's ambiguous. It should mention whether it's a [IPA] or an /IPA/, if that makes sense. 125.170.158.52 (talk) 13:27, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that description sounds about right to me. The slashes indicate phonemes rather than sounds. (And the pronunciation of a phoneme can be a function not only of dialect, but of its position within a word - see complementary distribution.) Lexical set is worth reading as well.

I guess the IPA chart for English dialects could be augmented with a sentence explaining that the bold column ("Diaphonemes") represents phonemes, while the other columns contain phones. I'm guessing the /slashes/ and [brackets] were left out simply for display reasons - but as for linking the phones to articles, that may run into problems of precision; you'd definitely need to raise the issue at that talk page first.

Template:IPA doesn't automatically include // or [] because you're expected to enter those manually as appropriate. AFAIK they should only be omitted in tables, like the English dialects chart, where a surfeit of brackets would give the reader a headache. Of course it should then be made clear whether they're phones or phonemes. (In contrast, the language-specific templates add brackets automatically.) Lfh (talk) 16:05, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I want to call to question Kwami's stated interpretation of "one symbol, one sound." While the precise phonetic details may vary from language to language, each symbol has a fairly narrow range of what they can acceptably represent within square brackets. So the [k] of English may be a little bit more back in the throat than that of Arabic, but they're both within a range of variance that human ears don't really perceive so that they are considered, basically, one sound. This range is different depending on the symbol. The acceptable range for [m] is much narrower than that for [c].

I don't think that's different from what Kwami believes, but the way he worded it prompted the anon user to believe that the IPA is ambiguous enough without contextualization as to be unhelpful. It isn't. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 22:11, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, so since IPA is apparently two meta-languages in one ([IPA] and /IPA/), shouldn't we have two templates, accordingly? Say what you mean! Each template would obviously auto-add the // or [] marks. Also, the [IPA] template (language-independent) could link each symbol directly to the corresponding phone article (so if I don't know one specific phone I can look it up directly), and the /IPA/ template would accept an argument (the language) and link to one of these articles (Wikipedia:IPA for Xxx). Thoughts? 125.175.125.117 (talk) 14:26, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oooh, I notice we already have Template:IPA-en, presumably one for each language. That's good! How about [IPA]? Lemme see... 125.175.125.117 (talk) 14:29, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ha! But the following usages are contradicting what we said in this conversation:

• {{IPA-en|n|IPA}} → IPA: /n/
• {{IPA-en|n|US}} → English pronunciation: /n/
• {{IPA-en|n|UK}} → English pronunciation: /n/

Uhm... 125.175.125.117 (talk) 14:34, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, the other one is at Template:IPAc-en, but there I can also see inconsistencies with our conversation... 125.175.125.117 (talk) 14:38, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The US and UK switches are for words which actually take different phonemes in British and American English: for example "basil", which is /ˈbæzəl/ in Britain and /ˈbeɪzəl/ in America. In such cases, the differences are not predictable from the accents, and both transcriptions are phonemic.

In outline, we already have what you're asking for: there's a list of language-specific templates at Template:Usage of IPA templates. They all automatically use [] (except English which uses //), and link to an explanatory key. The keys for foreign languages are based on a single dialect and are basically phonetic. There is also an IPA-all which links to Wikipedia:IPA, with sound samples for most of the common phones.

The IPAc-en template is, so I understand, a work in progress. Lfh (talk) 17:43, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. "words which actually take different phonemes in British and American English" - OK, so /IPA/ is not only inconsistent, it is also incomplete :-)

My point is, why do you write "/ˈbæzəl/ in Britain and /ˈbeɪzəl/ in America"? Surely in such cases you want to bypass one level of confusion and write "[ˈbæzəl] in Britain and [ˈbeɪzəl] in America". That's why I think that the three template usages above have no reason to exist and should be deprecated. 122.26.128.38 (talk) 14:21, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, why wouldn't you? They have different phonemes, so they are appropriately illustrated with a transcription at the level of the phoneme. A phonetic transcription would introduce irrelevant detail. For example, "tomato" would be [tʰəˈmɑːtʰəʊ] in Britain and [tʰəˈmeɪɾoʊ] in America. These differ in three ways, only one of which is relevant to the word "tomato".

What's wrong with the IPA switch? Lfh (talk) 16:06, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I think I finally got it, thanks. 114.149.25.167 (talk) 01:02, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

122, we try to avoid picking one dialect over the others. A phonetic transcription like you suggest would only work for a single dialect. As for the IPA being inconsistent and incomplete because "BASE-l" is transcribed differently than "BAZZ-l", I don't follow you. That's like saying the dictionary is inconsistent and incomplete because "pram" is spelled differently than "baby carriage". kwami (talk) 20:04, 26 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"A phonetic transcription like you suggest would only work for a single dialect" - That's why I thought it would be the most appropriate transcription when singling out dialects. However, Lfh's example shows that there is some merit to using // even in these cases. 114.149.25.167 (talk) 01:02, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It depends on what you need it for. If you want to show that one dialect has an /r/ and one doesn't, then yes, // is better. However, if you want to show the reader how the name is actually pronounced in the local dialect, then [] is better. kwami (talk) 06:26, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, some RP speakers do pronounce "Anglia is" with an R. See Intrusive R. ― A._di_M. (formerly Army1987) 16:16, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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]

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]

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]