Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 June 7

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June 7

Dictionaries' ways of representing oo sounds

The Childcraft dictionary uses oo as its representation of the sound in book, and u with a macron to represent the sound in moon.

The Macmillan dictionary for children uses a 2-dot u for the sound in moon and a 1-dot u for the sound in book.

Other dictionaries uses oo with the macron for the sound in moon and plain oo for the sound in book.

Why are dictionaries so inconsistent with respect to their pronunciation keys on how to represent these sounds?? Georgia guy (talk) 19:47, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Not invented here?  --Lambiam 22:29, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Not sure I have a good answer for "why". My guess is that there's just no particular reason you would expect them to be consistent, given that there's no uniform representation scheme they're trying to match. However, if you want a good summary of the differences (not just for these two vowels, but for lots of phonemes) see pronunciation respelling for English. --Trovatore (talk) 22:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Maybe cause a lot of American English and possibly other speakers would see it like the other dictionaries (and buk can then be buck, būk can be byuke (not a real monophthong?), bōk can be boke, bōōk can be buke or a really idiosyncratic book (/book/), bok can be bock, bīk can be bike, bik can be bick, bēk can be beak, bek can be beck, bāk can be bake, bak can be back, and bək can then be the schwa AKA the lazy vowel which just sounds like a barked bek here and we're already at the point where many Americans would stop caring about or even hearing the differences with even more English monophthongs of the world. I look at the other few vowels in America alone and I'm like how the fuck are these phonemes? Cot vs caught. Wut? And Mary and marry are barely distinct in intentionally uncasual speech, who the fuck even cares if you say merry slightly sloppy like mar(r)y, but the three aren't merging in parts of the world apparently. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:58, 12 June 2020 (UTC)