Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Phonetics/Archive 2

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Stub type?

I've proposed a phonetics-stub type, here, among various other possibilities for splitting up the rather large linguistics stubs. Comments welcome, as would be help sorting the candidates should the stub type be created... Alai 22:08, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

  • I've taken the liberty of listing this on your project page. Alai 03:56, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Project Directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council is currently in the process of developing a master directory of the existing WikiProjects to replace and update the existing Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. These WikiProjects are of vital importance in helping wikipedia achieve its goal of becoming truly encyclopedic. Please review the following pages:

  • User:Badbilltucker/Culture Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Culture Directory 2,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Philosophy and religion Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Sports Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Geographical Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Geographical Directory/United States, (note: This page will be retitled to more accurately reflect its contents)
  • User:Badbilltucker/History and society directory, and
  • User:Badbilltucker/Science directory

and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope to have the existing directory replaced by the updated and corrected version of the directory above by November 1. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 22:50, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry if you tried to update it before, and the corrections were gone. I have now moved the new draft in the old directory pages, so the links should work better. My apologies for any confusion this may have caused you. 207.160.66.129 14:48, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Irish phonology peer review

Irish phonology is up for peer review. Please leave comments at Wikipedia:Peer review/Irish phonology/archive1. Thanks! —Angr 18:27, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Template for "this article needs IPA pronunciation"

Is there a template that can be used to tag an article as needing an IPA pronunciation? For example, parrot needs it because I don't know how to put "si-tass-ines" (for psittacines) in IPA. Cburnett 00:27, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Template:Cleanup-ipa is good for that:
ə This article contains nonstandard pronunciation information which should be rewritten using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Please see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation) for help.


—Felix the Cassowary 11:55, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I have added that one and 3 others to the wikiproject page. Cburnett 13:58, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I would like to add the correct IPA for Psittacines, but I can't tell from your ad-hoc guide how it's supposed to be pronounced. —Angr 14:03, 22 November 2006 (UTC) Never mind, I looked it up in a couple of online dictionaries and added their pronunciation. —Angr 14:08, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Stablepedia

Beginning cross-post.

See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team#Stablepedia. If you wish to comment, please comment there. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 03:18, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

End cross-post. Please do not comment more in this section.

New template idea (crosspost)

I have an idea for making IPA symbols more comprehensible, like this: ʒ (try rolling over that with your mouse). That is, {{Ʒ}}. To discuss the concept, go here: template talk:Ʒ.--Homunq 01:50, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Vowel reduction

Vowel reduction is a well-neglected topic. I threw something in, out of my amateurish head, just to kill a highly limited redirect to "unstressed vowel" and to make it look respectable enough not to be speedily deleted under a silly and quite abused pretext of "dicdef". But the real job is obviously not for me. See you next year. `'mikkanarxi 00:27, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Woiwurrung language

Can anyone peer-review this, im not good at phonetics so may need help. The reference material is the second last link under woiwurrung. Thankyou Enlil Ninlil 04:34, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

The article looks like a stub, and has no IPA notation. I added the Cleanup-ipa template to it. --Smeira 12:05, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Explorer 7

I have just downloaded the upgrades for Internet Explorer 7 (version 7.0.5730.11), and I am sorry to say that the template {{IPA}} does not work well with it -- from what I can see, many diacritic modifiers to main IPA symbols show up as little square boxes, despite the use of the template (for an example, look at the dental affricate in the phoneme chart of the Wari' language). With the previous version of Internet Explorer everything went fine. Is there someone with the necessary template-making expertise who could fix this problem? --Smeira 12:10, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Isn't that a bug in that version of IE7, it used to work but doesn't anymore after the update. ---moyogo 13:56, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
Please continue discussion at template talk:IPA#Explorer 7.  Andreas  (T) 14:36, 16 December 2006 (UTC)


Modifying consonants

I've been modifying the consonant pages to have an occurrence section like those in the vowel pages. If anyone else would like to help me do this, they're more than welcome. I think I've done enough (all of the plosives and nasals) to give a good example of how I've been doing it. Usually the articles have language specific information that I simply remove but sometimes it can just go elsewhere in the article. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 01:19, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

It would be nice to get some consensus here on what format examples should be given in. I don't just say this because I put quite a bit of work into putting examples into many of the consonant pages (hoping that someone with more extensive knowledge might be inspired to continue the trend), but also because this is information I would like to know about various sounds. What other sounds are allophones in various example languages? What are some of the phonotactics? What graphemes represent them, in written languages? Since this is an English encyclopedia, which consonants are used in English, and what letters represent them in various circumstances? What sounds that don't occur in English are often confused with other sounds by English speakers? Which sounds are often used as approximations to English sounds by non-native speakers? What misunderstandings exist about a certain sound being used in a certain language (e.g. the "Castillian lisp" idea among speakers of Latin American dialects of English) This is an encyclopedia, not a phonetics textbook, and cross-linked, interesting-to-more-than-just-the-specialist examples should be commonplace in my opinion, even in somewhat specialized articles.
I can't say that the format I chose for examples was the best. Admittedly it is a bit clunky. However, the format you have chosen doesn't allow space for answers to any of the above questions, and I fear it will make the examples less than interesting for anyone who doesn't study phonetics. Perhaps we can work on a table-based format, which would provide a simple, uniform, and easy to scan left few columns for those who want to see examples in a textbook/reference manual style, and encyclopedic details in optional columns to the right. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 10:32, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I've been going with the format from the vowel pages, which assume has some consensus itself simply by the fact of its duration. I've tried to make sure that the information I delete from these pages is still elswhere and, as with Azeri's voiceless palatal fricative allophone, moved it to the appropriate place when it was only on the consonant page. For the most part (especially for the sounds with greater allophony), I've kept the "in English" sections because I think it can allow readers less familiar with phonetics and phonology to understand how they themselves produce these sounds. I'm not sure if I understand exactly how the table you're proposing would look but I'm certainly open to it. Do you think you can give an example? Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 19:23, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
Maybe something like this:
Occurrence of example consonant
Language Grapheme(s) Example Allophones Notes
Examplish b, Δ (after Ж) HsaЖΔji [gkisdfs], "candy cane" none In southern dialects of Examplish, example consonant is aspirated
I like having a grapheme column, but that's probably because I am fascinated with various writing systems. The example column may be enough for this, with additional info on graphemes in the notes column. An allophones column might be useful, but it also might be empty in many cases. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 07:00, 24 December 2006 (UTC)


