Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations (3rd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. There's still a decent consensus that this material may well belong on Wikipedia and that it can be sufficiently sourced. I would suggest that if a transwikied version on Wiktionary could be shown to be performing a similar function in a more appropriate place, people may be more amenable to deleting this article in future - as it is, many participants aren't convinced that that's the case, and hence this article is staying. Demonstrate how this material can be better integrated into Wiktionary, and the desire to preserve the material on Wikipedia may change. ~ mazca  talk 20:43, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log  •  )

Definitely interesting, but with completely arbitrary inclusion criteria and an essentially WP:OR bias. Virtually impossible to source or maintain all entries. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:32, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep: The "arbitrary inclusion" complaint of the nominator is valid as things stand, given the number of unsourced contributions from "drive-by" editors. But, since when is the hope of pre-empting bad editing a reason for deletion? Definitive sources, such as The Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation ISBN 9780192807106 and The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary ISBN 9780521680882 are available. Applying the WP:VERIFY principle more strictly would be an answer. --Old Moonraker (talk) 21:04, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep per arguments advanced by and sources noted by User:S Marshall in the second AFD. Books aplenty have discussed names and words in English with counterintuitive pronunciations. Edison (talk) 21:24, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep: Considering this the third deletion request, there are plenty of arguments for "keep" in the first two requests. My fear is that the process eventually will lead to a delete vote, which, unlike the multiple keep decisions, is "for keeps". Faulty system. At any rate, improvement is necessary (weeding, better defining what is counterintuitive, and in-line referencing), but it can be done. We've discussed the use of pronunciation dictionaries like the Cambridge and Longman Pronunciation Dictionaries (ISBN 0582364671) once to define "counterintuitive". Afasmit (talk) 21:29, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Would repeated attempts to secure a "delete" result be a form of the deprecated forum shopping, or is it valid to see whether the consensus has changed?--Old Moonraker (talk) 21:45, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It's always valid to see whether consensus has changed. On the other hand, deletion of an article is strongly unidirectional wrt consensus, since once it is gone (and assuming no deletion review), there's not really a forum for assessing consensus to bring it back. If it is re-created, it could be nixed by a single new article patroller, with no chance for discussion.--Curtis Clark (talk) 13:35, 25 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment: I wonder if the format of this list makes it difficult to supply appropriate references and encourages unsourced drive-by additions etc. Assuming suitable references can be found, would something like the following make it easier to keep the list focused, robust and verifiable?...  Just a thought, with no keep/delete rationale – sorry if that's not very helpful!  (Note the inclusion of sound clips, which would make the list more useful in the event of its being kept.)   Hassocks  5489 (tickets please!)  21:53, 24 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete This violates WP:NOT in several ways, being too indiscriminate, dictionary material and wrong. And the counterintuitive concept is too open to debate.  For example, consider Angus and Los Angeles.  I pronounce one with a hard g and the other with a soft.  But what accent are we using to determine pronunciation - American, Scottish, English or what?  And is this counterintuitive when my pronunciation of these seems quite intuitive to me?  There are just too many open questions. Colonel Warden (talk) 02:05, 25 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete Per Colonel Warden above.  N ERDY S CIENCE D UDE  (✉ msg • changes) 02:52, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep It's never going to be GA, but Colonel Warden doesn't understand the word "counterintuitive": counterintuitive would be if the 'g' in Angus were pronounced /k/. kwami (talk) 03:49, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment shouldn't this be on Wiktionary? 76.66.194.32 (talk) 04:45, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep, again. It's been less than a year since the last nomination, and no new arguments have been brought forward. Most entries can be sourced to published dictionaries (this hasn't been done yet, but it could: the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Kenyon & Knott, Merriam-Webster Geographical and Biographical Dictionaries, etc., list a lot of these pronunciations), so it's not true that it's "Virtually impossible to source or maintain all entries." And I think we're doing a good job of letting common sense and talk-page discussion decide what is and what isn't counterintuitive. +Angr 08:43, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep, this is a topic of potential encyclopedic interest to some people, thus I see no reason to forcibly move it to a dictionary (since this isn't really a series of definitions), or otherwise make our readers jump through hoops to find the information. To argue against the points for deletion so far:
 * Original research should be removed, the article has citations, why delete all of it to remove a small amount of problematic material? Additionally, if you are claiming that the pronounciations are original research, surely not. We could just add any good dictionary to the citation list to arbitarily "prove" they are pronounced in that way if we want to I suppose.
