Talk:Malay grammar

Use of ə for marking pronunciation
Currently, this page is inconsistent in its use of ə for letter-e-when-pronounced-as-schwa, with some e-pronounced-schwa still being written e.

A convention I've seen in one dictionary is to mark up only the non-schwa cases, using é. The advantage of 〈e,é〉 is that the usual case of schwa-pronunciation has the same appearance as in normal writing (i.e. only the unusual pronunciation gets the unusual spelling); while the advantage of 〈ə,e〉 is that they match the IPA symbols for their pronunciations.

Another possibility would be something like 〈ə,é〉 (i.e. where neither is simply ‘e’), which has the advantage of avoiding ambiguity with unmarked e (i.e. where the writer hasn't tried to convey the pronunciation). Similarly, this approach would allow immediate application to the page, without having an authoritative source to confirm pronunciations of words currently written e on the page.

A disadvantage of the specific choice 〈ə,é〉 is that ə suggests IPA, whereas é in IPA would involve a high tone. An alternative might be 〈ẹ,é〉: mẹréka. It has the advantage of being less visually distracting than məréka for those accustomed to conventional ‘mereka’ appearance, though I wonder how font support differs for the two.

My current preference is to adopt that last suggestion: change to using 〈ẹ,é〉 (e.g. mẹréka), while leaving e where unsure.

— Pjrm (talk) 03:45, 12 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Schwa could also be marked as $\langleë\rangle$, as in Albanian, which is a far more widely supported character as it is part of ISO 8859-1. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:39, 18 September 2016 (UTC)