Help talk:IPA/Japanese/Archive 2

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Palatalized [ʲ] or approximant [j]?

I just noticed that the Tokyo article has long indicated the pronunciation as [toːkʲoː], with a palatal diacritic [ʲ] that's not listed on this page. As palatalization would affect countless transcriptions, I think we should come to a consensus whether to transcribe it as [ʲ] or [j]. Japanese phonology is ambiguous on the matter, I don't know enough about Japanese to chime in myself, and someone eventually needs to go through the transcriptions and standardize them. — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 17:34, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like a [kj] sequence to me, and that's how I usually see it. — kwami (talk) 04:02, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

I just realized, [ʲ] is indeed necessary not just because of Yōon /kj, mj, rj, gj, bj, pj/ but especially because /ki, mi, ri, gi, bi, pi/ are also palatalized and to notate them as [ki, mi, ɾi, bi, pi] would be wildly inconsistent with the narrowness of the rest of the transcription such as devoicing and nasal vowels (if we didn't need them we might as well only use Romanization). In addition, [kj] and [kʲ] contrast phonetically anyway. Nardog (talk) 22:04, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Maybe someone changed the recording, but the current one definitely does not have [kj] but [kʲ]. I have [kʲ] in my native language (Polish) and we don't use it before the mid back vowel, we use [kʲj] instead. The difference is very obvious to me. Mr KEBAB (talk) 19:17, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Glothal stop and gemination

Don't you guys think that the entrance on ʔ/っ (sokuon is a little vague or not thorough enough at least? It not only lacks in examples, but also does not mention the whole idea behind the gemination (jap. 長子音, chōshi-in) occurring in "nm" clusters, as in 專門 (せんもん) being pronounced as [semʔmonꜜ] or [sem:on] (with doubled /m/ separated with a glothal stop) or in 最悪 (さいあく) being [saj:aku] with doubled /j/ also separated with a glothal stop. I guess it might not be gemination but rather something sandhi-ish (jap. 連声, renjō), but that's not my area of expertise anyway. I just think it's worth including.
Vegeta391 (talk) 14:57, 13 February 2017 (UTC).

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Help talk:IPA which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 16:16, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

"j" as affricate

The article Mount Fuji tells us it's pronounced [ɸɯꜜdʑisaɴ]. This surprises me (and doesn't seem to accord with what's written in this help page). Why the affricate /dʑ/ and not simply /ʑ/?

OTOH if it is correct, then what's written on this help page needs some correction or elaboration. -- Hoary (talk) 01:42, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

@Hoary: It should be [ɸɯꜜʑisaɴ], or at the very least [ɸɯꜜ(d)ʑisaɴ]. As the footnote explains, /z/ is highly variable, so it should be [z, ʑ] intervocalically and [dz, dʑ] otherwise in our reasonably broad yet non-phonemic system, unless to illustrate the presence or absence of the affrication among certain speakers. There are dialects that retain one or both of the contrasts between [z] and [dz] and between [ʑ] and [dʑ], but Standard Japanese isn't one. See Labrune 2012:64 and Yotsugana for more. Nardog (talk) 17:42, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

ɾʲ is approximated by "dew"?!

That has to be wrong. They sound nothing alike. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.80.164.161 (talk) 06:24, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

It is not a mistake. The alveolar tap [ɾ] occurs in major varieties of English only as an intervocalic allophone of /t/ and /d/ (see Flapping). But as far as I know flapping in English doesn't occur before [j], e.g. hit you usually becomes [hɪʔjuː] or [hɪtʃuː], but not [hɪɾjuː]. [ɾ] essentially is a really short [d], hence dew [dj]. If dew sounds nothing like Japanese /rj/ to you, that's probably because you pronounce it the same as do (yod-dropping).

But upon second thought, guardian may be better. There /d/ could become [ɾ] and /i/ could become [j], and it's less subject to dialectal biases. Nardog (talk) 06:57, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Using party in this example is misleading because it relies on the /d/ preferred pronunciation, even though many people use the /t/ form. Due to the dialect bias, this word should be avoided. Using better for /ɾ/ has the same issue, as most people pronounce better with the /t/ instead of the /d/. Children might pronounce it with a /d/ but most adults lean towards the /t/.139.140.219.197 (talk) 21:21, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Party is pronounced with [ɾ] in dialects that feature intervocalic alveolar flapping. For example, it's [ˈpʰɑːɾi] in American English. With the flapping phenomenon, there is often a merger of /t/ and /d/ so that it's meaningless to call one pronunciation a "/d/ preferred pronunciation" or "/t/ form." Even when there isn't a complete merger, the distinction is maintained by the length of the preceding vowel (so that the first vowel of writer is shorter than rider) while the flap itself is the same. Guardian would work better than dew, whether or not the /d/ is followed by a [j] or a [i]. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 15:19, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Inconsistency in gemination

