Help talk:IPA/English

Double entry
Why is ɪ appearing twice, both under "Vowels" and "Weak vowels"? If we need two entries here, I would expect separate symbols (even if one is a modification of the other with a combining mark of some kind). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:05, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I believe the double entries for //ɪ// and //oʊ// are mainly there for historic reasons, back from the day when we were propagating our own idiosyncratic symbols for the weak vowel versions of the two. I have tentatively unified the symbols, keeping all the content. --mach &#x1f648;&#x1f649;&#x1f64a; 06:11, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Colons for length symbols
In the 3rd bullet point of the Dialect variation section colons are used in place of length symbols:
 * Most speakers of North American English (with the exception of Eastern New England) do not distinguish between the vowels in father /'fɑ:ðər/ and bother /'bɒðər/, pronouncing the two words as rhymes. If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between the symbols /ɑ:/ and /ɒ/.

I think they need to be replaced. 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:B1A9:DA55:640A:FC65 (talk) 20:13, 1 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Done. Nardog (talk) 22:39, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Inclusion of /ts/ as a marginal phoneme and removal of /ʔ/
/ʔ/ is an entirely paralinguistic sound and "uh-oh" is not a valid word to base the inclusion of a marginal phoneme around. However, seeing and /ts/ is a common marginal phoneme in words like "tsar" or "Mozart", including it would probably be valid. Plexus96 (talk) 14:36, 17 May 2024 (UTC)


 * /ʔ/ is included for Hawaiian loans. It's illustrated by uh-oh simply because it's one of the most common and intuitive ways to illustrate the sound; it doesn't mean it's only used in paralanguage.
 * /t/ and /s/ are already phonemes so there's no need to list /ts/ separately. Nardog (talk) 00:42, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
 * /t/ and /ʃ/ are already phonemes so there’s no need for /tʃ/ as well…? БудетЛучше (talk) 18:15, 21 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Because it's a phoneme in English if you ask just about any linguist. See English phonology for why. Nardog (talk) 18:17, 21 June 2024 (UTC)
 * behaves more like a consonant cluster, rather than a phoneme. It doesn't appear word-initially, at least not regularly (see e.g. ), only word-internally and -finally. Compare this with German which can easily appear in this position, as in zu  or ziemlich . Native speakers of English constantly mispronounce those as  and . Sol505000 (talk) 15:39, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * "/ʔ/ is an entirely paralinguistic sound"
 * It's also a common allophone across most dialects of English, particularly for /t/ 167.206.19.130 (talk) 19:56, 21 June 2024 (UTC)
 * That's neither here nor there. We transcribe any allophone of /t/ as /t/ because this key is diaphonemic. Nardog (talk) 20:41, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

IPA overwhelming
IPA is overwhelming, redundant, and not user friendly. If you use the basic latin sounds the phonics are all there and we all know them. No need to learn a whole new set of sounds that are extremely numerous and cumbersome. 136.143.149.206 (talk) 17:51, 2 June 2024 (UTC)


 * We don't "all know them", though. Your west coast US pronunciation will be different from mine. WP:RESPELL describes how simple pronunciation guides don't always work. For instance, I pronounce ""Mary", "marry", and "merry" differently, but know that some Americans don't. The same applies to "cot" and "caught". Some of my compatriots pronounce "aren't" and "aunt" differently, but I don't. Bazza 7 (talk) 18:55, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Text on secondary stress
On the help page, we show both primary and secondary stress marks, yet we never define how we do (or don't) use those symbols in the diaphonemic system. I believe the last chat we had arriving at some consensus was here, where we agreed on WP to assign secondary stress only to a strong vowel preceding primary stress but not to a strong vowel succeeding it (i.e., following the British rather than American convention). It seems like it would be helpful to explain this, and even the concept of how secondary stress operates in English at all, if anyone can think of a concise wording for the concept. Wolfdog (talk) 12:53, 19 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Decided to BE BOLD. Wolfdog (talk) 13:54, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

Anki
We currently show the pronounciation of Anki as /ˈɒŋkiː/, which seems surprising to me. I am aware that /ɒ/ for the spelling ⟨an⟩ is not unheard of, especially in French loanwords with /ɑ̃/ in the original, but is Anki really pronounced like that? 187.245.68.84 (talk) 00:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)


