User:Taurus Littrow/Stress marks in Russian words

Stress marks on Russian words do not appear in "normal" Russian texts such as newspapers, magazines or books (other than those mentioned somewhat below). During a certain historical period, stresses were mandatory, but the reform of the Russian alphabet in the early 18th century made their use superfluous in normal texts. Nevertheless, stresses have been routinely used in all major Russian encyclopedias and explanatory dictionaries since at least the 1780s (and they continue to be used today; see the Great Russian Encyclopedia in 36 volumes, published by the Russian Academy of Sciences between 2004 and 2017), as well as in many bilingual dictionaries, reading books for young native speakers and those for foreigners. This is how they made their way into Russian Wikipedia. However, while a native Russian reader knows that stresses are not mandatory in Russian words, in English Wikipedia stresses can be misleading: a non-Russian speaker might think that they are mandatory (this confusion can be solved simply by adding a short explanatory note, though). One way or another, both spellings (stressed and unstressed) are correct in Russian.

So we have a lot of Russian terms imported from ruwiki with stress marks. The goal of some users is to eliminate the stress marks on English Wikipedia, for they argue that stress marks belong in Russian words no more than they do in English ones, so they say that these should be removed from enwiki to avoid confusion. Other users, however, insist that stress marks should be used on enwiki for they show how a word is pronounced: the stress in Russian follows no established pattern, so it is often impossible to determine the correct stress placement even for a native speaker (especially in place names and in last names other than the common ones).

A similar situation exists with English technical terminology. Some English technical dictionaries add an acute accent to stressed syllables but do not otherwise indicate pronunciation. This is because English orthography, like Russian, is close to phonemic for Latinate words, and stress marking is all that is typically needed. Another parallel is vowel marking in Arabic and Hebrew, which is similarly useful in making written words pronounceable to L2 (non-native) speakers but is otherwise only used for children, dictionaries, religious texts and the like.

A standard way to show the pronunciation (including the stress) in any language is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is already present in most of the articles. (A stress mark goes just before the stressed syllable.) The tools to implement this include the IPA family of templates, most relevantly IPA-ru, and the lang-rus template with its p parameter. This is not to say that all Russian terms and names should have the IPA. One way or another, it is argued whether the IPA can be used as a replacement of the stresses or simply as an additional tool, just like the pronunciation respelling key (H:RESPELL) is used in some articles for English words.

So far, no consensus has been reached as to whether stress marks should be used on English Wikipedia or not.