Wikipedia talk:Pronunciation (simple guide to markup, American)/oldtalk

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[edit] Version 0.90 Introduction

In the course of creating the List of heteronyms page, I was unable to find a simple guide to indicating pronunciation on Wikipedia. Thus this article, designed to be:

1. Intuitive, simple and easy to use;
2. Easy to type, requiring few or no special characters.
3. Pronounce as many words as possible with the fewest ambiguities.

Obviously, the result will entail trade-offs. I studied a number of such guides, and found them all either too complex or too ambiguous. One simple guide, for example, used "i" to indicate the sound of both bite and bit.

Editing the example words should present little problem if there's a compelling reason to do so--such as an error or a significantly better word. Editing the SYMBOLS, however, without discussion on this page, may create difficulties:

• Other dependent articles may become inconsistent;
• Revising the symbols may create internal inconsistency or result in increased ambiguity in use.

If you have an idea for improving the symbol selection, please discuss it here. My arrangement uses only normal letters and the tilde (~) to indicate the voiced t~h sound, as in the (t~huh). Caps denote the accented syllable. I'm not indicating syllables otherwise, for simplicity.--NathanHawking 02:46, 2004 Oct 31 (UTC)

[edit] Title

Pronunciation (simple guide to markup, American): The title was a struggle for me. It's not a pronunciation guide, it's American, it's about indicating or markup. If you have a better title idea, please bring it up.--NathanHawking 02:46, 2004 Oct 31 (UTC)

[edit] Long O symbol

I'm considering changing the long O symbol, as in the goat sound, from O to OH. That would change the markup for goat from GOT to GOHT.

I seem to recall rejecting this for some ambiguity issues, but for the life of me can't remember why now. It seems like a good idea again.--NathanHawking 09:22, 2004 Oct 31 (UTC)

[edit] Ver. 0.91 Changed symbols to aa, oh, and uu

What a difference a day makes. Can see clear advantages to changing three symbols:

These changes seem to make more pronunciation markups intuitive and less confusing, changing the markup for goat from GOT to GOHT, for example. Doubtless these changes will cause a few oddities I can't predict, but I believe they largely make sense.--NathanHawking 21:48, 2004 Oct 31 (UTC)

[edit] Questions

How do you transcribe the following words using this scheme?

• her
• err
• air
• marry
• merry
• Mary
• butter
• button
• prism
• sink
• single
• finger
• forest
• roses
• Rosa's
• for
• poor
• entrepreneur
• lure

Also, how do you mark secondary stress? Nohat 09:35, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Any SIMPLE phonetic markup system will be unable to map all the nuances of possible pronunciations of all words. Trade-offs, remember? That's mostly irrelevant, though, since pronunciations vary widely anyway, and even a dictionary with an extensive phonetic table can only approximate a selected "standard" pronunciation. Look up words on Merriam-Webster--their recorded pronunciation often fails to match their hypothetical written one.

A good example is their entry for record. [1] Their phonetic indication is ri-'kord, the equivalent of Pronunciation (simple guide to markup, American)'s rihKOHRD. But play the recorded version of M-W's record pronunciation and it's much closer to reeKOHRD, which happens to be the way I pronounce the word.

I've made no provision for secondary stress, to keep things simple. A word like entrepreneur, however, could be adequately rendered AHNtruhpruhNUHR, close enough to M-W's "änn-tr&-p(r)&-'n&r. Once again, simplicity and ease of use are more important than scholarly accuracy. Once again, the word entrepreneur is pronounced in a dozen different ways across America. Close enough, for a List of heteronyms and the like, is good enough.

As for your list, I leave most of them as an exercise for you, but will do:

• her HUHR or HR (M-W: 'h&r)
• err EHR (M-W: 'er)
• air EHR (M-W: 'er)
• marry MAARee (M-W: 'mar-E)
• merry MEHRee (M-W: 'mer-E)

As you know, most of these have two pronunciations, but I only selected one to illustrate. I estimate that 99.99% of "standard" American English words can be closely approximated using this table. As an exercise, I also tried it out tonight on a southern U.S. dialect and it worked well there too.--NathanHawking 10:52, 2004 Nov 1 (UTC)