Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics/Phonetics/Archive 3

IPA wikitable
Hi, if you add class="IPA wikitable" (or class="wikitable IPA") to a table, then all cells will be styled using IPA fonts (if you use MSIE6, or if you have custom styles for the .IPA class.)

The .IPA class is very useful, since it can be set on tables, table rows, table cells, paragraphs, divs, spans, and so on. If you have span.IPA in your user stylesheets, please switch to .IPA for the benefits. --Kjoonlee 09:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Shortcuts
Hi, now we can use WP:PHONETICS to link to the project page. I think something shorter like WP:PHO or WP:PHON might be good as well. What do you think? --Kjoonlee 06:30, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, sounds like a good idea. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  07:56, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * So which ones should we choose? It seems to be "first come, first served." I have a slight aversion to hogging all the good shortcuts, but part of me says "what the heck, we're not that early ourselves, so probably nobody will mind." --Kjoonlee 09:21, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * WikiProject Photography has already bagged WP:PH, and there doesn't seem to be a WikiProject Telephones, so there's nothing stopping us from taking WP:PHON. —Angr 10:22, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, PHON it is. (They've already got WP:TEL so they won't mind.) --Kjoonlee 13:01, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup
Currently, 311 articles are assigned to this project, of which 115, or 37.0%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 2008-07-14.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. More than 150 projects and work groups have already subscribed, and adding a subscription for yours is easy - just place the following template on your project page:



If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page; I'm not watching this page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:00, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

IPA help requested
Would someone who knows IPA please add a pronunciation to Rielle Hunter? According to sources it's pronounced "Riley". Thanks! Kelly hi! 16:07, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Help with a poorly named article
Hi, I'm a bit new to the editing of wikis/wiki projects, so I was wondering if someone could help me with the following pages: Alveolo-palatal fricative and Alveolo-palatal consonant. The page talking about the consonants is actually a page that only discusses the fricatives, while the page about fricatives is just a stub. I would be tempted to just edit the page for the consonants and leave it blank until someone rewrites it, and to copy over the information on the consonant page to the fricative page, but I'm not sure that that is how things are done. Please help. Vaaht (talk) 01:33, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd say we should make Alveolo-palatal fricative a disambiguation page like alveolar fricative is. I think that Alveolo-palatal consonant doesn't currently have information about alveolo-palatal sonorants by a lack of attention more than anything else.  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  03:38, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

IPA in Jaws
Michael found a possibly useful link, with advice on reading IPA or other Unicode characters in JAWS, by editing an .sbl file :Getting JAWS 6.1 to recognize "exotic" Unicode symbols.Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy Mabbett; Andy Mabbett's contributions 21:14, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

IPA help
Hi, can anyone please tell me what the IPA for "Evanescence" is? At the moment the Turkish Evanescence article is a featured article nominee, and as I'm probably the only native English speaker on that Wikipedia I think I'm the only person that's actually noticed that the pronunciation given in the article is wrong. Can someone please tell me what the IPA for Evanescence is? Thank you. Runningfridgesrule (talk) 15:46, 18 September 2008 (UTC)


 * —Angr 16:03, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you :-)! Runningfridgesrule (talk) 00:01, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Phonologies section revamped
Okay, after 16 months I've decided that the new index is now doing well enuff to be unleashed. Sinitic, Italic, Oceanic and creoles & pidgins are still to be indexed to the full.

I've been working approximately genealogically; if anyone wants to alphabetize it, knock yourself out, tho I think my approach helps to highlight which areas need work the most (I'd say Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic look relativly under-covered). Maybe one or both could be on their own separate subpages?

Aside from marking seperate articles, I envision that some sort of color-coding could eventually be added to mark what phonological data is included; phoneme inventory? allophonics? phonotactics? dialectology? Likewise a list of families or subfamilies completely lacking coverage could be useful - I was initially compiling those too, but ran out of steam with that.

