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The long u pronunciation [uː]

• 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)

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)

• 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)

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)

Pool

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)

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)

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)

eɪ and oʊ as monophthongs

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)

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)

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)

US states

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)

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)

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)

"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)

hour flower hire higher

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

Un-American IPA system needs more American-like examples

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Archaea

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

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

Advice for editors with cot-caught merger

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)

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)

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

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)

Rory Gallagher

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)

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)

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

Linguistics Nuts Aside

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)

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)

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)

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

Rhoticity in place names

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

"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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

"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)

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)

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)

(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)

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)

/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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

(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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

"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)

glottal stopʔ

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)

"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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

New York

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

automatic picking out of rows for users clicking on an IPA link

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)

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)

Examples for ɑ

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)

"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)

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)

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)

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)

Links to phonemes

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)

[...] 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

"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)

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)

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)