Hmmm, not too bad.
Occurrence of example consonant
Language Orthography IPA Meaning Notes
Examplese фъфuвайч [fˠɤˈvaɪtɕ] "free watch" also denoted by ф between voiced consonants
Scottish Examplish kómdhrda [ˈkomvrəˌda] "soda can" <dh> may also represent a voiced dental fricative
I think that the allophones and graphemes section can be dumped into the notes section. I'd also be strict about what to include in the notes: only that which will prevent confusion by the reader. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 04:15, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Better format. After thinking about it some more I really don't want the grapheme or allophone columns. However, I may be misinterpreting, but I don't agree with being so strict about what can be in the notes column. To give a few examples of things that aren't necessary to "prevent confusinon by the reader", but which I would like to see in the respective articles because they are interesting and encyclopedic, if somewhat marginal to the articles (factoids as it were):
  • Voiced uvular fricative in German gives an example of how broad the concept of the "r" sound is among speakers of many European languages
  • Voiceless dental fricative in Peninsular Spanish is sometimes mistaken for a lisp by speakers of Latin American dialects
  • Voiceless glottal fricative in Latin American dialects of Spanish is a rare example of this sound in a Romance language, and it is unrelated to "h" in Latin
  • Notes about when the actual realization of a phoneme in a language is disputed
  • Notes about what dialects of a language don't have a particular sound, and what it has been replaced with (voiceless dental fricative in English -> t in some Northeast US dialects e.g. Brooklyn, -> f in Cockney)
  • For examples in languages that use a syllabary, which syllables does the sound appear in (for consonants at least, for vowels this might be unwieldy)
  • Any and all allophones (although not necessarily listing all regional variations, this can go in the <Such and such language> phonology article). The reason I argue for this is that this is interesting (at least to me) information that has no place in any other article. In other words, if I am looking at an article on a consonant that is unfamiliar to me (or even perhaps one that is familiar to me), I want to know what other consonants it is "similar to" in some sense across a variety of languages, and I will not find this information anywhere else on Wikipedia (even in a perfect world where all <Such and such language> phonology articles followed identical conventions both for transcription and listing allophones, this would involve doing a search and sorting through some chaff).
Anyway, if you think that the notes column should be limited somewhat in amount of content, I agree with that. Perhaps something like "each article's average number of lines in the notes column per example should be no more than 2, and no single example should be more than 5, on a monitor with average resolution" would be reasonable as a style guideline. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 12:17, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, that would be a good style guideline. Most of the examples you put were things that I would consider anyway though. I probably wouldn't list all the minor dialects of a language that don't have a certain sound. I'm also cautious about the allophony idea. Sometimes minor allophonic variations are not significant (such as deaspirating stops between vowels) but, for example, Russian /i/ has three good allophones that are worthy of inclusion ([i], [ɪ], and [ɨ]). Although there are 5 more that I can think of on the top of my head, it is better to guide the reader to the Russian phonology page where allophony is explained in detail. The notes can also explain that certain sounds are allophones themselves. The best thing, I think, is to use links in the notes page whenever possible so that you can say "<dh> may also represent ð, see Scottish Examplese orthography" Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:21, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, I agree that we don't need to list dialects that don't have the sound in every (or even most) entries where such a comment would be possible, but it still might be useful here and there. For voiceless dental fricative, since it appears to be a very fragile sound, the fact that it has dropped out of several English dialects ties in nicely with its rarity among the worlds lanugages. But then again, if we are to keep English information separate (in a priveleged place in the occurrence section), then this is a nonissue for this example, and I can't think of any similar examples off the top of my head.
Anyway, looking at voiced uvular fricative, I see that there is a nice paragraph that covers several languages at once. I am getting the feeling that maybe the table should only be part of the occurrence section (although with a lot of users contributing examples, it probably should grow to be the largest part). What do you think about an organization like this (numbers to clarify sequencing, not necessarily subsections):

Occurrence

  1. English, if the sound occurs in English (and perhaps if the sound occurs in regional varieties or is the most common approximation of a sound in English by a sizable minority of non-native speakers in an English-speaking language)
  2. Anything that can be said about the sound in most of the languages it occurs in, e.g. labiodental nasal usually allophonic with labial and/or alveolar nasal (if this is true, just an example)
  3. Language families/subfamilies/etc. or areal groupings where the sound is common, possibly with some historical linguistic data on the sound in these groups
  4. Very sparingly include single languages that have too much to put into the Notes column. This would still be only one or two "factoids", but perhaps do this where it would take more than one or two short sentences. Don't put example words here unless necessary; save them for the table
  5. The table; with allowances for the sections above, the Notes column can now be pretty small, i.e. maximum 2 lines per example
Perhaps the order of 1 and 2 could be swapped.
For allophones, maybe the "prevent confusion by the reader" standard is a good one, except for those few cases where a language has some allophonic variation that is extremely different from the more usual ones for that sound. Other allophonic data could go into the sections prior to the table, where it could be better categorized.
Also, I was thinking instead of having grapheme info, other than the orthography of the example word, we could have a separate table in a separate section. Something like:
Orthography of voiceless velar fricative
Script Grapheme(s) Notes
Latin alphabet ch in German, some Slavic languages, and Scots Gaelic; other less common orthographies exist, such as j in Peninsular Spanish
Greek alphabet χ
Cyrillic alphabet х this grapheme represents different sounds in some languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet, see that article for more details
This helps keep the example table a little cleaner. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 11:58, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


