(Crossposted to wikien and foundation:)
Some points about IPA on all language wikis.
1) As a rule, all language wikis should use International Phonetic Alphabet as their standard pronunciation scheme. Very few appear to actually do. 2) All language wikis should attempt to use IPA to pronounce the endonym of a foreign word, not the exonymic re-pronunciation (ie. Iraq = /iːˈrɑːk/ not /ɪˈræk/). 3) With rare exceptions, IPA should be the default phonemic transcription scheme, and alternate schemes such as [[Wikipedia:Pronunciation respelling key]] should be avoided or deprecated. 4) Feedback from languages about IPA should be useful. IPA is actually quite flexible about exactness, while still being phonetically precise. If there are flaws in IPA itself, the Wikipedia community can help raise them for the Internation Phonetic Association. 5) Ambiguity about how it is supposed to be used is a cross-project issue should be dealt with at the Foundation level (ie. global not just inter-wiki policy).
-Stevertigo
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
I'd have to agree with you, Nathan. I can't read IPA to save my life!
Emily On Apr 21, 2010, at 5:58 PM, Nathan 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
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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. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 April 2010 00:58, 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
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I think it's better that Wikipedia be usable to laypeople, and not be in "academic savior" mode.
Emily On Apr 21, 2010, at 6:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
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. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 April 2010 00:58, 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
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On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Quite. We need to make the distinction between exonym and endonym transcription. Endonyms come first, and exonym-repronunciations are noted as such. But likewise we can't get too stuffy about pronouncing words according to native phonologies, clicks and whirrs and so forth. :P
-Stevertigo
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.
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Emily Monroe bluecaliocean@me.com wrote:
I'd have to agree with you, Nathan. I can't read IPA to save my life!
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 [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœːkʏtl̥], 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
Of course, this requires people actually learn the IPA. This is more difficult for some than others; neuroatypicalities can make it harder or easier, and polyglots can probably learn a lot easier. I don't know if it translates well into braille. I wish I did.
I'm concerned that those who can or do have a lot of difficulty learning the IPA will be "left out" if we end up depending on this.
Emily On Apr 21, 2010, at 7:04 PM, stevertigo wrote:
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.
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Emily Monroe bluecaliocean@me.com wrote:
I'd have to agree with you, Nathan. I can't read IPA to save my life!
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
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On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:04 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.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 [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœːkʏtl̥], 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.
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. Is it too much to ask that pronunciation guides actually help normal readers pronounce words? Or is some vague notion of "key into concept" (but only for the 'l33t' few) more important?
As quiddity notes, and most everyone is probably already aware, this is an old argument. For anyone who hasn't heard it before, it should now be clear that Steve's demand for uniformity doesn't have universal support.
Nathan
Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
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?
OK, its not about "communication" per se, its just a transcription system for phonetics, that we chose a few years ago to use for pronunciation keys.
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.
Straw man. Your confusing English with "Roman alphabet" - the latter of which is just about universal at this point. The rest of your argument sort of got lost.. I don't understand what you are saying, except that you are misrepresenting my argument as one about "universality."
Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Ah. The minimalist argument. :)
-Stevertigo
stevertigo wrote:
Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Ah. The minimalist argument. :)
Question. I looked at [[International Phonetic Alphabet]], and while it is clear that IPA is an "international standard", I don't think the matter is really discussed there. 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.
Charles
Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'm seeing arguments like "too international" (not so handy for English readers) and "not international enough" (too Anglo-centric).
Hm. People, myself included, don't understand it too well in a couple of ways: "Too international" to me translates to IPA was meant to be a tool for understanding foreign phonologies and not just word pronunciations, so its usage in that area might be excessive. "Not international enough" to me is an issue with IPA being largely Roman-based with highly specialistic-looking glyphs that were conceived of over a hundred years ago by mostly French and English linguists. I agree with both criticisms.
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.
We can consider IPA's usage on en.wiki as widespread enough to call a "foundation," keeping in mind that its a linguistics tool that we turned into something that many of us consider commonplace. I remember when some first discussed using IPA back in 2003-2004. Linguists were highly in support of it, and the word of linguists was enough for our fearless leader and everyone else. Those are the foundations.
