[WikiEN-l] Pronunciations and IPA/SAMPA

[Steve Vertigum]

This is probably the most well thought out addressing
of this issue ever done on wp. I must say this is
impressive and inline with the consensus of

No unicode IPA on IE?? Hmm. Well, considering the
expensive workarounds you listed -- as necessary to
accomodate IE users -- for a fix that entirely in
Microsoft's domain, I would lean toward calling the
IPA Unicode as "standard" anyway, and let the ?? or
Xboxes be the problem of the IE end user. This is
already the case for any character sets that arent
loaded up anyway -- (I have yet to load a Hindi
character set for example. ;)  Soon afterward someone
will write a hack to accomodate IE no doubt, but
theres no reason not to push the Unicode IPA as the
standard right now.

But that still doesnt deal with the problem of easy
input via a Roman character set.  A little conversion
hack from the pseudovalues (/s/) to their IPA
equvalents should be a first priority , and I would do
it myself if I had the time, or could program a little
better (late bloomer ok..)

As always with apologies to the hackers,
-S-


--- David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
> There was some talk a while back about deciding on a
> standard method of 
> indicating pronunciations on Wikipedia. Of course
> some people said 
> pronunciations belong on Wiktionary, but that's
> beside the point: there 
> are many articles where a discussion of the
> pronunciation of certain 
> words is necessary, and there ought to be a standard
> way of notating that.
> 
> In fact, there is. The International Phonetic
> Alphabet is ideally suited 
> to marking pronunciations of words, and is flexible
> enough to describe 
> broad transcriptions that represent how a word is
> pronounced in multiple 
> dialects to minute phonetic details. This wisdom, of
> course, has been 
> lost on the makers of most American dictionaries,
> who each insist upon 
> using their own ad-hoc pronunciation scheme (one of
> my personal pet 
> peeves). The _Cambridge Dictionary of American
> English_ is a notable, if 
> perhaps not well-known, exception. The foremost
> dictionary of (mostly) 
> British English, the _Oxford English Dictionary_
> uses IPA, as does the 
> major Australian English dictionary,  _The Macquarie
> Dictionary_.
> 
> But I digress. There are several pages on the
> Wikipedia that deal 
> specifically with pronunciations, for example [[List
> of words of 
> disputed pronunciation]]. And the way that the
> pronunciations are listed 
> on that page is the worst possible mix of ad-hoc
> pronunciation schemes. 
> In fact, some of the ad-hac pronunciations given I
> couldn't even figure 
> what they meant. (does AHSK rhyme with American
> _task_ or _mosque_?). 
> Clearly some kind of standard scheme is needed.
> 
> I spent several hours today revamping that page,
> using IPA 
> transcriptions and doing some serious research about
> which 
> pronunciations are listed in what dictionaries. I
> put that page on 
> [[List of words of disputed pronunciation/IPA]].
> However, I later 
> discovered to my tremendous dismay that the IPA
> letters simply do not 
> display in IE. The scheme for encoding IPA in ASCII,
> called SAMPA, is 
> capable of encoding anything in IPA, but it is not
> particularly readable 
> (although some might argue the same about IPA). It
> was designed to be 
> machine-readable, and it doesn't really seem like an
> adequate solution. 
> It uses lots of non-alphabetic characters to
> represent sounds (the 'a' 
> in _cat_ is '{' in SAMPA), and as a result
> SAMPA-ized pronunciations are 
> frankly ugly.
> 
> Anyhow, it seems that just using the HTML entities
> for the Unicode IPA 
> extensions is not an acceptable solution because it
> leaves IE users with 
> lovely but useless rectangles where there ought to
> be IPA characters. 
> There is a LaTeX extension called TIPA that allows
> the complete set of 
> IPA characters and diacritics. If this were
> installed into the TeX math 
> extensions, then a similar syntax could be used to
> generate images of 
> the IPA from LaTeX input.
> I see the following possible solutions (in the order
> that I think is good):
> 
> 1.) Auto-detect the browser and send IPA Unicode to
> browsers that 
> support it and TIPA LaTeX images to those that
> don't. (Pros: attractive 
> display of IPA for all users. Cons: lots of 
> programming)
> 
> 2.) Just send TIPA LaTeX images (Pros: attractive
> display of IPA. Cons: 
> Uses images in text when for some users embedded IPA
> Unicode would look 
> better)
> 
> 3.) Store the IPA in a special format or in a
> special tag, auto-detect 
> the browser and send IPA Unicode to browsers that
> support it and SAMPA 
> to the rest. (Pros: doesn't require inserting images
> or using TeX. Cons: 
> SAMPA is ugly and hard to read)
> 
> 4.) Render IPA into GIFs or PNGs and just insert
> them as images. (Pros: 
> compatible with everything. Cons: time-consuming,
> and difficult to change)
> 
> 5.) Devise a Wikipedia-specific pronunciation scheme
> and just use that 
> (blech!) (Pros: no coding required. Cons: YAAHPS
> (Yet Another Ad Hoc 
> Pronunciation Scheme))
> 
> 6.) Do nothing and continue to allow people to use
> ad-hoc pronunciation 
> schemes (BLECH!!) (Pros: no action required. Cons:
> maintains status quo 
> harms as described above)
> 
> Of course, no. 1 requires doing some coding and
> testing for what may end 
> up being a feature used on just a few pages. On the
> other hand, such 
> code could possibly be extremely useful for the
> Wiktionary. In the 
> meantime, I'm going to leave [[List of words of
> disputed 
> pronunciation/IPA]] as it is, and wait for
> suggestions.
> 
> Now of course there will be opponents of the IPA,
> because it's too 
> technical or whatever reason. To those people I say
> the IPA for the 
> purposes of representing English is really no more
> complicated than the 
> pronunciation schemes used in American dictionaries,
> like the 
> _Merriam-Webster Dictionary_, and the _Cambridge
> Dictionary of American 
> English_, which is designed for learners of English,
> seems to do just 
> fine with it.
> 
> - David [[User:Nohat]]
> 
> 
> * 
>
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_of_disputed_pronunciation/IPA>*
> 
> 
> 
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