The main reason that I've kept some of the in English sections separate is so that readers less familiar with phonetics can have a good idea of the sound in their own language. If we're going to have a notes column, I think most sounds in English can be compressed into two lines. For cases where this isn't the case (I'm not sure if there are any) an English section is appropriate after the anything-in-other-languages section. I think 2, 3 and 4 in your list can belong in one section. I'm not sure about the appropriateness of 4. Do you think you could give an example (from a real language this time, not Examplish)
While I agree that there is no other appropriate place to show how the sounds are represented orthographically, I am somewhat reluctant to have both an occurrence section and a grapheme section. It seems to me that if words are represented orthographically that it would even be a bit redundant. In fact, the edits that I've been doing have included a lot of deletions because I couldn't find example words. So we could have something like this when that is the case:
Occurrence of Velar fricative
Language Orthography IPA Meaning Notes
Russian хвост [xvost] "tail" is palatalized before /i/ and /e/ (see Russian phonology)
Serbian example needed [] "?" represented by an <h>

Eventually, someone who knows Serbian can provide a good example word and the text in that notes section can be replaced with something else or blanked. I'm trying to think of ways that we can link to pages regarding the individual languages' orthography, phonology, etc. And I suppose for languages that don't have an individual orthography page, a link to the alphabet page (Cyrillic for Latin, etc) can be appropriate.

I can't think of a lot of real world examples that clearly fall into number 4 of my proposed organization, but this is perhaps due to a lack of knowledge on my own part. For example, in the uvular ejective article, there is this bit of trivia on the occurrence in Georgian:
Unlike its velar counterpart, it does not contrast with voiced or voiceless uvular plosives.
Actually, in Georgian, the uvular ejective is the only ejective that doesn't have a three-way contrast with voiced or voiceless aspirated plosives (or in the same manner affricates). I only know a few words in Georgian myself and don't know the extent of the historical linguistic research that has been done on the language or other languages of the Caucasus, but I imagine there might be some interesting reason why the uvular ejective stands alone (for example, maybe it entered the language via contact with a non-South Caucasian language) that would be a fact not about a language family, nor about an areal feature of languages in the region (although there would probably be a more general note that this consonant is common in the languages of the Caucasus), but is also not so specific to Georgian that it would only be of interest to specialists.
Another example would be click consonants. It probably doesn't make sense to have separate sections within the article on, for example, on all of the alveolar lateral clicks that are contrasted in various languages (i.e. voiced/voiceless, prenasalized, breathy-voiced, aspirated, etc. in various combinations), but it might make sense to mention for a particular language all of the different versions of a lateral alveolar click that are contrasted (and if available, give some minimal pairs).
For now, what is in the uvular ejective article and the click articles could go into the Notes column for their respective languages, and this may be the case for all of the examples that currently exist for single languages. In proposing a style guideline for the format that the occurrence section should adhere to, however, I would hesitate to disallow the occasional single language example that would need a paragraph of its own, when this sort of thing is not difficult to imagine.
As for the orthography table, I know I won't have time to create such a thing in each of the articles myself. I just want to express my support if anyone else would like to take this as a work item. There may be some redundancy, but I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, especially since it would present the redundant information in a way that is substantially different in organization. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 19:16, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Comments

I think it's a great idea to organize such references in a table. Your discussion of the different table forms is very thorough, and I wholeheartedly support your improvements. I have only a little concern where you talk about "dialects". I think it would be best to keep the distinction of dialects and languages out of this guideline, since it's an issue that this guideline can't possibly resolve and is not meant to resolve. There's not even a naming guideline for dialects...

Ah, and just another detail: Wouldn't it be more common to put the meaning between single quotation marks? And surely, this proposal for consonant pages is valid for vowel pages as well? -- j. 'mach' wust ☛ ☏ 15:29, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Support. With the table one can readily identify the information without having to guess much. I also agree with j. 'mach' wust in that the meaning should be between single quotation marks (see gloss). And yes, I think it can be adopted to vowels as well:
Occurrence of near-close near-front rounded vowel
Language Orthography IPA Meaning Notes
Icelandic vinur [vɪːnʏr] 'friend' —
Norwegian nytt [nʏt] 'new' allophone of [y] when short

And for the dialectal varieties we could add another table in another section, thus:

Dialectal varieties

Near-close near-front rounded vowel in dialectal varieties
Language Dialect Orthography IPA Meaning Notes
English some in London-area book [bʏk] book Allophone of Standar English [ʊ]

Just an idea anyway. --Ciacchi 19:18, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, naturally this extends to vowel pages (I even had one example set for a vowel below). While the language/dialect distinction can be sketchy in some disputed cases, I think that a whole other table is unnecessary. With the above example, i'd put something like this:
Occurrence of near-close near-front rounded vowel
Language Orthography IPA Meaning Notes
Icelandic vinur [vɪːnʏr] 'friend' —
Some Londoner dialects book [bʏk] 'book' Correlates to /ʊ/ in most other English dialects
Norwegian nytt [nʏt] 'new' Allophone of /y/ when short

No information is lost and we've got some great examples. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposed style guidelines

Okay, sorry it took so long to reply. I was doing this.

Column 1: Language

  1. Only modern spoken natural languages. Esperanto is an exception since it is commonly spoken.
  2. Link to [[X language|X]]
  3. If the occurrence is dialect-specific then mention of the specific dialect should be mentioned and possibly a link to that dialect page.
Occurrence of voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative
Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Some urban dialects of South African English round [ɹ̝ɑənd] 'round' Also labialized [ɹ̝ʷ]
Icelandic þakið [θ̠akið̠] 'roof' --

Column 2: Word

  1. Example word from the language in question written in the standard orthography of that language
  2. If a language has two standards, the word should be listed in both.
  3. When possible, link to [[X alphabet|word]]. If there is no page specific to that language’s alphabet, a red link should be avoided by linking instead to the general article on the alphabet used (Cyrillic, Greek, etc).
  4. With words written in the Latin alphabet, the entire word should be in italics and the letter(s) that indicates the phone should be in bold. Non-Latin scripts should not be in italics and writing systems where the characters are linked such as the Arabic and Devanāgarī scripts should be neither bold nor italicized (since this affects the way the letters are displayed.
  5. If the language has no standard orthography and/or no common transliteration system, the word should be written in IPA and the cell of column 2 combined with that of column 3 (IPA)
  6. When a language should be included (because it has the phone in question in its inventory) but no example words are known, the cell should have the text "example needed."
  7. One example word per language


