Talk:English Phonemic Representation

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[edit] This is a non-standard, wiktionary-specific pronunciation key

At first, this page looked redundant. The American Heritage respelling system is already given at Pronunciation respelling for English (with a few differences; e.g. joined vowels like o͝o are broken up in two here). Also, the text here says that Webster's uses the same system, but above site shows that Webster's uses a completely different respelling scheme (both in the collegiate and online dictionaries).

However, googling "enpr" and "phonemic" together gives just 17 (!) sites, 16 of which are valid but all seem to link to this entry or wiktionary. It turns out the name "enPR" originated in February during a discussion on renaming a pronunciation system mistakenly called "AHD". To quote the user Hippietrail "I've said this in many places and I'll say it again here. This is not AHD, it should not be called AHD. It's my fault because at the time I naively thought all American dictionaries shared a standard system and I needed a name. It should be called something like "American dictionary style" which is a mouthful. If somebody can come up with a better name that would be ideal. In reality it is a Wiktionary-specific system based on AHD and other American dictionaries so as to appear to familiar to people used to looking up pronunciations in American dictionares". The original name given to this scheme was "American Dictionaries".

In other words, this system is non-standard. It was specifically compiled (by someone who thought all American dictionaries use the same respelling scheme!) for wiktionary and is prone to changes. Hopefully it will soon wither away and IPA will be solely used on wiktionary as well (if it isn't already). We probably shouldn't include an entry in wikipedia, nor should its use be encouraged. Unless someone can give a good argument to keep it around I'll suggest this page for deletion. Afasmit (talk) 13:57, 26 November 2007 (UTC)