What caused me to write here about this was this alternate system being promoted on en, which to me is disruptive to the professional quality of our articles. IPA is specialized, true, but it should not be abandoned as some appear to suggest. We would be better off looking at ways to reform it in ways that make it more accessible. As I see it, simply offering tips on the basics of learning IPA - like learning the vowels first - sufficiently answers most critics.
-Steve
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
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:58 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.
We ought to have a speech synthesizer that extension that provides clickable audio playback for marked up IPA.
IPA is sufficient for a machine pronounceation. I looked into creating one of these but none of the FOSS synthesizers I could find could take IPA for their phonetic input. Festival supports a standard input format which has IPA as a supported mode, but festival lacked support for the IPA part.
In any case, this seems to be clearly possible it's just a question of development resources. 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.
Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
We ought to have a speech synthesizer that extension that provides clickable audio playback for marked up IPA.
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
How is this going to work out? Will it slow down loading for a lot of people? Is there any other reason somebody can think of why there isn't more devices that support IPA?
Emily On Apr 21, 2010, at 7:48 PM, stevertigo wrote:
Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
We ought to have a speech synthesizer that extension that provides clickable audio playback for marked up IPA.
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
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On Wednesday 21 April 2010, Nathan wrote:
What's the point of using a phonetic alphabet that 95% of our readership can't interpret?
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.
Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
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.
Well let's face it that most of linguistics looks esoteric to monoglots and overcomplicated by specialized terminology.
English vowels are morphophonetic (c*ake, w*alk, c*at) wheras Latin ones are not (torta*, ca*mina*r, ga*to), and that seems to constitute the bulk of complexity regarding pronunciation of English in IPA.
For IPA beginners, I recommend just learning the *vowels - you can get away with using English consonants anyway and vowel differences fall along the lines of English vs. Latin's alphaphonetic pronunciations.
For expediency's sake, I'll agree that the rest is of IPA is mostly Chinese.
-Steve
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. sound files would be wonderful, to be real they should be pronunciation by a native speaker of the appropriate language, not a machine. And there still needs to be an English readable and writeable equivalent, because someone might want something to transcribe as text.
Certainly a more correct pronunciation guide should be given, and we should continue using IPA also, and consider ourselves fortunate that there is only a single standard.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 10:22 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
Question - Is this wrong:
"Socrates (pronounced /ˈsɒkrətiːz/)"
Or really wrong?
-Stevertigo
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Okay, but which pronoucation should we use? Australian English? British English? Canadian English? Does this matter with IPA?
Emily On Apr 24, 2010, at 12:31 AM, David Goodman 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. sound files would be wonderful, to be real they should be pronunciation by a native speaker of the appropriate language, not a machine. And there still needs to be an English readable and writeable equivalent, because someone might want something to transcribe as text.
Certainly a more correct pronunciation guide should be given, and we should continue using IPA also, and consider ourselves fortunate that there is only a single standard.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 10:22 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
Question - Is this wrong:
"Socrates (pronounced /ˈsɒkrətiːz/)"
Or really wrong?
-Stevertigo
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Emily Monroe bluecaliocean@me.com wrote:
Okay, but which pronoucation should we use? Australian English? British English? Canadian English? Does this matter with IPA?
If you look at the IPA for English page you'll see all of the major English dialects represented, and yes there are substantial phonetic differences between them - vowels particularly. Plain English is flexible for all of these dialects such that spelling things out in IPA isn't necessary. Using IPA to distinguish between English dialects would be overcomplicating.
Dealing with foreign concepts however - that is, the 80% of the planet that doesn't originate from an English-speaking culture - should require using some basic pronunciation scheme. And like DGG said, we're fortunate to have a single internaʃonal standard in the first place.
-Stevertigo
And like DGG said, we're fortunate to have a single internaʃonal standard in the first place.
I had a thought. We put so much cultural value into proper spelliŋ. One of the reasons for why theres so much dislike for a strange scheme like IPA is that repelling English words using a different scheme works to destroy the deeply-engrained informaʃon about word etymologies stored in "proper" spelling.
-Stevertigo
David Goodman dgoodmanny@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.
You forget an important point. enWP has many readers and contributors with English as second language. They usually use IPA as reference how English is pronounced and have been taught English this way. So effectively IPA is more native to them than all these ugly English pronunciation guides.
Regards, Peter
[[User:Pjacobi]]
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Peter Jacobi peter_jacobi@gmx.net wrote:
You forget an important point. enWP has many readers and contributors with English as second language. They usually use IPA as reference how English is pronounced and have been taught English this way. So effectively IPA is more native to them than all these ugly English pronunciation guides.