Column 3: IPA

  1. See Wikipedia’s pronunciation guides.
  2. If the word is known but the correct transcription is not, the cell should be left blank.
  3. The column head should link to International Phonetic Alphabet
Occurrence of voiceless uvular plosive
Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Arabic القرآن [ɪl-qʊrʔæːn] 'Qur'an' Represented with a <ق>
Lhasa dialect of Tibetan example needed -- -- represented with a <ཅ>
Ubykh /qˁʼaapˁʼa/ 'handful' Ubykh has ten different uvular plosives. See Ubykh phonology


Column 4: Meaning

  1. A translation of the word in 'single quotes.
  2. When the word is known but the translation is not, leave blank or put a question mark between quotes ("?")
  3. Words that are difficult to translate and have their own page may be linked (see Arabic example above)
  4. For English examples, translations are usually unecessary but can be present for stylistic conformity (See South African example above).

Column 5: Notes

  1. Brief supplementary notes (no greater than two lines).
  2. Should only indicate what the orthographical representation is when:
    1. The word in column 2 cannot show bolding (see Arabic example above)
    2. An example word is not known (see Tibetan example above)
    3. There are multiple ways of representing the sound orthographically. An exception to this is English and languages where the list may become too cumbersome.
  3. Phonological notes such as precise phonetic realization (see the South African English example above), notable allophony, and other similar sounds in the language (see Ubykh example above).
  4. Whenever possible, link to the phonology page of the language/dialect (but not the phonology section of the language page).
  5. Mention of important dialectal differences


Occurrence of Open-mid back unrounded vowel
Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
English nut [nʌ̟t] 'nut' Fronted. Sound has shifted forward in RP since World War II. See English phonology.
Korean 벌 [pʌl] '?' Long /ʌː/ is actually [əː] for most speakers
Russian голова́ [gəlʌ̟ˈva] 'head' Fronted. Occurs only as an unstressed allophone of /o/ and /a/. See Russian phonology.

I believe this is an accurate outline of what we agreed on as far as the table goes. We might need to get a bit of consensus on it before we implement it. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 06:11, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I have an issue with For English examples, no translation is needed and the cell of column 4 should be combined with that of column 5 (See South African example above). First it looks a little strange, and even confusing (does the English word nut really mean "fronted"?). Second, the usual semantics of linked cells in a table is either "the contents of this linked cell logically could go in any cell in the group" or "the combination of these cells is meaningful in its own right and the contents belong to this combination". Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks like you are either just trying to save some space or avoid having cells that would intentionally and permanently empty. It doesn't save much space, and I don't necessarily see a problem with copying the English word, sans markup, from the word column into the meaning column. This could actually be helpful in examples that are given for a less widely-spoken dialect (without any reason to think otherwise, I would probably assume that "round" in South African English means the same thing as "round" in the standard varieties, but I probably wouldn't wager $100 on it; it might be nice to have that confirmed).
Other than my comments above, the style guidelines look good to me and have my support. I am agreed on getting informal consensus (of at least a few other contributors) before implementing anything. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 20:31, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've changed it accordingly. You're right, I was just trying to save space there. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:44, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm all for standardizing these articles, and whatever format you come up with is fine with me, but please use class="wikitable" in the table headers, as I have changed above. Nohat 21:59, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Will the languages be in Alphabetic order strictly or will there be any order based on language family? So far I have done them first by language family then alphabetical. Azalea_pomp

Old Persian

I know it's not the best place to ask, but could someone please check the "Phonology" table of the article on Old Persian (I've also axed there on the talk page, but nobody seemed to care). I am not an expert of phonetics and therefore I don't feel bold enough to edit it, but to me the palatal row of the table looks as if someone had "mixed up" the voiceless and the voiced stops and the fricative. Also: the Old Persian consonant "v [v]" was placed in the approximant (liquid/semivowel) column, but if it is a real approximant, why didn't they use the appropriate IPA symbol ʋ - and if it's not (which I assume to be the case), why didn't they place it in the more appropriate "spirant" column? --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 19:45, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 16:54, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

notational standard for morphophonemic/deep URs

Hi. Me & User:Aeusoes1 have been talking about the notation used for deep underlying phonological representations (or alternately morphophonemic representations) as opposed to surface phonological representations (in the sense of the classic phoneme). Currently Wikipedia seems to use vertical bars (or pipes) | | the former and slashes for the latter / /. I think that is because User:Kwamikagami prefers the vertical bars and this editor has been the primary contributor to articles involving the concept of morphophonemics. Aeusoes1 has suggested the vertical bars are actually IPA practice, but I have expressed my doubts about this.

I have seen several ways to indicate MP representations including the following:

  • double slashes // //
  • vertical bars | |
  • double vertical bars || ||
  • braces { }
  • italics

I suggest that the double slashes are preferable to the others for two reasons: (1) they are easy to distinguish between other characters, (2) I dont think they are generally used for other purposes in linguistics. The vertical bars are dispreferred because they are similar to the lowercase letter l in some fonts and because they are already used in the IPA for marking prosody. The double vertical bars are dispreferred because they are similar to two symbols used in the IPA: ‖ (prosody), ǁ(consonant). The braces are dispreferred because they are sometimes used to represent morphemes (or morphomes). Italics are used for so many things they are not particularly clear.