The way the key was put together allowed two (or three if you count nothing) ways to notate gemination, by ⟨ː⟩ (length mark) and by ⟨◌̚⟩ (no audible release). But in other languages that have gemination, such as Latin, Italian, Arabic, we just repeat the consonant. The use of length mark is allowed in Catalan and Tamil according to the respective keys, but this doesn't suit for Japanese when syllabification is taken into consideration (see Japanese phonology#Gemination). We should follow Latin etc. It's much simpler. Nardog (talk) 12:04, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

き as kʲ is inaccurate

It should be k, just as with く and け. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 07:09, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, name one scholar who says so. All consonants of Japanese are heavily palatalized before /i/, either phonetically or phonologically. Try saying just the consonant of き ki, and then あ a, う u, or お o. You will get きゃ/きゅ/きょ kya/kyu/kyo rather than か/く/こ ka/ku/ko.

In fact some linguists (e.g. Vance 2008, Akamatsu 1997) phonemically group the consonant of き ki with that of きゃ/きゅ/きょ kya/ki/kyu/kyo rather than with か/く/け/こ ka/ku/ke/ko. In other words, they analyze きゃ/き/きゅ/きょ as /kʲ/ + /a, i, u, o/, rather than as /kja, ki, kju, kjo/. Nardog (talk) 10:18, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

See, this is where you are showing your lack of knowledge. There is only one "consonant" in Japanese, and that's the syllabic ん. Everything else is a syllable. きあ does not sound like きゃ. It's not even close. The same with きう/きゅ and きお/きょ. They are completely different. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:36, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Of course Japanese has consonants. Every language has vowels and consonants. I think you're mistaking morae for segments. き is a mora (orthographically, a syllabogram), which is composed of a consonant and a vowel.

Here is what Okada (1999:118) says:

Consonants generally are strongly palatalized before /i/, as /mi/ [mʲi] 'body' ... /j/ affects the preceding consonant as /i/ does, and is itself absorbed, thus: /mjakú/ [mʲakú] 'pulse', /tˢja/ [tɕa] 'tea', /sjóː/ [ɕóː] 'prize', /kanjuː/ [kaɲ̟uː] 'joining'.

And you can demonstrate this by trying to say only the k part of き ki but not the い i part, immediately followed by, e.g., あ a. The resulting sound would resemble きゃ kya more than か ka.

And this is something no scientist would argue with. It is only whether the sound, which is phonetically, inarguably, [kʲi], is better represented as [kʲi] or [ki] in Wikipedia's own IPA-based transcription scheme for Japanese words that could be open to debate. Nardog (talk) 18:51, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Apparently you speak for all scientists? Are you a scientist? Please don't try to bolster your argument by making wild and completely unfounded claims to authority which doesn't exist. If you say just the "k" part of き followed by あ, you get か, not きゃ. You never get きゃ. Your argument makes no sense to anyone with more than a rudimentary grasp of Japanese. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 21:25, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

@Nihonjoe: Judging by the IPA and my experience with other languages and phonetics in general, he is right. You should start providing sources for your claims, otherwise it just looks like you're the one appealing to authority which doesn't exist (or not even that). This is no place for WP:OR. Mr KEBAB (talk) 10:33, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm not a scientist but I can cite scientists. The quote above is from the book Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, published by Cambridge University Press. (Do these organizations' names signal anything to you?)

I also happen to have this newly published book 『日本語の音』 (Nihongo no oto, "Sound of Japanese") right in front of me, which says the following (p. 37):

拗音のうち，キャ行 [kʲ]，ギャ行 [ɡʲ]，キ゚ャ行 [ŋʲ]，ビャ行 [bʲ]，ピャ行 [pʲ]，ミャ行 [mʲ]，リャ行 [rʲ] には，[j] が付随する．それは，[k] [ɡ] [ŋ] の調音点が軟口蓋，[b] [p] [m] は両唇，[ɾ] は歯茎であるため，拗音（[j] があること）また母音が [i] の際には硬口蓋寄りの調音点になる．キ・ギ・キ゚・ビ・ピ・ミ・リについても精密表記では [kʲi] [ɡʲi] [ŋʲi] [bʲi] [pʲi] [mʲi] [ɾʲi] となる．これを口蓋化または硬口蓋化という．

