Talk:Rudolf Diesel

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Pronunciation

@Quercus solaris: There are many, many articles that indicate pronunciation in non-English languages only (for instance, {{IPAc-pl}} alone has more transclusions than {{IPAc-en}}). My point is that there are no "needs of the English-reading audience" to know how the word is pronounced in English, for it is a common word (see WP:LEADPRON). Both variants are fairly common so the English notation is barely informative, unlike the German one which is not as obvious to English-speaking readers. Nardog (talk) 15:59, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

@Nardog: Thanks. I cited a ref. There are major counterarguments to those ideas. There are many English speakers who check sources including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and the major unpaywalled dictionaries (eg, the free version of Merriam-Webster Collegiate, AHD, others) to verify the major descriptively accepted pronunciations of particular words, including names, in English. It's the reason why great effort has been put into making each transcription character have a pop-up "sounds like" tip for the IPAc-en template. One cannot assume that the global English audience for en.WP, which includes countless ESL or EFL speakers, "would know" any given pronunciation. Quite the opposite: it's why the aforementioned resources provide so much help for pronunciations—not only transcriptions but also help to understand them, such as the "sounds like" tips. I must also add here that the reason why so many en.WP articles contain solely a source-language pronunciation transcription, when they should contain both an English one and that one, is the background prevalence of prescriptivists/purists who have the epistemologic belief/misapprehension that "the only 'correct' way to say this word or name is the source language's way," coupled with the fact that no one has fixed the misapprehension in that article yet, or the fix got reverted by some misguided "purist". Quercus solaris (talk) 16:06, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

There is a difference between regular words, and names – the latter typically have a very limited set of correct pronounciations, in many cases with only a single element – i.e. an English pronounciation in the sense of a "correct" pronounciation doesn't exist. For native English speakers, pronouncing German names correctly isn't particularly challenging, and Rudolf Diesel is a rather easy German name (for native English speakers). In this case, the ˈdiːsəl pronounciation is definitely wrong though. Nobody says Diesel like this – the "s" in Diesel is pronounced like the "s" in words such as civilisation, specalise, realise, etc. – providing meaningless pronounciations that nobody uses isn't an improvement. Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 16:58, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi. Regarding "Nobody says Diesel like this" — that's demonstrably false among E1L speakers, as supported by the WP:RS of M-W Collegiate, and that is simply the one that I've given a moment to check today — no doubt there are more. There's a lot of sloppy and flawed epistemology of language being thrown around in this discussion. You are quite right to throw the word "correct" into scare quotes, but exactly why it is thus quoted must be properly understood. Encyclopedias and dictionaries present the descriptively widely accepted variants. Then you talk about "English speakers, pronouncing German names correctly" (there's that word again), but that mention is flawed too. The descriptive fact, regarding both languages, is "(English: /ˈdiːzəlˌ -səl/, German: [ˈdiːzl̩] ", as the article duly gives it as I write this sentence. I'm not picking on the epistemological flaws just to be academic — I'm sure that much of this discussion has been shot from the hip and does not reflect a long-considered argument. But I'm just sticking up for the fact that Wikipedia has to reflect descriptive reality, so any sloppy epistemology in this discussion cannot be used to try to justify having Wikipedia present a prescriptive rather than descriptive approach. Quercus solaris (talk) 21:19, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Okay, then let me use a different approach: Rudolf Diesel was a German with a German name. If native English speakers check Wikipedia to verify his name's correct pronounciation, then why would we provide a pronounciation that is only common among a limited group of native English speakers, and that Germans, including Rudolf Diesel, would not use? The Merriam-Webster dictionary depicts how Americans pronounce things (because it is an American dictionary) – see, each variety or dialect of a language causes "new interesting approaches" when trying to pronounce a foreign word, and that is a fairly normal process, but providing pronounciations based on this process is not helpful. This would allow "proving correct" any American-based pronounciation of any foreign word, and that would, unsurprisingly, render the entire pronounciations thing (for foreign names) useless.