My second suggestion is that you add on the project page (or maybe in a linguistic manual of style, whereever that is) what is to be the standard notation, whether it's vertical bars or double slashes or something else. peace – ishwar  (speak) 22:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

I'd also like to note that the { braces } are used in templating and are pretty awkward to get around when using the IPA template. Personally, I don't think the similarity that | pipes | share with I/l is going to make things too much more difficult than it's been with the fact that / slashes / are used to mean "or" . Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 23:16, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I think Ishwar's right: The pipe notation on Wikipedia probably originated entirely with me. I used pipes because that's the system I'm familiar with. I don't really care which is used, as long as we're consistent. I do like the double slashes for being iconic; on the other hand, they're annoyingly loud. Personally, I'd go with one of those two rather than the other alternates (certainly not italics!). We should also state in the morphophonology article that all these variants are found.
Does the literature distinguish between the representation of UR/MP and archiphonemes? If so, that might be something to keep in mind when choosing a symbol. kwami (talk) 09:18, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

FA nomination

Irish phonology has been nominated for promotion to Featured article. Please take a look at the article and then comment on its nomination at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Irish phonology. Thanks! —Angr 00:00, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

IPA and phonetics sections in articles

I personally understand very little IPA, and I suspect that I am not alone. Hence, when I try to read articles on certain dialect, and I am lost (for example, it was difficult to understand the phonology section of California English). Maybe I'm missing something, but might I suggest putting some clear examples somewhere (IPA article?) of the basic IPA letters in both standard AmE and BrE? Sound samples would be best, of course...this would greatly enhance Wikipedia, if we had sound examples of each IPA letter. Maybe we do and I just missed it; I don't know. -- Cielomobile talk / contribs 05:07, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I actually did find an IPA chart for AmE, but it still lacked audio examples, which would be wonderful. -- Cielomobile talk / contribs 05:10, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Is it possible for there to be examples of 'basic' (just what are considered basic?) IPA symbols in both standard AmE and BrE considering that there are many sounds not present in either variety? I can read IPA, but even I have difficulties in distinguishing some of the vowels (which are usually the differences between the major varieties of English. I suppose there is a limitation of how 'simple' Wikipedia articles can be written for the lay-person (in this case, people without much IPA knowledge) without losing detail and coherence. Phytomagus 18:20, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
See IPA chart for English Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 00:23, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Revert war about formatting

There's currently a little revert war on several articles regarding the formatting of the "Occurs in" section. Examples include Voiceless uvular fricative (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) and Voiced uvular fricative (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs). I personally think the articles gain from the distinction by number of fricatives, but before I participate in the revert war I wanted to ask for third (or rather fourth) opinions here. — Sebastian 05:52, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

If you see above, there was no mention of organizing languages that way. However, in the agreed upon format, something can be said of languages that do possess more than one form of a given sound (in the "notes" column). Another possibility is to discuss this sort of phenomena in the article's prose. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]
Thanks for pointing to the above discussion; I haven't been aware of it as I'm not a participant of this WikiProject (yet).
With regard to the articles, I still don't see why a constructive editor would revert the addition of major bits of pertinent, unquestioned information with the lapidar reference to a mere layout decision. Certainly it should have be possible to keep this information; and be it only in the prose (as you propose) or in the notes column. (If I read the layout discussion correctly, the consensus seemed to favor a table, anyway, rather than the bulleted list to which the article was reverted.)
Another question is: Is that layout decision really written in stone? It seems to me that the discussion assumed that each article describes exactly one phoneme. The possibility that some languages have more than one phoneme that need to be covered by the same article has apparently simple been forgotten. If that is so, then the proposed layout should be revised to allow for that possibility, rather than fitting the facts to the Procrustean bed of an unsuitable layout decision. — Sebastian 21:10, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
If I've deleted constructive information by reverting then I apologize. Yes, the layout agreed upon a table format rather than the bulleted list. This is how the vowel pages are and were I not on a wikibreak I would be working on converting the rest of the consonant articles to this format (you're more than welcome to do this yourself).
As for the possibility of multiple phonemes represented, I believe the example from Ubykh above shows a good way of indicating that there are multiple phonemes in a given language (as well as notable allophony). Examples also include instances where a sound occurs as an allophone. My preference is to show examples of basic forms first (not palatalized, not emphatic, etc) and indicate in the notes column that there are other forms. This is how I'd do it with Russian, which has palatalized and non-palatalized forms of almost all its consonants.
On a related issue, it has generally been agreed upon that voiceless alveolar fricative should have two examples from Basque since it contrasts apical and laminal alveolar fricatives. As such, there is some elbow room for putting multiple examples from one language but I don't think that secondary aspects like aspiration, palatalization, labialization, pharyngealization, velarization, etc warrant this. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 00:26, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
My apologies to all if I've caused any problems by doing this; I was the editor who made those additions (without signing in), and I had no idea of how to insert the information as a table, being singularly unskilled with the requisite syntax. Nevertheless, I think my additions were extremely pertinent information, especially since phonemes with secondary articulation don't get dedicated pages, and I tend to agree with SebastianHelm that the layout decision as it stands really is unsuitable when it comes to languages like Ubykh and Abkhaz, where secondary articulation is so pervasive. Simply ignoring the existence of the secondarily articulated phonemes in an article that only describes the primary articulation is, I think, oversimplification. Can someone please restore this information, following the layout guidelines as (or if) necessary? Thefamouseccles 01:03, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I hate to engage in revert wars, so I would rather convince Aeusoes1, or at least get another independent opinion. Personally, I feel secondary articulation is not a secondary aspect. It is without any doubt more relevant for an article about a consonant than the translation of the example, which according to the table layout gets a column of its own! By arbitrarily giving some phonemes top billing, and relegating others to the notes we distort the reality of their use. We may even end shoving the usual pronunciation into the notes, such as [ʨʲ] in Russian.
As to the format: Tables are not as easy to maintain, and since these lists are still growing I don't feel the change to table format is the best use of our time just now. Moreover, I like Thefamouseccles's introductions under each subheadline; the prose makes it more interesting than a mere list. I propose to leave it a simple list for now; at least till the list has stabilized. — Sebastian 02:45, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Agreed w.r.t. the tables; while it's a nice idea in theory, in practice many people don't know how to set out a decent table in Wiki markup (I know I certainly don't). Aside from that, I don't know why my edit to Voiceless uvular fricative was reverted, as it didn't have a table in the first place, merely a bulleted list (which I only expanded), unlike the Voiced uvular fricative counterpart. But as you say, it's not constructive to get into a revert war. Thefamouseccles 03:04, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Once again, I apologize for recklessly reverting without explaining. Thefamousccles's edits did indeed add some interesting and relevant information. While the bulleted list is not a table, it is organized in a very similar manner.
I've converted the page to the table format so we can then see about how we might be able to tweak the format to incorporate the information we're talking about and set a precedent. One possibility is to put the other examples in the notes column, although this can easily get too long. Another possibility is to mention them in the article's prose. I would put my weight on this second option as most of these consonant pages have a paucity of prose lines and we needn't put all our energy in making the table all-encompassing.
As for secondary articulation being a "secondary aspect" I'm not sure what you mean, Sebastian. My only point above is that a language's contrasting a secondary articulation is not enough to warrant extra examples in the table from said language. Naturally, for speakers of any given language with such a contrast, the distinction is as important as voicing is for, say, English speakers. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 05:28, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Are you really interested in resolving our differences? Your apology doesn't match your actions. You apologize for being reckless, and then ... - you build up on the bad version as if nothing happened. Did you even read our arguments for keeping a list for now? For the reasons discussed earlier, both the solutions you offer are clearly inferior to Thefamouseccles' version.
The term "secondary aspect" was introduced by you; I thought it was a pun and I'd take you up on it, which apparently was a mistake. Please just replace it with "minor detail". — Sebastian 06:52, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I quote:
My only point above is that a language's contrasting a secondary articulation is not enough to warrant extra examples in the table from said language. Naturally, for speakers of any given language with such a contrast, the distinction is as important as voicing is for, say, English speakers.
This is a bit self-contradictory. If secondary articulation is as important as voicing is, why completely get rid of all illustrative examples that show secondary articulation? They're clearly relevant to the topic, and the fact that there are no dedicated pages for, say, Voiceless uvular fricative labialised means that there should be illustrative examples somewhere (after all, that's why we give illustrative examples for the plain phonemes). I still don't see why this page can't be where those illustrative data go. Thefamouseccles 08:13, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I apologized for recklessly removing information. I don't apologize for spending time and effort to make the table. That's bold, not reckless. "Secondary articulation" is a phonetic term and used to describe some of the things I had listed (labialization, velarization, etc), not an opinion. I agree that examples of them ought to be put in these pages but I don't think they have to go in the table. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 13:03, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Not a problem; I wasn't intending to accuse you of being reckless. Obviously you had the interests of uniformity and consistency at heart, and that can never be a bad thing. Thefamouseccles 22:31, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