Which, for the reference of those who don't speak Japanese, translates as:

Out of all yōon, morae beginning with ky [kʲ], gy [ɡʲ], ngy [ŋʲ],* by [bʲ], py [pʲ], my [mʲ], ry [rʲ] (sic) are accompanied by [j]. That is, since the place of articulation for [k] [ɡ] [ŋ] is velar, [b] [p] [m] are bilabial, and [ɾ] is alveolar, the place of articulation becomes closer to the hard palate in the case of a yōon (the presence of [j]) or when the [tautomoraic] vowel is [i]. Ki/gi/ngi/bi/pi/mi/ri also become [kʲi] [ɡʲi] [ŋʲi] [bʲi] [pʲi] [mʲi] [ɾʲi] in narrow transcription. This is called palatalization or hard-palatalization.

* 「キ゚」 denotes the nasal allophone of /ɡ/ known as 鼻濁音 bidakuon, which is produced by some speakers especially in formal registers. Ng is merely an ad hoc transliteration of mine.
(Hope my translation's serviceable, but I can't guarantee its accuracy.)

If you couldn't produce the sound like I told you, that is probably because you have already internalized the Japanese phonemes in your brain. (If that didn't work, I guess you can alternatively put a chopstick or something in your mouth and try to pronounce き ki and こ ko to figure out that the tongue touches slightly different points of the roof of the mouth, but I wouldn't recommend it because I don't want to cause someone to hurt their mouth or throw up.) After all, most speakers don't realize the difference between the p's in pie and spy until they put their hand in front of the mouth, or the one between the i's in 誓う chikau and 違う chigau until they put their finger on the Adam's apple. These minute―granted, minute―differences are hard to realize especially by native speakers.

Now that I think about it, I suppose your confusion comes in part from the fact that the entirety of き is in bold in the key. Notice only k is in bold in the transliteration. Obviously Japanese has only syllabaries and not an alphabet, so it is impossible to emphasize only a consonant and not the vowel that accompanies it, except ん or っ. き would be [kʲi], not [kʲ] as the title of this section suggests, according to the current key.

I can cite more if you want, but again, this is just one of the most basic characteristics of (most varieties of) Japanese that I don't think even Curly Turkey or Hijiri88 are going to disagree with. If you still think I'm "showing [my] lack of knowledge" or "making wild and completely unfounded claims to authority which doesn't exist", I don't know what to tell you. Nardog (talk) 21:07, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

@Nardog: I haven't been following this whole discussion throughout all the multiple fora, so forgive me if you have already acknowledged this somewhere yet, but the only really important part of Okada 1999 for our purposes is his first sentence: The style of speech illustrated is that of many educated Japanese brought up in Tokyo or other areas with similar pitch accent systems. This means that for the vast, vast majority of our Japan-related articles, the specific niceties of the phonetic transcription prescribed here are at best off-topic and anachronistic, and at worst arguably plain wrong. (So pretty much what CT says below, but more wordy and somehow less eloquent.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:33, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

And English fortis consonants are always aspirated in syllable onset, but it would be wrong to notate such in the IPA pronunciation guides to most article leads (e.g. [tʰəˈɹɒɾ̃o(ʊ)]). Please consider context—Wikipedia is not a linguistics journal, but a general layperson's reference work. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:29, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey and Hijiri88: I'll respond to you in a moment including at WT:JAPAN. But for the moment I will say I concede [kʲi] is probably persnickety and [ki] is enough. I'll expound later. Thanks for your patience. Nardog (talk) 21:07, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Edited the guide and existing uses of {{IPA-ja}} so the palatalization symbol is no longer used before [i]. The rationale for it was that it is phonemically more economical as I explained above, but I acknowledge き as /ki/ is equally defensible and to transcribe it as [kʲi] might have been overly detailed and less accessible. Nardog (talk) 17:07, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Inconsistency

See User talk:IvanScrooge98#Ukiyo-e, where an editor insists that the article Ukiyo-e get a kind of a special treatment different from other articles featuring Japanese IPA. Note that his proposed transcription */u.ki.yo.e/ isn't even IPA as ⟨y⟩ does not denote a palatal approximant in IPA (⟨j⟩ does). Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 00:05, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Obvious typos are easily corrected on a Wiki, and the reasons for the transcription method have been discussed to death—this is about giving readers a simple pronunciation guide in a non-linguistics article. Let's not pretend this is something you just "noticed", Mr KEBAB—you're very obviously holding a grudge over not getting your own way on the issue, which you have consistently refused to discuss in good faith. This sort of faux-innocent notice is only more evidence of your refusal to engage in good faith. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:58, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

AFAICS he just disagrees with you because it's not in keeping with existing guidelines and conventions practiced in many other articles. That's not holding a grudge. And even if he does, that has no bearing on what the content of the article should be.

