Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Pronunciation

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Frequently asked questions

The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?

The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.

For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it.

Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion.

The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.

Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{IPA-all}} or {{IPA-endia}}.

The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.

The English rhotic is pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic.

Manual of Style

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Proposal to Footnote IPA

I would like to submit a petition regarding the usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet, abbreviated as the “IPA”.

I have observed that the Manual of Style prefers a plain text format of the IPA pronunciation of the subject’s title, which is beneficial for clarity and accessibility, however, those who may not be familiar or knowledgeable about the IPA may find the plain text format be cluttering the page.

Although there is a Footnote section on the IPA subpage that addresses highly technical and multiple IPA pronunciations, it does not extend to suggesting that main pronunciations also be footnoted.

I suggest that all pronunciations—whether they are common, uncommon, or multiple variants—be moved to footnotes. This approach maintains an uncluttered lead section with the detailed IPA information accessible via a footnote for those who seek further clarity.

This change balances the need for a clean, readable article while also providing detailed phonetic information for those interested. I welcome feedback on this proposal and am particularly interested in hearing about potential drawbacks or alternative solutions that might preserve both accessibility and readability. WorldClassChampion (talk) 10:25, 20 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I second that petition, the IPA is cryptic and likely only readable by a minor fraction of visitors, while taking a top spot in the article. Though rather than a footnote (which are often cluttered), maybe having it moved to the info box for main pronunciation, and a subsection for the variants? Wkyx (talk) 07:28, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. A single IPA pronunciation is good to have, especially for names and foreign words where the pronunciation is often not obvious. It's also not hard to learn. Therefore it's fine for the first sentence in such cases, though in more complicated ones (such as with several possible pronunciations), a note may be more appropriate. Gawaon (talk) 08:18, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

IPA is usually considered very hard to learn. The number of symbols alone is a barrier, and TBH even in the linguistics field, it's not that easy: many of the pronunciations can require months of training with tutoring. And if your ears were never trained at a young age, you may never be able to get them right.

If wikipedia was primarily about linguistics, then yes, it would make sense to have IPA up there in a prime spot, otherwise english pronunciation respelling is more practical (it's accessible to all visitors). Wkyx (talk) 08:39, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While US dictionaries normally don't use IPA, UK dictionaries normally do. So the fraction of visitors who can read it may be greater than you think.

Anyway, we often do have both pronunciation respelling and IPA, and in some cases they're even both relegated to a footnote or the infobox (e.g. technetium, Łódź). The trouble is that there are some words where respelling doesn't work very well (because English spelling is messy enough that there's no unambiguous way to write a vowel), and of course it doesn't work at all when it's specifically a foreign-language pronunciation that is being presented. Double sharp (talk) 09:04, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notification of RfC: Should we keep delimiting diaphonemic transcriptions with single slashes?

I have opened a request for comment to discuss the matter: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics#RfC: Should we keep delimiting diaphonemic transcriptions with single slashes?. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 13:07, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]