As the page banners say, it's a recurring question. These are some of the relevant links: Discussions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:IPA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:International_Phonetic_Alphabet The templates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA-en http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA-all 2 alternatives we can use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:USdict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Respell Associated project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28pronunciation%29 A Comparison of the various systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_English
So: It's complicated. All options are imperfect. Different imperfections vex various people. (Or at least, that was the conclusion I came to, after complaining about same, and investigating, last year.)
Quiddity
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
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