@Kbb2 and IvanScrooge98: I see no possibility of a consensus being reached about this simply through a discussion because we indeed have discussed it to death. I suggest we seek opinions from a broader range of editors, e.g. by starting an RfC at Talk:Ukiyo-e. Nardog (talk) 09:39, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

If it was indeed a typo then that's no problem. My bad.

I actually deliberately wrote here as to not join your discussion with IvanScrooge98. I sometimes check his talk page out of curiosity. However, my point still stands, regardless of whether this is something that's already been discussed. There's simply no need for the discrepancy or special treatment of one article as opposed to others featuring Japanese IPA. Especially given the fact that you've never started a thread calling for a simplification of our Japanese transcriptions. This is the very place to do so, so I'm not sure what you're waiting for.

I won't comment on the links. I got banned for the way I talked to you after you received no punishment for the way you talked to me. We're square, EOT. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 12:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

What is there to discuss here, though? This help page is all about how to describe the pronunciation of Japanese words in a certain way, so no deviations are allowed as far as the page is concerned, period. The question is not whether a guide should allow deviations from itself because that defeats the whole purpose of the guide being a guide. The question is whether the article Ukiyo-e should deviate from the guide. Given WP:CONLEVEL, I don't see how that's possible, but CT certainly seems to think it is, and, granted, MOS:PRON is a guideline and not a policy. So if this is to be resolved anywhere, it's Talk:Ukiyo-e, not here. And let's hear from other editors (such as those at WP:JAPAN/WP:LING) because we abide by consensus on Wikipedia. Nardog (talk) 14:10, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Exactly what I was saying: there’s no point in not using IPA as described here since this page exists purposely to give a guideline. イヴァンスクルージ九十八_（会話） 15:29, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Nardog: It's frustrate to go around in these circles. You keep ignoring context—the target audience is non-specialist English speakers in the lead paragraph of a non-linguistics article. The IPA is there to give these speakers a clue as to how they can pronounce the word to themselves when they read the article. The reader might speak Japanese, but most certainly any dialect of English. There is no one standard pronunciation in either language—we have attestations of the stress falling on the second, third and fourth syllable in English, and we have two pitch patterns for the Tokyo dialect alone (see wikt:浮世絵#Japanese). This would mean listing a minimum of five pronunciations, as none is more "standard" than another. This also ignores what level of detail we should go into and other issues. This might make sense in an article or article section discussion linguistic aspects of the subject—but this is in the lead, where the IPA is serving but one purpose: to give the reader a simple pronunciation guide to get smoothly through the article. I've provided a concrete solution to a concrete problem. It's really exasperating how, after all this discussion, you still refuse to address any of this. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:51, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Kbb2: "you've never started a thread calling for a simplification of our Japanese transcriptions"—I've never called for simplification of WP's Japanese transcriptions, just as you've never made any attempt whatsoever to address any point I've made on the subject. Literally not one. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:51, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

If we're going to treat Ukiyo-e differently by providing a phonemic transcription, rather than a phonetic one, we should have a good reason to do it. Can someone explain clearly what that reason is? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 15:56, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Ƶ§œš¹: Sure. To sum up:

We have multiple sourced pronunciations in both English and Japanese (minimum five). The purpose of the IPA in the lead is to give a simple pronunciation guide to help the layreader get through the article. Listing all the "standard" pronunciations might be appropriate elsewhere in the article (or in an endnote), but under no circumstances in the lead paragraph—there is substantial pushback against including IPA (and other parentheticals) in the lead paragraph at all, which has led to several MOS discussions and the removal of IPA from many articles.

The article is an FA—I got it there after hundreds of hours of work, reading and comparing a large number of sources, weeding out the urban legends and outdated information. The editors who have objeced to the pronunciation guide have not even bothered to check their own sources carefully—they've inserted pronunciations found in the first source or two they came across, and made no effort to verify and compare them, so that they gave a pitch pattern that wasn't even universal for the Tokyo dialect—wiktionary gives two pitch patterns for that dialect alone, and they're both sourced. An FA deserves (and requires) much better than this half-assed "research".

