What's the point of using a phonetic alphabet that 95% of our readership can't interpret? If the idea is to help readers understand how a word is pronounced in English, it should actually be useful to the majority of readers and not largely useless but academically perfect. Nathan _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Hoi, A lot of so called IPA out there is created by Americans for Americans and expect that certain sounds can be expressed by the ordinary Latin characters. The consequence is that such polution makes the whole of IPA hard to use. Consequently I argue that in order to save the usefulness of IPA at all we HAVE to be academically correct in how it is expressed.

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean(a)me.com> wrote: The idea behind IPA is, that there be a single standard alphabet that everyone can use which can help us all communicate a bit better when speaking a new language or just using a term from another language. It's basic and encyclopedic information and should be included. Consider a word we've all seen recently: Eyjafjallajökull, which apparently just means "island-mountain glacier" (I suggest that "Eyja-fjalla glacier" is the sensible English translation). It's not necessary that anyone pronounce it exactly as [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatla ˌjœːkʏtl̥], still its basic information about the name itself. A name is a key into a concept, and a foreign name is a key into a foreign concept. We don't omit basic information just because it gives us too much of a window into strange and foreign ways of conceptualization that we just don't understand. The issue of accessibility is valid, but I can answer that by understating IPA's usability as flexible, ranging from the basic to the expert. Most people I imagine start with learning few of the IPA vowels, and the consonants are mostly intuitive. Being flexible means that its also quite forgiving, and that anyone who makes an honest attempt at writing in IPA is making a contribution, even if they are politely corrected here and there by someone a bit more.. 1337. I agree that IPA can seem a bit cumbersome and even ambiguous when used at extreme detail (ie. it gets into reproducing whole foreign-language phonologies at a single-word level, which isn't always useful nor necessary). At least I can understand why it's not universally accepted and used on our foreign encyclopedias, namely that its still a bit esoteric enough for us on en. Nevertheless its, again, encyclopedic and necessary. -Stevertigo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I have a hard time understanding this claim that using IPA improves communication. Surely a device intended to facilitate communication should make accessibility its first priority?

I suppose forcing all the various projects to use English might make it easier for the people who understand English to read them all; but as it happens, there are quite a few people who don't read English comfortably and we've sacrificed rigid uniformity for actual usefulness.

I think the prospect of a nice machine synthesizer in the future (with the ability to provide real recordings, of course) is probably sufficient justification for continuing to use IPA all by itself.

I'm seeing arguments like "too international" (not so handy for English readers) and "not international enough" (too Anglo-centric).

I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that there should be more IPA on the various Wikipedias and other projects. But I don't feel the foundations for that discussion have been laid. If for the example the WMF handed down some view on IPA, would it be >endorsing a "standard international standard" like the SI system, or a "standard" such as some version of "imperial" > >units? All this affects attitudes, and the discussion on automation too.

What's the point of using a phonetic alphabet that 95% of our readership can't interpret? If the idea is to help readers understand how a word is pronounced in English, it should actually be useful to the majority of readers and not largely useless but academically perfect.

Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Great idea. Is there still some hangup about needing to transcribe IPA to ASCII, or can these things be done in UTF-8 now? -Stevertigo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I've never been able to. I always hoped that the theory was that > from the IPA, you could translate it into some scheme that would make sense in different vernaculars, but I never found the IPA -> English pronunciation link.

Question - Is this wrong: Or really wrong? -Stevertigo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Okay, but which pronoucation should we use? Australian English? British English? Canadian English? Does this matter with IPA?

David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

To me IPA is likely to remain one of the scripts I will never learn, and whether I ought to learn it is besides the point The enWP is written in English. The explanations are in English. The pronunciations have to be given in a form English readers can read, even if it is only approximate.

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Peter Jacobi <peter_jacobi(a)gmx.net> wrote: I honestly find that hard to believe; nothing I've seen written about IPA on this list, or on the [[IPA]] article, suggests that it is widely used for any purpose outside academic linguistics.

I just assumed that if IPA were widely used, someone might have mentioned that in previous iterations of the arguments over its use. Perhaps that assumption is a mistake, if the limit of research done by IPA advocates is cherry picking Google search results. (Of course that comment is unfair, but then again, so was your characterisation of my previous post).

Even the IPA article mentions that EFL references use pronunciation guides.

Has anybody actually studied the effect on actual users of removing schemes like [[Wikipedia:Pronunciation respelling key]] in favor of IPA? It's obvious that having IPA pronunciations advances our mission for a certain highly educated segment of user. But for the rest of our readers, the answer seems to be, "Well, you should learn IPA." Although it's probably true that they *should* learn it; the question I think we should answer is whether they *are* learning it. If not, then stripping a key they can read in favor of one they can't would move us away from our vision, which is people sharing freely in knowledge. William _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l