Regards, Peter
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. More importantly, the pronunciation guides are necessarily most useful for those whose English is already fluent. Their purpose (on en.wp) is to guide the pronunciation of non-English words spoken in English, and accessibility to English speakers should be the standard by which they are judged. Perhaps IPA is an elegant, ideal pronunciation guide - but very few readers can make sense of it, so using it (and demanding uniformity in its use) is largely pointless.
Nathan
Nathan wrote:
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Peter Jacobi peter_jacobi@gmx.net wrote:
You forget an important point. enWP has many readers and contributors with English as second language. They usually use IPA as reference how English is pronounced and have been taught English this way. So effectively IPA is more native to them than all these ugly English pronunciation guides.
Regards, Peter
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.
Oops, if the world contradicts the list and a WP article, the world is out of step?
Anyway, not much googling on TEFL and IPA needed to find this quote:
"Pronunciation guidance is a major feature of leading EFL dictionaries such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), which are regularly revised and updated. These and authoritative pronunciation-only dictionaries such as Wells (2000) make use of IPA symbols to indicate pronunciation."
Charles
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Oops, if the world contradicts the list and a WP article, the world is out of step?
Anyway, not much googling on TEFL and IPA needed to find this quote:
"Pronunciation guidance is a major feature of leading EFL dictionaries such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), which are regularly revised and updated. These and authoritative pronunciation-only dictionaries such as Wells (2000) make use of IPA symbols to indicate pronunciation."
Charles
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. That doesn't equate to wide usage of IPA specifically, since both your quote above and the article suggests that IPA is a minority of these guides. In your quick Google search, did you find anything to contradict that?
Nathan
Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
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).
Keep in mind that I, for example, share many of your misgivings with IPA. Nevertheless I recognize, as others here do, the benefits of using a single pronunciation scheme. Granted, pronunciation is typically placed low on most people's lists as far as language acquisition is concerned. In truth it's not that low at all: Proper pronunciation of words in a new language opens doors for new speakers.
Even the IPA article mentions that EFL references use pronunciation guides.
I might agree to using a second standard, if that second standard was actually a standard. It is instead something we cobbled together based on English.
My original premise, again, was that IPA be used across all wikis. If its the in fact the international standard that linguists claim it to be, then why can't it be used internationally. My suspicion may surprise other critics here in that I see IPA as being not as international at it would like to be.
Still I favor of using a standard scheme like IPA accross all language wikis. Even if the idea only stirs up debate, like ours here, that debate that will likely yield some positive results.
-Stevertigo
On 24/04/10 03:22, stevertigo wrote:
Question - Is this wrong:
"Socrates (pronounced /ˈsɒkrətiːz/)"
Or really wrong?
-Stevertigo
[in Ancient Greece] Bill: Socrates. Hey, we know that name! Ted: Yeah! Hey, [hands Bill the book] Ted: look him up. Oh, it's under So-crates.
-- Neil.
Just my take on the matter: I find the 'pronunciation respelling key' next to impossible to read, and IPA fairly simple (apart from some of the rarer symbols or diacritics...)
On 21 April 2010 18:45, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
(Crossposted to wikien and foundation:)
Some points about IPA on all language wikis.
- As a rule, all language wikis should use International Phonetic
Alphabet as their standard pronunciation scheme. Very few appear to actually do. 2) All language wikis should attempt to use IPA to pronounce the endonym of a foreign word, not the exonymic re-pronunciation (ie. Iraq = /iːˈrɑːk/ not /ɪˈræk/). 3) With rare exceptions, IPA should be the default phonemic transcription scheme, and alternate schemes such as [[Wikipedia:Pronunciation respelling key]] should be avoided or deprecated. 4) Feedback from languages about IPA should be useful. IPA is actually quite flexible about exactness, while still being phonetically precise. If there are flaws in IPA itself, the Wikipedia community can help raise them for the Internation Phonetic Association. 5) Ambiguity about how it is supposed to be used is a cross-project issue should be dealt with at the Foundation level (ie. global not just inter-wiki policy).
-Stevertigo
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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
William, those are my concerns exactly (along with the "and which standard dialect of English should we use?" concern).
Emily On Apr 24, 2010, at 10:17 AM, William Pietri wrote:
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
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