Most articles don't need pronunciation guides for Japanese terms (à la ninja), but ukiyo-e is frequently mispronounced with a leading /ju/. Rather than clutter up the lead with five (or more) pronunciations, I provided a generalized one that can map to any dialect of either English or Japanese: /jo/ will easily map to [joʊ] or [jəʊ] or jəʊ or [joː] or [jo] or whatever other realization, while /u/ maps to [ɯᵝ] or whatever variant in Japanese or English. You will map /u.ki.jo.e/ correctly to your dialect, and if you know Japanese you will map it correctly to whatever dialect you speak. We kill several birds with one stone, and stave off arguments of "clutter" from those who would remove IPA from the lead entirely.

I've provided a concrete solution to a concrete problem, designed to be a useful pronunciation guide to the largest number of layreaders likely to read the article. Objectors have not rebutted these points, described how their (poorly researched) "solutions" better serve the target reader, or proposed any other solution. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:07, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm tickled at the approach. It sounds like what you're saying is that /u.ki.jo.e/ is not phonemic, but rather diaphonemic, akin to the diaphonemic representation at Help:IPA for English. Rather than encode for different English dialects, though, this diaphonemic representation encodes for both English and Japanese. I can appreciate the effort at providing a creative answer to a thorny problem. But what appears on the surface to be an elegant solution is a huge no-go. Consider the steps that you've skipped:

1. IPA transcriptions of English and Japanese have help guides for readers to understand how to map symbols for sounds. There is no such guide for this diaphonemic representation. It might make sense to people who are already familiar with both languages' phonologies, but that will not be most readers.
2. Were such a guide to be constructed, it would reflect an unverified (and unverifiable) synthesis of pronunciations that are touted as both Japanese and English. The English diaphonemic guide gets occasional flack for its semi-synthetic approach to transcriptions that encode for multiple varieties of English, but the information it encodes for is at least verifiable, even if the precise presentation of it is original to Wikipedia. What you are proposing has no grounding in research and could not. Diaphonemic systems that linguists have pursued in the past are those that encode for varieties with phonologies that are at least somewhat isomorphic with each other, which is not really the case with English and Japanese.
3. Were such research to be discovered as a basis for this guide, the unusual nature of an English-Japanese diaphonemic representation steers so far from normal IPA conventions that community approval would necessitate its implementation before we could edit articles to include such diaphonemic transcriptions. This would likely be an uphill battle, as the necessity for such a diaphonemic system would be weighed against the theoretical problems I identified above, as well as the mindboggling can of language-language diaphonemic representation worms it would open up.

So your concrete solution is untenable on practical and theoretical grounds and no one would like it.

Again, I can appreciate the ingenuity in attempting a solution that is simple and practical, but this is neither unless you ignore linguistic theory, accessibility for readers, and Wikipedia's core policies.

If the problem is linguistic clutter in the lede, we can use footnotes. That's the most common solution elsewhere when there are multiple pronunciations (or transcriptions) of a term. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 03:06, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Endnotes for pronunciation guides are problematic in a number of ways:

• accessibility (such as on mobile)—most endnotes are never accessed, but birthdates and pronunciation guides are basic information the reader expects to have ready access to (and are often the whole reason a reader has clicked through to the article)
• endnotes are supplemental information unnecessary to follow the main text; a pronunciation guide is not "supplementary", but fundamental to the subject
• a long list of pronunciations is unhelpful when a reader does not know which they should choose to get through the article; this would indeed be "supplementary" information, not a pronunciation guide

I obviously haven't "ignore[d] ... accessibility for readers, and Wikipedia's core policies" (??). I also haven't proposed any "system", but a local solution to a local problem (I have thousands of Japanese articles on my Watchlist and have not implemented a similar scheme on them, as they don't pose the same problem). Do you have a concrete, practical inline solution that doesn't overhwelm the reader or hide fundamental information? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: no need of a minimum of five, we could as well only list the most common Japanese one, so we’d actually have a maximum of two. Not cluttering at all. If English IPAs were ever needed (it’s still a Japanese word after all), we’d list them in an endnote, because yes, they would be supplementary (wait, weren’t you the one who thought IPA should not be overspecific in an article unrelated to phonetics?). イヴァンスクルージ九十八_（会話） 06:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't understand how footnotes create an accessibility problem for users. Everyone can access them. Even mobile users are able to access footnotes easily. A superscript link (as we see in the current version of the article) is also a strong signal that the footnote's contents will be important to readers and shouldn't be skipped over. This is imperfect, but it's vastly superior to an English-Japanese diaphonemic transcription that is unreadable and inaccessible to most readers. That you aren't proposing a full system or guide goes right into my point about readability. In fact, I'm well-versed in IPA and I can't map it coherently to any definitive sequence of English phonemes.