(unindent) Tally: 36 hours after I posted this, the majority favors Thefamouseccles' version. Nobody supported Aeusoes1. I will therefore change the article back. My apologies to Aeusoes1 for recklessly removing his formatting; and my sincere apologies to Thefamouseccles for not doing so sooner. — Sebastian 18:43, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Sebastian, there are some serious procedural errors on your part.
1) Wikipedia is not a democracy
2) Were it a democracy, we would also be counting the 3 other people who approved of the style guideline making it four six in favor and two opposed
3) Were it a democracy, we would take longer than 36 hours to conduct a poll, especially when the format guideline was created from over a month's worth of discussion.
As I said above, my point in putting in the table was to discuss ways to tweak the table format to address the issues brought up here. If you're not willing to carry on discussions and consider compromise then you won't get very far here or any other Wikipedia article. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 00:49, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Although the information is nice, I perhaps think that the other varieties should only be mentioned in the notes. The other sounds would be better in the language's article to beef up those articles as many of them are stubs. Azalea pomp 18:16, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Swedish phonology PR

Swedish phonology is up for peer review. Your comments are most welcome.

Peter Isotalo 11:52, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Organizing the index of language phonologies

FYI: Since there seem to be loads of language phonologies not linked yet on the project page, I've started to reorganize the section by language family. That will probably help it to be a bit more exhaustiv and to see better which languages or language families need attention. Y'all are welcome to help with the draft. --Tropylium 14:09, 28 April 2007 (UTC)


Hello from LINGUIST List!

This message was posted on the Wikipedia Talk: WikiProject Linguistics discussion page, but I wanted to make sure it was seen here as well:

I hope you have all had a chance to read about LINGUIST List’s new effort to recruit linguists for updating Wikipedia pages (see links on Wikipedia Talk: WikiProject Linguistics discussion. It is good to see that there is an active group of editors already working away. For those of you who haven’t already heard, The LINGUIST List was nominated by Dr. Partee (in Russia) to coordinate academic linguists in an update of the linguistics and language pages. In April, our online linguistics community confirmed this with an overwhelming vote, and as promised, I am the graduate research assistant working to recruit linguistics editors. For the past few weeks, I have been reading about WikiProject Linguistics, familiarizing myself with all the subprojects, and trying to get a handle on the many activities you’ve already started. Here at The LINGUIST List, we’ve decided to place our focus on any areas is not being actively worked on yet. This might be tackling the “to do” lists of a few subprojects, adding to those lists, or whatever else is appropriate. Feel free to make suggestions on this page, or shoot me an email at hannah@linguistlist.org (my name is Hannah Morales).

Looking forward to working with everyone,
--Linguistlist 16:56, 9 May 2007 (UTC) Hannah, LINGUIST List

Mapping_of_Unicode_characters#Phonetic_characters

Hello, could someone take a look at Mapping_of_Unicode_characters#Phonetic_characters and help elucidate this rather obscure section? Thanks Jasy jatere 08:53, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

also Unicode_Phonetic_Symbols#Semantic_Phonemes_and_character_names Jasy jatere 08:56, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Hudson Valley English

The article on Hudson Valley English is up for deletion on [today]. Is this a hoax? Does anyone know? --Charlene 13:45, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Canadian Shift

I bumped into the Canadian Shift article today, and noticed it was unreferenced. I did a very short amount of research on it, and have extended the article somewhat. I would appreciate it if people could look over it. (There's probably a better way to draw the diagram, at the very least...) Thanks! —Felix the Cassowary 12:57, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

IPA of all Icelandic film titles

Hi. I've added a sound example of all the List of Icelandic films that I know how to pronounce. I am interested in adding IPA for them, but I don't know how. I flipped trough a few dictionaries hoping that they have IPA for words, but they don't. Any ideas? --Steinninn 17:58, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Moving Extended IPA to Extensions to the IPA

