User talk:Paulroxx

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Hi,

Please stick to IPA conventions that match the help key you're linking to, e.g. for Brian Eno and Berkshire, unless you specify that you're giving a dialectical pronunciation. Thanks, kwami (talk) 02:19, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

As for Bogan, does it rhyme with slogan in Australian English? If so, then the pronunciation is correct. It's between slashes, which means it is an abstract representation, and will not be dead-on phonetically for every dialect. The IPA help key it links to defines /oʊ/ as the vowel in beau, hoe, poke, and notes that it may be transcribed in various ways. (The transcription /oʊ/ was decided on as a compromise of RP, US, Oz, the orthography (<o>), and the fact it is a diphthong. kwami (talk) 02:31, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Paul,

First, since you're working on English dialects, I would welcome you to join in on the discussions at the Help:pronunciation discussion page. My main effort has been to get everyone speaking the same language; we could use your input on where to draw the line.

It's obviously valuable to have local pronunciations, at least in some cases; after all, that's one of the main reasons people come to geographic articles -- especially ones in Britain!, -- but there's a problem with consistency. I've often come across an article with the pronunciation in the IPA, but have no idea what it's supposed to mean - for example, is the [e] supposed to be the sound in bate or in bet? There are hundreds and hundreds of articles where there are no errors in transcription but the information is almost useless because it's not clear which convention was followed.

We have two IPA charts that we hope will get people on the same wavelength. Help:IPA covers the basics. Help:pronunciation is the IPA tailored to English. It's a consensus that was mulled over for a couple years, until we finally broke it out a couple months ago, and I've been spending most of my wikipedia time since then trying to get all of the articles on the same wavelength.

The English chart is a compromise of Oz, GA, and RP. There is no simple /i, u, e, o, a/, so as to not be ambiguous. The vowel transcriptions follow the OED, with the exception of /oʊ/ and /ɨ/ for non-IPA /ɪ/, including /juː/ after /t, d, n/ etc, but we accommodate rhotic dialects by always writing /r/ and /h/. So, with Brian Eno, the final vowel is written /oʊ/; it may be pronounced [əʊ], [ɜʊ], [ɔʊ], [əʉ], or [oː] in various dialects, but the difference isn't important to most people. The idea is that readers will check the symbol on the chart, and get a sample word that contains it; when they pronounce that word as it is in their dialect, they'll be able to correctly pronounce the word they're looking up. For instance, Berkshire: the final r needs to be transcribed even in RP, since this is a phonemic transcription; the first r won't be pronounced in any non-rhotic dialect, but that's such an fundamental difference between RP and GA that it should be obvious to most people. Anyone who looks up /ɑr/ on the chart and sees it's the sound in bark should realize that there's no r for them in Berkshire if there's no r for them in bark. I think of it being like a pronunciation respelling: no one would argue that we shouldn't transcribe it bark-shire because it isn't pronounced locally with an r!

The alternative is having separate RP, GA, etc. pronunciations, which are almost never really necessary. For example, Los Angeles is transcribed /lɒs/, despite the fact that that vowel does not occur in California English, because the difference is irrelevant to them, but is relevant to people elsewhere in the world. I've seen edit wars over whether some common noun should be transcribed in GA or RP, which is pointless. I did create special IPA templates for Australian pronunciation, which link to an Australian IPA chart, but the people who requested them only used them for 17 names. For most people and towns, they ended up not minding generic English /oʊ/ or transcribing an r they don't pronounce themselves.

If the local pronunciation of a name is unpredictable, we certainly need to have two transcriptions, or even just the local pronunciation if it's otherwise clear. In other cases it may be predictable, but with enough differences that people are uncomfortable using a pan-English transcription. However, wiki policy is that all pronunciations should be in English and as broad as possible unless we specify otherwise. However, if we give only the local pronunciation, people who don't know what it corresponds to phonemically won't know how to pronounce it in their own dialect. I find that's true with the Australian names - I need the Aussie chart to make sense of them. So, if you were to write Berkshire (locally pronounced /ˈbɑːkʃɪɚ/), or Bogan (pronounced /ˈboʊɡən/, locally IPA: [ˈbəʉɡn]) [here we need to link to the general IPA help key, because there's no explanation of [ʉ] in the English IPA key], that should be acceptable to everyone.

As for your example of Leicester, a couple days ago I changed it to /ˈlɛstɚ/. Given that /ɛ/ is defined as the vowel in bed, pet, and that the /r/ surfaces in phrases like Leicester is the largest city ... in the English East Midlands, can you think of anyone who would find the pronunciation less than clear? Some people argue it should be /ˈlɛstə(r)/, but that's a bit like transcribing find as /ˈfaɪn(d)/ because the /d/ isn't pronounced in phrases like anyone who would find the pronunciation (in my dialect, at least). That's not a phonemic transcription, and IMO shouldn't be used with slashes.

Only one editor that I can think of has a problem with combining RP and GA in one transcription, despite the fact that these changes have so far affected 20,000 articles. However, several people have taken issue with personal and place names. Maybe you can help us work out a policy that addresses those concerns without sacrificing universality and intelligibility? kwami (talk) 07:47, 24 December 2007 (UTC)