I agree with Ivan's solution. Maximum two pronunciations in the lede and either footnotes with the rest or a full section in the article on etymology and pronunciation. IMHO, having just a Japanese pronunciation would be enough to address concerns about mispronunciations of the first syllable as /juː/. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 07:37, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Ƶ§œš¹, IvanScrooge98: we've just been through this—there is no "most common" Japanese prununciation. There are at least two pitch patterns for the Tokyo dialect alone, neither of which is marked as preferred. Do you not understand how exasperating it is to have to repeat this? And where does "maximum two" come from? Stress is attested on the second, third, and fourth syllable in English, and none is "preferred" over the others. You can't just choose the one you prefer.

Ƶ§œš¹: "I don't understand how footnotes create an accessibility problem for users."—then you might want to bring that up at MOS, where it's been discussed a number of times.

Ƶ§œš¹: "I'm well-versed in IPA and I can't map it coherently to any definitive sequence of English phonemes."—that's hard to buy. Perhaps if you could give a concrete example of how it could be misinterpreted.

IvanScrooge98: "If English IPAs were ever needed (it’s still a Japanese word after all), we’d list them in an endnote"—you're forgetting that this is the English Wikipedia, and the purpose of the pronunciation guide is to give the reader a pronunciation to get through an English-language text. Think about how absurd it would be to prominently give a Japanese pronunciation few of them would use, and then bury the English pronunciation in an endnote. We're talking the lead paragraph of the article here, not a section on etymology.

"weren’t you the one who thought IPA should not be overspecific in an article unrelated to phonetics?"—I've never said anything remotely like this. I'm not opposed to having a list of IPA pronunciations elsewhere in the article (I've already said so), but we're talking about a layreaders' pronunciation guide in the lead paragraph. Please don't continue to confuse the two issues. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:20, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: let me say your argument is pointless: it’s the English Wikipedia, but you can’t expect everything is provided English IPA, especially considering having it would take too much space for a lead. Yes, few will use it, but I’ll remind you you expected layreaders to get /u.ki.jo.e/ could be interpreted as either English or Japanese, which makes less sense than directly pointing to some place where they can find help on how to pronounce the word, not to mention approximating the Japanese reading would almost automatically result in one of those possible English IPAs. イヴァンスクルージ九十八_（会話） 23:29, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

IvanScrooge98: "but you can’t expect everything is provided English IPA"—of course not. Most articles need no pronunciation guide, and most that do have a "standard" pronunciation to rely on. We're not talking about "most" (or "many") articles—we're talking about a single article with particular issues. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:41, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

And things get worse—here are two sources that give a /jeɪ/ pronunciation for the final syllable in English: A Dictionary of Japanese Loanwords (1997)The Chambers Dictionary (1998). I don't doubt there are more. There seriously is nothing approaching a "standard" pronunciation for this word in English—and I hope it demonstrates how irresponsible it is to slap whatever pronunciation you happen to first come across into an article (particularly an FA). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble!

And where does "maximum two" come from?

This is a situation where nuance and accuracy can't be conveyed without either cluttering the lede or putting the information elsewhere. I said "maximum two" as in maximum two pronuncations in the lede and the rest of it elsewhere. If no English pronunciation is preferred over any other, then it wouldn't make sense to pick one. We could just put one of the Japanese pronunciations (perhaps without marking the pitch accent to be neutral to the variation) and all the English ones either in a footnote or as a section in the article talking about etymology and pronunciation. This is the least bad option in this situation because, again, we can't convey the necessary nuance and detail with the level of efficiency that you're attempting with your diaphonemic transcription

then you might want to bring that up at MOS, where it's been discussed a number of times.

Presumably, you can at least fill me in on what issues have been discussed with footnotes on mobile devices. If you won't even explain what the accessibility issues are, it's hard for me to accept them. Even if I were to take your point, it would just mean that the best solution would be a section about etymology and pronunciation, rather than a footnote. It seems like you're warm to that option and I am too.

Perhaps if you could give a concrete example of how it could be misinterpreted.

