Toby Bartels wrote:
This is what morphophones are all about -- a scheme where all dialects read in their own sound. We don't have to invent our own ad-hoc scheme, since linguists have been studying morphophones, and quite often in the context of English, since 1962. (IPA, in contrast, does phonemes, or even lower-level structures.)
The "Webster's Dictionary" systems often seen in US dictionaries are roughly morphophonic, but not very sophisticated linguistically. (But Merriam-Webster's current system is phonemic, despite it's old-fashioned non-IPA, Webster's-ish look. Therefore the worst of them all, IMO.)
The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following explanation of their pronunciation scheme:
"For most words a single set of symbols can represent the pronunciation found in each regional variety of American English. You will supply those features of your own regional speech that are called forth by the pronunciation key in this Dictionary"
And it seems like a panacea for the pronunciation problem. But it's not, because some words simply have different underlying representations in different dialects, and the system only works for dialects that are roughly the same except for a few sound changes. It fails for wildly or even mildly divergent dialects. The American Heritage Dictionary system sweeps this problem under the rug by saying "The pronunciations are exclusively those of educated speech", which, to my mind, is a cop-out, and not a satisfactory solution for Wikipedia.
However, the question of dialect remains. Obviously listing pronunciations in all possible dialects is not a reasonable solution, and indeed, nor are any of the systems used in American dictionaries. I recognize that the general task of specifying a pronunciation that speakers of any dialect will automatically speak in their dialect is not ideally handled by IPA. However, I have do not know of any system advocated by linguists other than what phonologists call "broad transcription" using IPA. Can you point me to a book or paper, written by linguists, that specifies such a system for English, and advocates its use by and for general (non-academic) readers?
I have never encoutered such a system, and I doubt that one exists. Barring the existence of a standard system, I don't really see that Wikipedia has any other options besides IPA for specifying pronunciations. Certainly I hope no one thinks Wikipedia should invent its own system. When it comes to standards, it should be our job to follow them and describe them, not create them.
So I advocate having IPA transcriptions for standard dialects (like Standard American English and Received Pronunciation), and having special pages describing how the various nonstardard dialects differ both phonetically and phonemically from the standards. I don't know much about morphophones and I'm not sure it's a concept widely accepted by linguists.
PS: I have made a page on meta called [[Pronunciations]] and am going through the list archives and posting links to relevant discussions there. I'm not sure what the policy should be regarding where further discussion should occur, so if you want to respond, do so either here or on the list.
-- David [[User:Nohat]]