Help talk:IPA/English
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Latest comment: 10 days ago by Nardog in topic Colons for length symbols
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The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?
The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.
For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it. Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion. The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.
Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{IPA-all}} or {{IPA-endia}}. The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.
The English rhotic is pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic. |
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A minor dispute on whether IPA-en should be included for this tennis player. I maintain that Gauff is a very unusual and non-intuitive name in the English-speaking world, but the other editor disagrees. We have IPA-en for Jessica Biel, Alicia Silverstone and Joe Biden, so why should her article be any different? Mac Dreamstate (talk) 21:08, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
- It's the normal pronunciation for those who have "cot-caught merger" plus "father-bother merger"... AnonMoos (talk) 16:56, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
- @AnonMoos: But for those have neither merger (like me), it would be helpful. Is it /ɡaʊf/, /ɡɔːf/ or /ɡɒf/? Bazza 7 (talk) 09:09, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
- This key is WP:DIAPHONEMIC. Nardog (talk) 10:14, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
- @Nardog: I'm not sure how that's pertinent. As discussed elsewhere by Mac Dreamstate, my British English stumbled on that name: /ɡaʊf/ (gowf) came first, then /ɡɔːf/ (gawf), then /ɡɒf/ (gof).
- I see that User_talk:Fyunck(click) reinstated the referenced original guide /ˈɡɑːf/ GAHF, which is just as well as it wasn't on my internal list of three distinct pronunciations. Bazza 7 (talk) 11:25, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
- I was replying to AnonMoos. /ɑː/ is indeed the vowel for those with father–bother and cot–caught mergers, but it's a non-option for a diaphonemic notation. We need what those without the mergers pronounce it (the LOT–CLOTH split is also potentially relevant here, but given the subject is American—from the South no less—we could assume its presence; see the note at the end of the "Key" section). Nardog (talk) 11:32, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
- @Nardog: My apologies for not paying attention to your accurate indentation. And thanks for your concise and understandable explanation. Bazza 7 (talk) 11:35, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
- From what I can tell, American speakers without the cot-caught merger pronounce the name as /ɡɔf/, not /ɡɑf/. This makes sense as it corresponds to the spelling. I have therefore changed the pronunciation guide to this. Referencing Gauff's own pronunciation is useless as she has a PALM-LOT-THOUGHT merged accent, so her /ɑ/ phoneme corresponds to three separate Wikipedia diaphonemes. Offa29 (talk) 13:32, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
- I was replying to AnonMoos. /ɑː/ is indeed the vowel for those with father–bother and cot–caught mergers, but it's a non-option for a diaphonemic notation. We need what those without the mergers pronounce it (the LOT–CLOTH split is also potentially relevant here, but given the subject is American—from the South no less—we could assume its presence; see the note at the end of the "Key" section). Nardog (talk) 11:32, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Distinction between /æ/ in "trap" and "bad" edit
The latter is extended in most accents I've heard, so surely should include : like in /ɑː/ and /iː/. I'm not seeing it on the table. Mac Dreamstate (talk) 12:21, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- @Mac Dreamstate: Checking three reliable sources:
- dictionary.com shows /træp/; /bæd/
- Merriam Webster shows /ˈtrap/; /ˈbad/
- OED shows /trap/ (Br), /træp/ (US); /bad/ (Br), /bæd/ (US)
- So although the "a" may vary in sound between English variants, the same sound is used within a variant for "trap" and "bad". Bazza 7 (talk) 12:50, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- Weird. To me they sound as different as /ɪ/ and /iː/. I'm not going to call into question anyone's linguistic credentials, but it's like someone's missing a trick somewhere. Mac Dreamstate (talk) 13:25, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- @Mac Dreamstate: Someone else might want to contribute here and provide some better references. I was, I confess, surprised by the sources. I think I know what you're alluding to; we might, from our seats on this side of the pond, respectfully call it a "drawl". Bazza 7 (talk) 14:12, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- Weird. To me they sound as different as /ɪ/ and /iː/. I'm not going to call into question anyone's linguistic credentials, but it's like someone's missing a trick somewhere. Mac Dreamstate (talk) 13:25, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- It isn't a phonemic difference. A speaker's phonetic realizations might be transcribed as [træp] and [bæːd] but it's one phoneme, written /æ/. On the other hand, considering only my own (eastern US) speech, I don't see why, in contrast, the phonemes /ɑː/ and /iː/ are marked long. To me, the vowels in "beat" and "bead" differ in length in the same way as "bat" and "bad", so it isn't clear to me why the phoneme behind one pair would be explicitly marked long and the other one not. Perhaps there are enough examples of English around the world with long vowels in both "beat" and "bead" and short vowels in both "bat" and "bad" that it makes sense. Largoplazo (talk) 22:41, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- There is a phonemic distinction made in some accents of English: the Pronunciation of English ⟨a⟩#Bad–lad split. However this is not accounted for in the transcription system, presumably because it is not featured in most dictionaries. It is far from the only possible phonemic distinction omitted; cf. the horse-hoarse and fir-fur-fern distinctions in Scottish and Irish English. Offa29 (talk) 02:49, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
- 200 days ago? 50.231.115.70 (talk) 12:20, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
Double entry edit
Why is ɪ appearing twice, both under "Vowels" and "Weak vowels"? If we need two entries here, I would expect separate symbols (even if one is a modification of the other with a combining mark of some kind). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:05, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
- I believe the double entries for //ɪ// and //oʊ// are mainly there for historic reasons, back from the day when we were propagating our own idiosyncratic symbols for the weak vowel versions of the two. I have tentatively unified the symbols, keeping all the content. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 06:11, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
Colons for length symbols edit
In the 3rd bullet point of the Dialect variation section colons are used in place of length symbols:
- Most speakers of North American English (with the exception of Eastern New England) do not distinguish between the vowels in father /'fɑ:ðər/ and bother /'bɒðər/, pronouncing the two words as rhymes. If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between the symbols /ɑ:/ and /ɒ/.
I think they need to be replaced. 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:B1A9:DA55:640A:FC65 (talk) 20:13, 1 May 2024 (UTC)