Much more interestingly though is your WP:RS approach – have you figured that, your source does not provide a pronounciation for Rudolf Diesel's name in particular? It is about the noun "diesel", not about the person/name "Rudolf Diesel". Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 10:14, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate the cordial response, but unfortunately it is incorrect on two counts. (1) Wrong about what my citation shows. Notice that I cited the high-quality version of that dictionary, not the garbage-interface version of it at the unpaywalled URL, which may have been the one that you viewed. At the URL that I cited, it provides links to both entries, "diesel (noun)" and "Diesel (biographical name)", and both show the transcription that I cited. Which makes sense, because it reflects how natural language actually works, not how anyone misapprehends that it should work. Many E1L speakers sometimes say the unvoiced variant when referring to diesel fuel, including because under some conditions it is functionally allophonic with the voiced principal pronunciation in E1L: specifically, conditions under which it is not being consciously focused on or receiving stress/emphasis. Which makes the claim of "limited group" incorrect anyway. And any pronunciation of diesel as in diesel fuel or diesel engine in E1L will also apply to the name of the eponymous man, Diesel, because that's how natural language works, which is why the cited WP:RS shows it. Both the einsteinian universe and Einstein himself are /st/ in E1L, not /ʃt/, unless a speaker is affecting an affectation, trying to pedantically show other E1L speakers that they know how to pronounce German and/or trying to misguidedly harangue those others into thinking that they too should say /ʃt/ in English (which they shouldn't). (2) Again you bring up a notion of what's "correct" in natural language without adequately parsing the epistemology of what "correctness" means in natural language, with regard to both prescription (where it means "what prescribers want") and description (where it means, at bottom, "not solecistic, by nonprescriptive criteria"). This all boils down to the fact that the cited reference is factually correct (stating a fact not an opinion) when it states that "English: /ˈdiːzəlˌ -səl/" represents the two (sometimes allophonic) pronunciations of the name in English (not in German, when "German" is taken to mean High German, not even to broach the fact that there are German dialects that pervasively use /ß/ where High German uses /z/). I don't even care about this instance (diesel and Diesel) as much as I care about upholding Wikipedia's generally high quality of epistemology of language against ink clouds wherein people try to reverse-engineer a justification for having Wikipedia show a linguistic prescription as if the descriptive reality were "incorrect" when it is by epistemological definition not "incorrect". Let me give you an even better example than Diesel. For many of the persons in Category:19th-century French scientists (including its subcats), such as Louis Pasteur for example, most E1L speakers will almost invariably use a naturalized approximation of the native French pronunciation instead of a [phonetically] perfect production thereof, because most E1L speakers are barely even capable of the latter, and certainly not without consciously trying really hard and breaking the stride of fluent English. But that fact has nothing to do with whether or not they are making a "mistake" as they are saying the name in English. They aren't making any mistake at all, in English. His name is most conventionally English: /ˈluːi pæˈstɜːr/ in English, as his Wikipedia article already rightfully shows (rightfully using IPAc-en), independently of the fact that English: /ˈluːi pæˈstɜːr/ does not equal French: [lwi pastœʁ]. This is the very nature of naturalized approximations of foreign pronunciations. I realize that some of you all, and many other people, might wish that English would never unvoice the /z/ in Rudolf Diesel's name. Just as you might wish that English would never say English: /ˈluːi pæˈstɜːr/ but only French: [lwi pastœʁ]. That's OK; I can understand that wish. But to say that the descriptively normal phenomenon is "incorrect" is counterfactual, for the same reason as why it is counterfactual to say that E1L speakers should say /ʃt/ to each other when mentioning Einstein. Quercus solaris (talk) 20:55, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I get your point and I agree that Wikipedia should, in general, use a descriptive approach. If native English speakers have a habit of pronouncing names "their" way, and if this way is fairly common, even ubiquitous, then I don't see a reason why Wikipedia should not explain this matter. However, why exactly would Wikipedia treat the native-English pronounciation of foreign names as a "correct" pronounciation? If people visit Wikipedia to check whether their way(s) of pronouncing things are correct, and if these people are native English speakers, then why would they need the IPA pronounciation help? Also, which German dialects "pervasively" use /ß/ as opposed to High German's /z/? Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 06:39, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Hello, I have duly replied, not because the particular instance is crucially important (I realize that it is not) but only because the general case is worth answering adequately. Forgive the length, which is given only because it serves that goal.