Should Extended IPA be renamed to Extensions to the IPA? Pls cmt at Talk:Extended IPA#Extensions to the IPA. Thank you. --Kjoonlee 19:52, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Seems like it should be the latter. If we decide it shouldn't, though, Extensions to the IPA can still serve as a redirect to Extended IPA. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:24, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Ejective consonants

There are currently Wikipedia articles for bilabial ejective, alveolar ejective, velar ejective, uvular ejective, and alveolar ejective fricative. I propose that we not have separate articles for these consonants and that they be merged with voiceless bilabial plosive, voiceless alveolar plosive, voiceless velar plosive, voiceless uvular plosive, and voiceless alveolar fricative respectively. Ejectivity is a phonation type that is not exclusive to these consonants and, as far as I understand, not exclusive to any place or manner of articulation. I believe that having separate articles like this is akin to having separate articles for aspirated forms of consonants, which we haven't been doing. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 07:37, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

If we merge them anywhere, I'd say we should merge them into ejective consonant rather than into their respective pulmonic cousins. And ejectivity is very nearly exclusive to one manner of articulation, namely oral stops; a few languages may have an ejective [s’], but I've never heard of anything else besides oral stops being ejective. (The same goes for aspiration, though.) —Angr If you've written a quality article... 09:23, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
Oh yeah, merging them to ejective consonant does make more sense. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 10:02, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
IMO the articles should not be merged into anything any more (or less) than those of voiced stops, or implosivs (those are "just phonation types" too). They're distinct consonant phonemes and phones just as much as [k] and [x], regardless of whether the IPA assigns a completely separate symbol to them. Furthermore, if I understand correctly, allophonic ejectivity is much rarer than allophonic aspiration, palatalization, frication... --Tropylium (talk) 13:26, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
But for implosive and voiced consonants there are actual IPA characters, which for the most part seems to be the measure of separateness. The exceptions that we see are for either place or manner of articulation and not phonation type. I agree that they are indeed distinct consonant phonemes, just like Russian /tʲ/, Chinese /pʰ/, Arabic /dˤ/ and Hmong /ⁿdˡ/. But there are a lot of consonants in the world's languages that don't necessarily need a separate page because they've either got secondary articulation or some other feature that makes them more complicated. Being a phoneme or how commonly it appears allophonically (doesn't it appear allophonically in English?) is not a good measure of there being a separate wikipedia article on a sound. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 18:43, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
If it comes to that, having a separate IPA character isn't a good measure of whether Wikipedia should have a separate article on a sound either. I wouldn't mind merging the articles on /p/, /p’/, /b/, /ɓ/, /ʘ/, /φ/, /β/, /m/, and /ʙ/ all into bilabial consonant, and the same for the other places of articulation. Incidentally, English has glottalized consonants allophonically, but not ejective ones. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 19:19, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
I wouldn't support merging that far. I'm in the one-to-one correspondance of article to IPA character camp. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 21:35, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
So how about voiceless labiodental affricate, retroflex trill, epiglottal flap, voiceless palatal lateral fricative… then? Y'think those should also be merged into something else? --Tropylium (talk) 22:34, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
There are a number of exceptions to my preference such as the nasal, voiceless, and voiced stops, the bilabial and dental approximants (both which only seem to appear in Spanish) the voiceless labiodental plosive, voiced labiodental plosive and the labial-velar stops. If there is to be exception to this preference it should be thought out and deliberate. The labiodental affricate is notable in its rarity, but I would understand a merger more than with the others which seem to lack symbols because the IPA hasn't deemed it necessary to make symbols (that is, there is a cell space for such sounds even though there is no character). Heck, the palatal lateral fricative apparantly has a non-standard symbol.
I suppose I could refine my position and say that my preference is one-article-to-one-character but that I'm more tolerant, within reason, of articles for sounds with no IPA character but that take up a cell on the chart. This way I can be consistant in tolerating these but excluding doubly articulated consonants, ejectives, aspirates, etc. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 09:14, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm not quite sure that having articles only when IPA chooses to provide an extra symbol is a good criterion. These choices of the IPA have a lot of tradition-baggage, even can be seen as euro-centristic, and not necessarily reflect any linguistic reality. To have extra symbols for voiced/voiceless stops and not for aspirated/non-aspirated stops is a reflection of what is going on in European languages. That one is judged as a distintion of sounds and the other as a distinction of sound-modifications is not really backed by linguistic evidence outside of Europe. The same is true for ejectives. The reverse phenomenon to ejective sounds are the implosive consonants, for which IPA does provide special characters. In most Ethiopian languages the ejectives are a lot more prevalent than the implosives, so judging by this particular language area it would be difficult to understand why Wikipedia has entries for individual implosive sounds, but nor for ejectives. I'm not arguing that IPA should provide special characters for ejective sounds, I'm just saying that IPA's idiosyncratic choices on this matter don't make up a good criterion for Wikipedia policies. Landroving Linguist (talk) 08:28, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Voiced/voiceless stops are also not a reflection of certain European languages like English, German, and Estonian. Someone would have to look at Vowels and Consonants by Maddieson to verify if voiced/voiceless contrasts in stops are really as uncommon as you imply. Also, remember that by using a diacritic for aspiration, the IPA can transcribe pre-aspiration (which is very common in and out of Europe) just as easily as post-aspiration. I guess there are two questions here then. The first is, are ejective p t k q and s more common than other ejective consonants? If the answer is no, do we want to make new ejective articles for the missing places of articulation to reflect "reality"? — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 15:11, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Running out of space here, don't we? Anyway, if you look around (I admit that I don't have hard and fast data on that) you will find that p, t, k, and the affricates ʦ and ʧ are very common as ejectives, and other consonants are rather uncommon as ejectives. This is at least true for Ethiopia, where I have not seen any other ejectives apart from these five. And (see below) I'm not convinced that s can be the base of an ejective in any language. So I would not advocate the need for more articles on individual ejective consonants. In fact, I can live with merging them all under the article ejective consonant, which I would certainly prefer to joining them with their respective pulmonic counterparts. If the policy is to follow IPA in how it symbolizes a single consonant, than this is what needs to be done. However, I question the basis for this policy. Having said that, I have no good suggestion for a better one, so I better keep quiet... Landroving Linguist (talk) 20:24, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
The individual ejective articles are for the consonants that are shown on the IPA chart. This is a reflection of them being rather common, but it does not in itself make them notable. Most voiceless fricatives occur as ejectives. I've seen reports of ɸ’, s’, ʃ’, and ɬ’ for Yuchi (contradicted by our Yuchi language article), f’, ʃ’, and ɬ’ in Kabardin (see link), ʂ’ and ɕ’ in Acoma (not covered there), s’, ʃ’, and x’ in Lakota, s’, ɬ’, x’, xʷ’, χ’, χʷ’ in Tlingit. — kwami (talk) 22:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure about fricatives as ejectives. To me this sounds like a phonetic impossibility. You cannot produce an ejective without full closure in the mouth, because you will not gain sufficient pressure to achieve the explosive release characteristic of an ejective. You will need to have a plosive or an affricate as a base. I don't know about Yuchi, Kabardin, Tlingit and Lakota - my experience is with Ethiopian languages, where most descriptions use a symbol like s’, which gives the impression of an ejective fricative. But this is just an idiosyncrasy of Ethiopianist transcription traditions, and the sound behind it is really the affricate ʦ'. I would suspect that similar things are going on in the abovementioned languages. Landroving Linguist (talk) 08:28, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Proposed modification to the style guidelines