 * Is it really indiscriminate? I think it has a focussed topic which it follows well in an informative and encyclopedic manner. Sure, there are things to improve, but I don't think this fails our inclusion requirements.
 * Is it dictionary material? It isn't a series of definitions, it infact studies the pronounciation of the language which may go against what one would assume. That doesn't strike me as dictionary material, and I feel this would not be suitable for Wiktionary.
 * It's "wrong". I am unsure I follow this point. There are citations, if some of the information is wrong, fix it, don't delete it.
 * No real comment can be made on "per above", other than a reply of see my reasoning above I suppose. Please do remember this is a discussion, not a vote. --Taelus (talk) 08:49, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete + transwiki Simple surnames or first names in the wikipedia as a subject for an article are off-topic/disamb pages, so I don't see the point of lists of them either. This would be much better as an appendix in Wiktionary because they allow simple names as articles. If it has been placenames, product names or whatever that are specific to one thing that would have been fair enough to have a list of it here, since they're valid topics, but invalid in Wiktionary. So overall although there's AFAIK no specific policy that seems to be the cleanest way to think about it; the topic is much more dictionary-like than encyclopedic.- Wolfkeeper  12:54, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep/split/transwiki Article is mostly about specific placenames, given that placenames are on topic as part of articles on places, it seems OK to keep it. The list of surnames and first names should be transwikied to wiktionary; all of those link to it anyway. Surnames and first names are largely offtopic here. I don't think there's any specific policy though about lists like this.- Wolfkeeper  13:00, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep. Better to fix than to delete.--Curtis Clark (talk) 13:31, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * And how do you propose fixing this list, which has no clear criteria for inclusion, is original research, and lacks secondary sources? Filest (aktl) 08:58, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 15:08, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep per my argument in the previous AfD: if the potential problems those wishing to delete the article foresee were real, they would surely have appeared by now.  — Soap  —  18:22, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 * What makes you think that the problems have not already appeared? The article is largely unsourced and its content is already contentious.  It seems to be a prima facie violation of all our core policies:  WP:V, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV and a bunch of other policies besides like WP:DICDEF and WP:NOT.  Colonel Warden (talk) 19:48, 25 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. The basic concept for this page is sound although I do agree more precise guidelines on what constitutes counterintuitive should be ironed out. The fact that they haven't yet been ironed out is insufficient to be a general condemnation of the article itself. Note: I grow weary of the call for any article with vaguely lexical content to be shunted into Wiktionary. nohat (talk) 00:37, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete there is ample evidence that english is the most inconsistent language regarding spelling and corresponding pronunciation. something like a 60% reliability, which means that spelling bees are really memorization tests, and irrelevant in any other language. thus, this makes this article a potential compendium of nearly half the words in english, esp. most of the borrowed terms. i could see this as a list for words in other languages on other wikipedias. I dont see how this could possible be given reasonable inclusion criteria. "counterintuitive" not appropriate for an article title.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 05:02, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment Would it be timely to remind contributors that the point of the article under review is the pronunciation of some unusual proper names and not general lexicography? --Old Moonraker (talk) 06:29, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you, that is an extremely good point! In fact, this is almost the inverse of general lexicography, because it's not about spelling English (non-name) words, it's about how there are these English names whose whose pronunciations-vs-spellings would be extremely surprising if these were (non-name) words.  There is nothing in any of the regularities or subregularities noted in DW Cummings's American English Spelling that would lead one to believe that a (hypothetical) quirpon is a /ˈkɑrpuːn/.  Thus, the oddity of Quirpon→/ˈkɑrpuːn/ is a fact worth noting.Sean M. Burke (talk) 11:44, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