 * I expect /æ/ or /ɑː/ (especially from British and American speakers, respectively), but it's unsourced anyway. It should be sourced to an ad or a developer saying it. Nardog (talk) 06:01, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * is all I've ever heard in US English, so that's what was meant, most likely. I've corrected the IPA, changing to  because the nasal is always velar (so the vowel is weak, phonemically  according to Cruttenden, or  according to some others). Sol505000 (talk) 15:47, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Youglish indicates that /ˈæŋki/ is the norm in BrE, which fits for the general pattern of nativisation of  in recent loanwords in BrE vs. AmE. Offa29 (talk) 15:59, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 2 July 2024
change to  71.78.136.215 (talk) 00:43, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done for now: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the template. Nardog (talk) 02:38, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Edit warring at Richard D'Oyly Carte
There is edit warring against MOS:DIAPHONEMIC on that page. It's Melbourne all over again, with the 'local consensus' nonsense. Sol505000 (talk) 15:30, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Nice canvassing. As you're the main edit warrior on the page, it's a bit of a stretch - and more than a little uncivil - to disregard the well-founded arguments of others as 'nonsense'. - SchroCat (talk) 15:34, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
 * You don't get to call me uncivil when you so blatantly disregard MOS:DIAPHONEMIC and this guide. Take a good look at the mirror, mate. You are the one ignoring a well-established consensus in the APPROPRIATE place, which is right here. Sol505000 (talk) 20:59, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I’m not your ‘mate’, sunshine, and yes, I’ll call out incivility and idiotic edit warring when I see it. There’s a talk page for you to use if you’re able to do so without reverting to further incivility. - SchroCat (talk) 21:10, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

has raised a valid point: Alas, readers familiar with the real-world IPA cannot be expected to guess that Wikipedia has its own esoteric phonetic system in which the pronunciation symbols mean "this unless you'd rather pronounce it that". Our transcriptions are still surrounded by single slashes /…/. Readers familiar with the IPA will know that this means a phonemic transcription. However, our transcriptions are not phonemic, but diaphonemic. We do not mark them as such, though. I thought last year we had reached a consensus that we should mark the diaphonemicity of our transcriptions by surrounding them with double slashes ⫽…⫽, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Pronunciation/Archive 11. Are other steps required? --mach &#x1f648;&#x1f649;&#x1f64a; 11:48, 5 July 2024 (UTC)


 * To be fair, transcriptions meant to represent specifically GA or RP are themselves most often in effect diaphonemic - the former for assuming a cot-caught distinction(sometimes also the strut-comma and weak vowel mergers, which are mostly absent from the Inland North, Western Pennsylvania, New England, and Eastern Canada), the latter for assuming no l-vocalization, and both for assuming no /æ/ splits. Célestine-Edelweiß (talk) 01:29, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Mach, perhaps knows. As for the edit-war situation, I've contacted a random uninvolved administrator (simply, the most recently active one), who can perhaps help the situation. Wolfdog (talk) 01:49, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Done. I've also created IPA // as a shorthand akin to angbr IPA.
 * I've replaced in the Key section where they were unambiguously referring to diaphonemes rather than phonemes as far as I could find, but it can be ambiguous sometimes. (E.g. should it be "/A/ is merged with /B/ in accent X", " is merged with /B/ in accent X", or " is merged with  in accent X"?)
 * Further fixes in articles where our diaphonemes are mentioned are welcome. Nardog (talk) 12:10, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * That’s great, thanks a lot! --mach &#x1f648;&#x1f649;&#x1f64a; 06:48, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Undone per request. I suggest you start an RfC if you want to go through with this. Nardog (talk) 08:54, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I have opened a request for comment to discuss the matter: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics --mach &#x1f648;&#x1f649;&#x1f64a; 21:38, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

I just suggested it at that talk page, but in case it's of more interest here: since it seems that //r// is so much more of a chronic objection than the fact that our key makes vowel distinctions that AmE doesn't, perhaps the problem is rather that "don't pronounce this letter that's clearly there" is a bigger mental block than "pronounce these two letters the same way". So perhaps it might help to change the symbols we use for the diaphonemes to //ɑː(r)//, //ɔː(r)//, etc., explicitly parenthesising the r? Double sharp (talk) 08:17, 11 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Using superscript $⟨ʳ⟩$ has been suggested, e.g. here. That seems less intrusive than parentheses, and has precedence in CamGEL. Nardog (talk) 08:33, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Even better, then, if there's a precedent. I'm happy to support superscripts if they get proposed. Double sharp (talk) 08:56, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Either solution seems fair given the insistence of some to disregard well-established conventions over the mere sight of the symbol. I support that. ~  Ivan Scrooge 98  ( talk ) 10:03, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I also am content with either option. Something to consider for the implementer, though, is that we currently transcribe a word like bearing as b|ɛər|ɪ|ŋ in this system. If we made the change, we would want to avoid the output being something like bɛəʳɪŋ, since the r here in these types of cases is not optional even in non-rhotic accents but required. Wolfdog (talk) 14:12, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
 * That can be automated in Lua. Can be tricky, but feasible. Nardog (talk) 14:18, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Here's what really happened to initiate this discussion. There was a longstanding stable IPA on the Richard D'Oyly Carte page, and then User:Sol505000 edit warred there about it, but they did not get a consensus in their favor. So they brought the issue to this Talk page to see if they could get a different consensus here. -- Ssilvers (talk) 23:04, 11 July 2024 (UTC)


 * I have had disagreements with Sol505000 in the past, but we really should look at the situation and realize having a discussion about IPAc-en on the talk page of a specific article, when the template is used in countless pages, is out of place. ~  Ivan Scrooge 98  ( talk ) 23:48, 11 July 2024 (UTC)