Template talk:IPA-en
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[edit] Link target tweak
"[…] {{IPAEng}} is appropriate, as it links to Help:IPA English pronunciation key […]"
should now be tweaked to:
"[…] {{IPAEng}} is appropriate, as it links to Help:Pronunciation […]"
Would do, but page is protected. — ¾-10 00:51, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
- Done. Thanks for catching that. kwami 01:09, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] BTW, thanks to Kwami
I am but an armchair linguist, so when other people on WP were screaming that Kwami didn't know what he was doing re transcription and pronunciation help, I didn't have 2¢ to add and wasn't prepared to argue either way. But I have come to believe that they are mostly wrong and he is mostly right. He is the one who is effectively sorting out the different needs and addressing each one (e.g., "For a broad, non-regional transcription of an English word, as when giving the pronunciation of a key word in an article, {{IPAEng}} is appropriate […] For foreign words that are not assimilated into English, regional pronunciations of English words, and non-standard English dialects, {{IPA2}} would be more appropriate […] For phonemic transcriptions that follow Australian pronunciation, use the templates {{IPAAusE}} and {{pronAusE}}.") The relationship of phonetics to phonemics is complex, and every part of it gets highlighted differently somewhere on WP. Sometimes the blind people groping the trunk and the blind people groping the tail don't realize that they're both touching the same elephant. I currently believe that Kwami sees more of the elephant than they do. Sometimes an IPA character is used to represent a phoneme, not a phone. (A lot of people don't realize that.) Which may be to say, it is being used as a variable whose value may be its phone or also several nearby phones that may regionally express the same phoneme. Probably we ought to have a separate set of characters for this variable usage, but we don't. We could invent one, but most people will avoid using it. And there would have to be a slightly different (or sometimes very different) one for each language. Which may be why people resist it—they instinctively grasp that IPA allows for interlingual (phonetic) comparison, and when you lead them toward the phonemic, which also has its proper applications, they say "hey! Where'd the phonetic go?!". They don't want phonemic systems that don't also maximize phonetic comparison. That is, they do want both at the same time. But they fail to understand that you can't have both in the same transcription. I'm digressing; let me get back to the basics. Sometimes laypeople need phonemic transcriptions for words in their own language. Sometimes they need phonetic ones for foreign words. (A corollary of the previous two sentences is that a native English-speaking reader of EN-WP and an EFL reader of the same EN-WP could in many cases best be served by different transcriptions of the same English word.) Sometimes a language has both naturalized and imported pronunciations that coexist. In each of those cases, laypeople need a different help chart to explain the different transcription style. There doesn't have to be one transcription style, nor one help page/chart, that addresses all of those cases. In fact, the point is that there can't be. You can't transcribe broadly and narrowly at the same time. Which one you do should really depend on the context—on the target audience—not on your personality. They both have applications. With EN-WP having multiple target audiences simultaneously, I could envision multiple transcriptions for a single word (although I know that such a system is currently a pipe dream, and maybe most people would never understand its purpose, so maybe it's never to be.) Anyway, I'm digressing again. Let me end with thanks to Kwami—I think his help has been a positive force. — ¾-10 00:51, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
- Thanks for your support. Actually, there are several articles with phonetic transcriptions in English, such as when giving a person's own pronunciation of their name. I think that's fine, as long as we clarify what we're trying to communicate. (There's one with a historical pronunciation, where I get reverted each time I try to note that that is what it is.) There are also some phonemic transcriptions of foreign words, but in such cases I think we should always link to an article on the phonology of the language in question, so our readers can properly interpret what they're seeing. The IPA is designed to be used for both (basically main symbols for phonemics, diacritics for phonetics), which is where [brackets] vs. /slashes/ come in. kwami 01:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