I was having a discussion with Ƶ§œš¹ about the need of mentioning different varieties of a certain phoneme, for example voiceless alveolar plosive. In my view it is useful for readers who wonders about questions like: "What languages have an aspirated t?"

We appear to have four possible solutions at hand, two by Aeusoes1 and two by me:

1. Put up a notice in the "Notes" column, which is what's done in voiceless alveolar plosive at now.

2. Mention it in the prose. One that Aeusoes1 prefers.

3. Mention it in the table of "Varieties of ......". Like this:


IPA Description Occurrence
t tenuis t English
tʰ aspirated t Mandarin
tʲ palatalized t Irish
tʷ labialized t Abkhaz


4. Have another "occurence table". Like this:

--Occurence of varieties of voiceless alveolar plosive--

---Aspirated t---

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
English tick [tʰɪk] 'tick' See English phonology
German Tochter [ˈtʰɔxtɐ] 'daughter' See German phonology
Swedish tåg [ˈtʰoːg] 'train' See Swedish phonology

Preferably, only the languages that have a phonemic contrast would be listed.

I am for mentioning in any form of a table: that is, 1, 3, and 4. Unfortunately the only choice that's being left out is the one that Aeusoes1 prefers. What do you think of the following four solutions? Keith Galveston (talk) 09:38, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I would favor treating aspiration and similar features (like ejectivity, if we end up merging those with the plain sounds) with choice 4. I'm not sure if the same would be necessary for secondary articulation; choice 1 or 2 would be better there. The table for choice 3 doen't IMO look very nice, and additionally does not transmit aspiration and eg. palatalization being orthogonal features. --Tropylium (talk) 22:03, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback and sorry for not replying sooner. Although two people's opinion is nowhere near a consensus, I find your suggestions reasonable: we could probably rule out choice 3 now. We could put the secondary articulation information in prose or the 'note' column. And I'm guessing that Aeusoes1 would still object to choice 4, so we definitely need more people's thoughts and opinions. Keith Galveston (talk) 14:40, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Arabic and Chinese

Zerida and I were discussing this a bit in our talkpages and it seems best to present these languages in the same way in regards to dialect. Should we do it this way:

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Albanian example [x] 'exmple'
Cantonese example [x] 'example' See Standard Cantonese
Catalan Majorcan example [x] 'example' See Catalan phonology
Egyptian Arabic example [x] 'example' See Arabic phonology
Mandarin example [x] 'example' See Standard Mandarin
Yemeni Arabic example [x] 'example' See Arabic phonology

or this way:

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Albanian example [x] 'example'
Arabic Egyptian example [x] 'example' See Arabic phonology
Yemeni example [x] 'example'
Catalan Majorcan example [x] 'example' See Catalan phonology
Chinese Cantonese example [x] 'example' See Standard Cantonese
Mandarin example [x] 'example' See Standard Mandarin

I can't think of any other group of dialects/varieties that have the sociolinguistic situation wherein they are not mutually intelligible but considered part of a single language. If there is, then those also apply to this convention. I'm leaning towards the second table because I think the sociolinguistic situation is important and I'm pretty sure linguists generally do the same but Zerida has pointed to ISO categories and mutual intelligibility. We should get some consensus on this. Thoughts? — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 22:27, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I like the second table better. Although technically, they are not exactly dialects, they're often viewed as such for other reasons. And the table looks much neater that way. Just wondering: should we put a notice/disclaimer describing the special case of Arabic and Chinese? Keith Galveston (talk) 00:32, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
You mean something like "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"? I wouldn't think that that's necessary, especially for the purpose of these pages. — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 00:38, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
I think there are a lot more comparable situations among the world's languages. You could consdider Kurdish languages, or Oromo. The speakers of these languages would mostly insist on the unity of their languages, but to talk to each other, they would have to communicate through translators or third languages. There is a sociolinguistic reality to this language-unity, however, and upcoming versions of ISO 639-3 will address this reality by proposing macro-languages (that is, Curdic, Oromo, Chinese and Arabic), which then serve as the umbrella for lower-level language units above the dialect level. So, in that sense, the second table would be a nice reflection of this perspective. I would pick that. Landroving Linguist (talk) 17:52, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Arabic, Chinese and Kurdish have all been ISO 639 macrolanguages for a while [1]. Or are you referring to something else? — Zerida ☥ 23:24, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Right, I was talking about that, but wasn't aware that the macrolanguage approach has already been implemented. I think this is fairly recent, or I am quite uninformed... (which would not be the first time...) Anyway, thanks for the link to ISO 639 macrolanguages, that is a nice list I was not aware of yet. Landroving Linguist (talk) 06:07, 4 March 2008 (UTC)