And how! The transcription of ⟨u.ki.jo.e⟩ has no vowels in common with Help:IPA for English. ⟨u⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, and ⟨e⟩ may appear in English as long vowels, so these would be the vowels of goose, fleece, goat, and face, respectively. But they may also be short vowels (since there's no length indicated), so that they could instead be the vowels of foot, kit, lot~thought, and dress (though the last one is unlikely because of phonotactic rules of English). On top of this, there is no stress given, which is sort of a necessary part of polysyllabic words in English. It not only helps indicate the pronunciation of the unstressed vowels, but also whether the k is aspirated or not. So basically most of the vowels are unclear and I'm not sure about half the consonants. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 04:27, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

[ʊkɪyɑɛ] is not even remotely possible an English pronunciation—this comes off as facetious.

Anyways, I give up. I've removed the pronunciation guide from the article. Thank you all for improving the article. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:40, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: Ah yes, I hadn't fully considered the phonotactic restraints that limit the possible pronunciations. This still adds up to a little over half a dozen because, again, there is no stress indicated.

I find it strange that you would be so quick to attack me personally by saying my argument has been made in bad faith. If this is how you normally interact on talk pages, I can see why other editors have gotten frustrated. Following WP:AGF would be helpful here as it can prevent editors from getting bogged down in meta-arguments and instead steer us toward engaging with each other's arguments and considering our own assumptions. Regards. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 16:59, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Aeusoes1—I didn't attack you personally. Where does that even come from? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:25, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm referring to this comes off as facetious. That's an accusation that I'm arguing in bad faith. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 05:16, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

It wasn't, but I apologize nonetheless. I still don't buy the argument, but it's moot now. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:51, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Not to beat the dead horse but just to set the record straight, when the article was promoted to an FA, Help:IPA/Japanese represented the vowel as ⟨u͍⟩. So the reviewers back then could not possibly have had a problem with the article not using ⟨ɯ⟩. AFAICS no one even mentioned the article's presentation of pronunciation in any of the GA/FA/peer reviews (Talk:Ukiyo-e/Archive 1#Name being the only discussion about it on the article's talk), and I know of no one who has objected to using ⟨ɯ⟩ or defended using ⟨u⟩, let alone a non-English phonemic notation with no link to a key (Hijiri88 questioned providing a pronunciation at all, but that's it). Everyone else who commented on it supported, or at least didn't express a problem with, the use of {{IPA-ja}} adhering to the key it references. So unless I'm missing something, I don't know what "consensus" CT was speaking of besides the WP:IMPLICIT one. Nardog (talk) 13:01, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Nardog: it was promoted, and then issues arose, as they have continued to, such as periodic discussions at MoS about allowing IPA and other parentheticals in the lead at all, and the importance of preferring English pronunciations to aid in reading English texts, since that's the purpose of opening the article with a pronunciation guide. Since we can't serve that purpose in an accessible way that also satisfies IPA subject enthusiasts, we'll just leave it out—none of the sources provide a pronunciation guide either, so the reader's no worse off. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:25, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: that’s why we don’t need all that English IPA in this article. The Japanese one is not “whatever pronunciation you happen to first come across”, and it is enough for the article (once again, looks very similar to the one we have right now but instead of being ‘unspecified’ it is accurately explained within its proper page). イヴァンスクルージ九十八_（会話） 07:49, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

That's the point: you're being WP:DISRUPTIVE and stubborn, which is something I've already stated a long time ago. You've been insisting on a special treatment of one article for over a year and have never attempted to resolve the issue here by creating a thread calling for substituting ⟨ɯ⟩ with ⟨u⟩ in IPA transcriptions of Japanese on WP so that the IPA on Ukiyo-e could be enclosed within IPA-ja and it would match this guide.

First you edit warred with Nardog and me, continuously changing IPA so that it didn't match this guide anymore. Now your behavior is only slightly better in that the IPA still doesn't match the guide but it's in phonemic slashes and it's enclosed within the ordinary IPA (or IPA-all) template rather than IPA-ja. But it's still illogical to do that rather than call for a simplified transcription here which, I repeat, you've never attempted to do. There's no reason to treat that article differently from the rest of WP articles which feature Japanese IPA.

I have reasons to believe that you're doing all of this on purpose and that's to win the battle with me, otherwise why bother to do all of this? The amount of projection in your messages is big. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 16:28, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

"have never attempted to resolve the issue here by creating a thread calling for substituting ⟨ɯ⟩ with ⟨u⟩ in IPA transcriptions of Japanese on WP"—I literally just addressed this non sequitur. You're only laying down more evidence that you have no intention of engaging in any sort of discussion in good faith, and are merely on the warpath.