 * But why would you expect that an American spelling guide will tell you anything relevant to the pronunciation of a place in Canada? Maybe that's your intuition but that tells us nothing about the intuition of a Canadian, a Briton, a Frenchman or whoever.  Shall we add an entry for Paris?  For some people this is pronounced Parr-iss while for others it is Parr-ee.  What one says depends upon whether it is Paris, France or Paris, Texas and who you are trying to communicate with.  The essential difficulty here is that the Roman alphabet is not phonetic and so various people pronounce it in various ways.  The unit of language is the word not the letter and the pronunciation of a word like lead depends upon accent, context and semantics rather than some simple-minded intuitive phonetics.  We see this especially when the same alphabet is used in Pinyin with quite different expectations and outcomes.  Shall we have Beijing and Peking too?  And then there's placenames in Scotland which are based upon Gaelic such as suidhe and loch; placenames in Wales based upon Welsh such as Llanelly.  And on and on.  As there's no end to this indiscriminate extension, you can expect this article to keep coming back here regularly as it bloats and generates further conflict. Colonel Warden (talk) 16:09, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
 * You point out liminal cases, and liminal cases are worth due consideration. But the presence of liminal cases doesn't invalidate the category "English names", nor does it render it potentially infinite, nor does it render meaningless the distinction "English name" and "non-English name". And crucially, the same is true of the category "counter-intuitive pronunciations".  Your linguistic arguments to the contrary are fallacious hyperbole and without merit.  (That is my view of them, in light of my two degrees in linguistics, one of them with an emphasis on lexicography, which in fact has led to me being a published author in the field.)The fact that an article can "bloat" apparently now means simply that you don't like how big you can catastrophize that it could get. (But in fact, this article is more self-limiting than, say "Economics", about which one can always always write more. That doesn't diminish the value of the article.)The only thing that truly can extend into infinity is the number of AFDs you say you wish for. I will not accuse bad faith, but your behavior is badgering, and I can imagine no greater basic abuse of the AFD process.Your badgering is intolerable, and I will not distinguish this discussion with further participation, neither in this third AFD of yours, nor in a seventh AFD that you feel entitled to call for, nor in a seventieth. Sean M. Burke (talk) 04:52, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
 * To avoid misunderstanding, it should be noted that neither Sean nor myself participated in the last AFD. Further information about Sean's authority on this topic may be found at Sean M. Burke. Colonel Warden (talk) 10:16, 27 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. Moreover... having a third RFD!? This is pestering. Sean M. Burke (talk) 11:22, 26 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete as a list might be worth it as an explanation with a few examples but an endless list does not add any value. Particular cases can be mentioned in the relevant articles. Also agree with some of the colonel's points, prounication can change in the same location between individuals so it is all a bit subjective. MilborneOne (talk) 10:40, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment (trivial) colonel warden and myself often disagree, and both put in too much time here, so if we agree here (i said delete earlier), we must be either extremely right or extremely wrong.im biased, so i wont vote on that issue.:)Mercurywoodrose (talk) 01:34, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete or Transwiki. There are no secondary sources on the topic of weird pronunciations in English that can guide the contents of the article. Therefore the list is indiscriminate. Also, this sort of thing belongs on Wiktionary. Abductive  (reasoning) 05:56, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete, list with entirely arbitrary inclusion criteria. Filest (aktl) 08:57, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep – I find S Marshall's arguments at the previous AfD convincing enough, and he cited some secondary sources that do cover the topic. The list is still a work in progress but has improved since previous nominations for deletion. Paul Erik  (talk) (contribs) 11:14, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Transwiki - That's the best option, as delete will be too harsh, and keep will be where it was in the first place. As well somebody has already started transwiking on the article. Whenaxis (talk) 11:25, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.