• Regarding the question, "If native English speakers have a habit of pronouncing names "their" way, and if this way is fairly common, even ubiquitous, then I don't see a reason why Wikipedia should not explain this matter": This fact is, in fact, WP:BLUE, although there is also probably already some coverage of it on Wikipedia somewhere (elsewhere) if one digs through WP's coverage of loanword linguistics. There are conventional ways of pronouncing loanwords in any given "borrower" language, which do not identically match the phonetics of the source language, because native speakers of the borrower language usually cannot match those, and even those who can, do not invariably do so when speaking the "borrower" language, for any combination of the following reasons: it may break the stride of fluency; it may draw undue attention to itself; it may come across to the listener as a needless and digressive affectation; it may be misguidedly pedantic; and so on. In fact there is an enjoyable video on YouTube by a bilingual English-Spanish language instructor who explains an interesting vignette/anecdote about how when he tried to order a piece of red velvet cake in Bogotá (where its name is a loanword from English), he could not make himself understood to the monolingual Spanish-speaking waitstaff until he repronounced the term "red velvet cake" with a Spanish accent. Which makes perfect sense in retrospect, as he explains. It was a lesson for him to take this fact into account when he is speaking. This same theme is why Albert Einstein's name is conventionally established with /st/ in English, not /ʃt/, and why the names of Louis Pasteur, Louis Agassiz, and countless others have conventionally established pronunciations in English that do not precisely equal their standard phonetic values in French. The Wikipedia article on each person should not attempt to reexplain this same theme (which would create hundreds of forked versions of the same explanation). Such articles could potentially link out to a centralized explanation of it, which would not be a bad idea pedagogically, but one can easily predict that if any of us started adding such a link to such articles, a bunch of editors probably would start objecting to those links as being digressive, out of place, unnecessary, and so on.
• Regarding the question, "why exactly would Wikipedia treat the native-English pronounciation of foreign names as a "correct" pronounciation?" — Again, this is really a WP:BLUE fact, as explained above for the examples of Einstein, Pasteur, and Agassiz. Thus, for example, again, the standard, conventional, established English-language pronunciation of Einstein's name with /st/ and not /ʃt/ is in fact the "most correct" way to say his name in English, where "most correct" in descriptive epistemological terms means (operationally) the primary accepted variant, the one that is first-listed in major dictionaries of the English language. The same is true of Diesel's name: the /-z-/ pronunciation is in fact the primary accepted variant, the one that is first-listed in major dictionaries of the English language. The second-listed variant, with the /-s-/, happens to be allophonic with the first under some conditions in speech, which is why it is not incorrect in English.
• Regarding the question, "if these people are native English speakers, then why would they need the IPA pronounciation help?" The answer to this one is also WP:BLUE: Why does pronunciation/transcription help exist throughout any major dictionary of the English language, and why is it also similarly used in countless en.Wikipedia articles to help both E1L and ESL users with the pronunciations of English-language words? Why does the page Help:IPA/English exist at all, and why do tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles link to it? Why does the template IPAc-en exist at all, and why do tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles link to it? Should we delete Help:IPA/English and IPAc-en because we assume that fluent speakers of English should not need any help with pronunciation? Of course not. The answers to these questions are WP:BLUE. As a "de-4" speaker (muttersprachlichem Niveau), you are quite used to speaking as your native language a language that has a pleasingly strong degree of phonemic regularity of its orthography, and in such a language, people may not realize or appreciate what it is like to be a monolingual native speaker of a language that has a markedly lesser degree of phonemic regularity to its orthography (of which English is one). We E1L speakers are quite used to using the major reference works for pronunciation help; in fact, that's the entire reason why pronunciation respelling systems are such a big thing for English; it's the entire reason why the enPR/AHD system exists at all — because laypeople need such help but most laypeople traditionally find IPA notation too cryptic and abstruse for their casual use; that is, "it seems like Greek to them." That's why AHD uses an enPR/AHD system instead.
• Regarding the question, "which German dialects "pervasively" use /ß/ as opposed to High German's /z/?" — Sorry, I should have said "often" and not "pervasively". I recall one of my German professors many years ago telling us that some German dialects often use /s/ as opposed to High German's /z/ even in many words that are spelled with s and not ß (ss) where standard German would eschew the /s/ sound. I cannot remember the locales. But you are right that in Standard German, that substitution is nonstandard, which was germane to the point that you were making about the "correctness" of /z/ in Standard German. Quercus solaris (talk) 19:43, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

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