One of us has been following the other, and it ain't me, so guess who's desperate to "win" the battle? Perhaps it's the guy who was blocked for calling me a "Canadian cocksucker" months later, unprovoked, and out of the blue—the guy who editwarred at ukiyo-e while also editwarring against someone else at Richard Wagner. You've been belligerent from your first comment to me to your last. You are clearly WP:NOTHERE to improve the article, and won't let go that you "lost" a battle that you initiated (and that should have been a discussion, but you refused to participate). You have yet to rebut any point I've made about Ukiyo-e. Literally not one. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:16, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

kʷ?

Where is kʷ attested for Japanese? There's no mention of it in Japanese phonology, and in my experience the kui in クイーン is pronounced the same as the kui in 飼育員 shiikuin, which the listings at Wiktionary at least back up: wikt:クイーン [kɯ̟ᵝĩːɴ] vs wikt:飼育員 [ɕiikɯ̟ᵝĩɴ]. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:55, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

It’s not used for クイ, but for クィ (that is, for one rather than two separate morae). It is probably modeled for consistency with /kʲ/ and such, however, being only used (if ever) in foreign borrowings, I’d list it separately. イヴァンスクルージ九十八_（会話） 18:39, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

IvanScrooge98|: I asked for where this is attested. Our Japanese phonology article doesn't mention it, and I haven't seen a source that does.

It is not my experience that クィ is pronounced differently from クイ—my understanding is it it simply a way of representing a "foreign" sound (much like ヴァ, which is literally never pronounced /va/, even though that's the sound it "represents"). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:39, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: I don’t know, I just made a hypothesis; you should ask whoever added this. Still, it may be common while [v] isn’t. イヴァンスクルージ九十八_（会話） 06:22, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

"you should ask whoever added this"—that's normally what the talk page is for ... ?

"it may be common while [v] isn’t"—if it's "common", I assume there's a source. I cannot find one, and our own article on Japanese phonology makes no mention of it. Wiktionary marks wikt:クィーン as a "very rare" alternate spelling of wikt:クイーン, and gives no alternate pronunciation (and this alternate spelling doesn't even exist at ja.wiktionary). A Google Books search turns up absolutely nothing for "クィ" "kʷ". Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:41, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

The person who added it was @Jvyuno:. Maybe they can explain this more. I don't have a problem with removing it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 16:01, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

As the edit summary states, Jvyuno's rationale for the addition was that it was used at Transcription into Japanese#Extended katakana. But as Curly Turkey has pointed out, determining the phonemicty of marginal combinations found in western loans is tricky at best because even when orthography reflects that speakers don't suddenly expand their phonotactics. Vance (2008: 93) suggests /kw/ is not phonemic. I think what we should do is remove [kʷ] and replace IPA-ja used for these marginal combinations at Transcription into Japanese#Extended katakana with IPA-all. (On a side note, searching for an IPA string on Google Books or Google Scholar is practically meaningless because OCR never gets it right.) Nardog (talk) 18:38, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Jvyuno's rationale is that "kʷ is used on [Transcription_into_Japanese ".] That rationale makes no sense. All that says is that foreign words that have [kʷ] in them are transliterated into katakana using クヮ or whatever, not that it's actually pronounced that way in Japanese—an exact parallel with ヴァ, which the chart lists as having a value of [va]. Even Japanese who speak fluently a language with /v/ do not pronounce ヴァ as [va]. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:26, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

The main rationale is that this is a help page. A page that should help a user by *explaining* the listed approximate prounounciations in IPA. I have seen the huge fight over き ≟ /kʲi/ ≟ /ki/ and /ki/ ≟ /kʲi/. I have to say I really don't care if /kʷ/ == /kɰ/ or /kʷ/ ≈ /kɰ/, but I would really appreciate it if you could keep in mind what a help page actually is and foremost what the intended function of help page is. So one option would be to readd クィーン and state that there is no difference between using /kʷ/ and /kɰ/ as for example a note. Another option would be to remove /kʷ/ entirely from the suggested pronounciations used in Transcription into Japanese or add some hint to make this easier to understand. Would it be that difficult to simply include this information (-> "All that says is that foreign words that have [kʷ] in them are transliterated into katakana using クヮ or whatever, not that it's actually pronounced that way in Japanese") somewhere on the help page? Jvyuno (talk) 19:41, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

I have (tentatively) replaced the instances of {{IPA-ja}} that didn't conform to this key with {{IPA-all}} at Template:Katakana table extended. Perhaps those IPA notations should be removed altogether, or at least there should be a note that says these pronunciations are merely theoretical somewhere at Transcription into Japanese#Extended katakana 2. Nardog (talk) 20:08, 23 March 2019 (UTC)