Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sirius-serious merger

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was merge. --Rhobite 21:26, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sirius-serious merger

Nominated by an anonymous contributor who posted the VFD notice but didn't complete the rest of the nomination process. I won't speculate as to the reason for nomination. — Knowledge Seeker দ (talk) 00:10, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Comment: these words appear to have been randomly chosed to represent this "vowel merge", relevant google hits appear to be wikipedia mirrors. I believe it is describing a real phenomenon, so this might be merged or renamed. Kappa 00:24, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

An earlier anon today put a VfD notice on father-bother merger, then deleted it himself and redirected the article to Fucking father-bother merger. Since the current anon did not give any reason or complete the VfD process I am removing the VfD notice as vandalism. The same anon IP that nominated this page vandalized Hippie a few hours earlier [1] (but possibly not the same person).

See Category:English pronunciation mergers, there are a couple dozen similar "pronunciation merger" articles here. Too many to merge into a single article, and each of them could eventually be expanded to give more detail about the geographic extent of each pronunciation and its history, including maps and perhaps even Ogg media files with actual audio pronunciations.

If someone else wishes to legimitately re-nominate this article, they can of course do so. -- Curps 01:31, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• There were a whole load of these that came in all at the same time. See Category:English pronunciation mergers. Also see the edits to American English from the same author. There were a whole load of "yod dropping before X" articles (see Special:Whatlinkshere/Yod-dropping) that came in at around the same time, too. They were all merged to Yod-dropping. Basically, all of the specific list items from the phonology section of American English have been broken out into their own articles.
  Since, like the yod droppings, these have relevance outside of U.S. English, I'm with Kappa: either Merge all of the vowel merger articles to Vowel merger phonemic differentiation or Keep. Uncle G 01:49, 2005 Feb 21 (UTC)
• I replaced the VfD tag because I think it's a valid nomination. I have no vote until I look into it more carefully. I'm thinking if there are a bunch of these they can probably be merged, and this is as good a place to discuss it as any. -R. fiend 04:20, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Strong keep. Although the list of "mergers" recently added to American English looks like it may well require some serious revision — my strong suspicion is that many of them, such as "yod-dropping", are historically bogus, and assume the prescriptionist tradition of southern England's boarding-school English as both normative and deeply rooted in history — this isn't the place to decide any of these issues. -- Smerdis of Tlön 04:35, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Not sure. On the one hand, I support the idea of keeping these "pronunciation merger" articles; on the other hand, Google seems to come up empty on this precise term "Sirius-serious". Some other ones are very well known, eg, cot-caught merger. So if this merger is real and notable, it seems to be known under some other name. The expert out there seems to be William Labov, who in 2005 is publishing the Atlas of North American English. His website is here: [2]. Maybe someone can send him an e-mail and ask his opinion? -- Curps 04:55, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Merge seems appropriate. Radiant! 08:48, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Strong Delete (and I would support deleting any similar material) Very minor mispronunciation. What if we had an article for every mispronunciation in every language, region, dialect, accent, speech impediment, etc? Very unlikely this will be searched for by name. Also impossible for this to evolve beyond a substub. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 13:14, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
  • These aren't mispronunciations. Nor are they minor. These are genuine dialectical differences. The pronunciation guide of the OED1 tacitly acknowledged similar vowel differences and mergers to these, as a matter of fact. (It had different symbols for vowels that, although pronounced the same in one dialect, were pronounced differently in others.) The main questions are (a) whether these are the widely-accepted names of these differences, and (b) whether these differences would be better off grouped into a single article on vowel mergers or vowel shifts, to give context. Curps seems to think that the answer to the latter is that they would not. However, from looking around a bit at existing articles, there seems to be some duplication going on here. All of the yod-droppings were definite merger candidates. I was initially less sure of the vowel mergers, but am becoming more convinced. Uncle G 15:41, 2005 Feb 21 (UTC)
• Comment. I don't think the term "pronunciation merger" is used in linguistics to define this. I would vote to merge all those articles into the same place, but I'm not sure where. Perhaps a Phonology of American English? JoaoRicardo 01:01, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • I thought of breaking out the phonology section of American English, too. But these really do have relevance outside of U.S. English, as I said. Uncle G 02:23, 2005 Feb 23 (UTC)
  • Yes, the term "merger" really is used in linguistics. See the website of William Labov, mentioned above. -- Curps 03:55, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Agreed; "merger" is indeed used to describe the levelling of two formerly discrete phonemes in linguistics. I do question the factual accuracy of this particular merger, especially given that it is named for two non-native inkhorn terms: to demonstrate the reality of this phenomenon, it would be necessary to show that Sirius was a name on everybody's lips, and that it had a historically attested pronunciaiton different from serious that once existed most everywhere but was lost in certain dialects. The historical primacy and unaltered purity of certain varieties of British English seem to be the assumption he's working from. But an accuracy dispute does not make a case for deletion. -- Smerdis of Tlön 04:32, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • Feel free to dispute the accuracy of phonemic differentiation, where I've merged all of the merger articles apart from this one (as it is still pending deletion). I've explicitly asked for a POV check. A fact check is in order, too. Uncle G 17:59, 2005 Feb 28 (UTC)
• Merge all merger articles. – flamurai (t) 18:33, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)
• Merge along with the related articles. There has been a crop of these merger articles showing up, and the liklihood of them being searched by individual name is low. The information is relevant but it would be better suited to a single article listing and describing pronunciation mergers in English. Arkyan 18:46, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Merge with all other merger articles. – AxSkov 00:43, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Merge with apprpriate articles.--Directorstratton 09:28, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

Most of the articles on phonemic mergers in English have been merged into Phonemic differentiation; this one should be too. --Angr 10:27, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.