Talk:Garðar Thór Cortes
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[edit] Position on classical charts?
Is there some website that says how well an album or single has done in the UK classical music chart(s)? Cheers, Jacklee 03:04, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Respelled pronunciation of "Garðar Thór Cortes"
Actually, I think the article "Garðar Thór Cortes" is one where a respelled pronunciation would come in very useful. Can we consider restoring it? Not many people read IPA symbols with ease, particularly those representing Icelandic phonology, and on my browser the character that you inserted after the "r" in "Cortes" doesn't even display properly – it appears as a little square. (What character is it supposed to be?) Also, I'm not sure it's right to consider the respelling system I used as "idiosyncratic" as I was applying the system set out in the "Help:Pronunciation respelling key" article. Cheers, Jacklee 01:04, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
- It appears as a little box to me too. I'm hoping that it displays somewhere as an unvoicing of the r. Can you explain to me the pronunciation information you want to add? What I removed was unintelligible to me. Haukur 01:09, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
The article "Help:Pronunciation respelling key" tries to set out a standard method for rendering pronunciations using letters of the English alphabet which should be easily understandable by most English speakers who are unfamiliar with the IPA. Have a look at that article. As regards the respelling (kar'-dhar tho~oor khorr'-tes), I actually thought it was fairly clear. Two things to note: stresses are marked after the syllable, not before (this is explained in the "Pronunciation respelling key" article), and I had some difficulty rendering "ouːr" in "Thór" as "uː" is respelled "oo". I therefore added a swung dash ("~") to the respelled pronunciation to indicate that it was a diphthong, otherwise it would have appeared as "thooor". What aspects of the respelled pronunciation did you find unintelligible? About the unvoiced "r" – I've never studied phonology, but what about using "ɹ"? Or is that not quite accurate? Cheers, Jacklee 01:28, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
- No, ɹ is not an unvoiced r. I guess I understand your pronunciation key now but I don't quite see the point. Why use two systems and why should this be the second one? IPA is something standard which is known by many people while I have never encountered what you're proposing before. Haukur 01:37, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, I thought it would be helpful to provide the average English-speaking Wikipedia user with an approximate respelled pronunciation, mainly for convenience but also especially since some of the symbols you have used such as /tʰ/ and /kʰ/ do not appear in the "IPA chart for English" or "International Phonetic Alphabet for English" articles. It's therefore difficult for users to work out how the words are in fact pronounced. Respelled pronunciations are common in concise dictionaries; less so in the comprehensive ones such as the Oxford English Dictionary. Any number of different respelling systems could be adopted, I suppose – I chose this particular one because it is set out in the article "Help:Pronunciation respelling key" and appears to be the standard one used in Wikipedia. Is there some way of getting around the problem with the unvoiced "r"? It's rather mystifying to see a square in the middle of the IPA transcription. Cheers, Jacklee 01:55, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
- I've never heard of any standard used on Wikipedia except IPA. I don't know about the merits of this particular system but if it's meant to be intuitive I'm not sure how well it succeeds. For example I doubt most readers will realize that they're supposed to pronounce 'dh' as a fricative. Where this cluster appears in English it's usually either in compounds or in loan words from Sanskrit or its derivatives (like dharma). In those words it is, if I'm not mistaken, pronounced [d] in English and [dʰ] in Sanskrit. Haukur 02:07, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
- Oh, I forgot. The [tʰ] and [kʰ] sounds are common in English; they're the first sounds in 'take' and 'cake' respectively. The [t] and [k] sounds are found in 'steak' and 'score'. A broad phonetic transcription of English might not indicate this difference but it is phonemic in Icelandic and thus crucial to note. Haukur 02:10, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, since you feel quite strongly about the matter, I guess we can leave out the respelled pronunciation. However, I think someone needs to produce an article that helps people who are not familiar with the IPA to relate the symbols to the sounds. Right now there's the article "International Phonetic Alphabet for English" but that doesn't seem comprehensive enough because, for example, it doesn't mention anything about how to pronounce [tʰ] and [kʰ]. Also, because IPA is also used in languages other than English, there needs to be a guide on how to pronounce symbols used in such languages. The main "International Phonetic Alphabet" article is too technical – it is no help to me to know that [ɕ] is a "voiceless palatalized postalveolar (alveolo-palatal) fricative". Does this sound like a project you might want to take on? ;-) Cheers, Jacklee 16:01, 20 May 2007 (UTC)