-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 11:49, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Is there a way we can alter it so that there's not so much empty space? — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  04:44, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * You should have seen it before I added all those Template:Col-2 and Template:Col-3s! :) For a more whitespace-efficient version, I tried putting it all inside a single Template:Col-2, but that made editing a pain — no subsection edits possible! I wouldn't want to start chopping families into non-genetic units either… -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:57, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Next up: the phoneme table discussion
This is a topic that should've been raised a long time ago, frankly. I think the gist of it comes down to this: should phoneme tables be phonetic or phonological? I'm on the latter's side, because the actual IPA symbol typically conveys the leftover phonetic information. An user interested in these details may look them up hirself basing on that. I've for a while now been converting phoneme tables to a more phonological (condensed, systematic) form; merging POA and MOA categories where applicable. But clearly they were originally entered in a fairly phonetical form - is there perchance wider support to keep them that way insted? I noticed my rearrangement of Hadza was reverted back to the original form a while ago.

These are some of the specific issues, mostly with consonants:
 * Affricate vs. stop: I've been merging these as a single category whenever there's no contrast. Typical examples: Xamtanga, Sandawe. Articles such as Tanacross, however, group them together even when there is a contrast, but I'm unsure how to label such a scenario efficiently ("stop" and "affricate" cannot be colums in itself because that leaves no room for sonorants).
 * Tanacross also demonstrates grouping sonorants together as a single class. I've seen this done with North Amerind languages here and there.
 * Phonation: the default template is designed for a language only containing voiced and unvoiced consonants. Languages such as Hmong that have on some consonants an aspiration contrast insted, I've re-arranged to have phonation as a subtype of the MOA. Should be fairly uncontroversial.
 * POAs:
 * I'd like to see bilabial vs. labiodental generally merged. Labial consonant does explain the distinction's existence, so I don't see necessary to include it in every phonology treatise, any more than, say, "laminal alveolar" vs. "apical alveolar". Consider Vietnamese phonology, one case where the latter is included too — but outside the table.
 * Similarly I've been merging postalveolar vs. palatal (Xamtanga & Sandawe again work as examples) whenever there is nothing else getting in the way. I'm a bit unsure about the validity of this, however, when there are also non-palatoalveolar postalveolars or pure palatals, eg. Hixkaryana. It seems like a safe bet that palatoalveolars etc. would phonologically be simple palatals if none exist phonetically; but not necessarily other, less typical ones.
 * is also problematic. Whenever there's a separate labiovelar category, it's the natural choice (and those Australian languages using non-standard POA sorting get by with a colspan="2" - clever, may I say), but if there's not? Should it go as labial, as velar, as labiovelar? I really have no idea about this one. :/ The safest choice is to just see how our sorce presents the table (if they have one), but is that the only choice?

-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 19:12, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I've been doing a bit of table simplification myself, and I think I've had a similar goal as yourself.
 * I'd like to point out that Tanacross and the Amerind languages don't group all sibilants together, it simply distinguishes between alveolar sibilants and laterals since there may be several lateral affricates. When I can, I actually try to group laterals and approximants.
 * I agree about labials.
 * Typically, if I merge plosives and affricates I call the row(s) "stop". This technically would include nasal stops, but don't tell anyone.
 * There's already a bit of confusion between postalveolar and palatal because people like to merge them. I'm somewhat resistant to merging postalveolar and palatal columns unless there's a note or the column itself is titled "postalveolar and palatal."  I suppose, though, that phonologically postalveolars may be indistinguishable from palatals (I believe there are processes that occur only with alveolo-palatals and /j/ in Polish)
 * /w/ is weird because, for many languages, there are competing phonological reasons for putting it in either velar or labial. Generally, I move it to a velar column though if editors have reasons to undo this I don't really fight them.  When there is already a separate labiovelar column (that is, there other labio-velar consonants) then that's where /w/ ought to go, but I wouldn't make a separate column just for /w/ and I wouldn't put it in both labial and velar (blech!) — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  05:00, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Vowel Featured Article Review
Vowel has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.)

Two questions
Following advice, I repose the following two questions here:

1. I wonder whether you have any opinion on the usage or non-usage of the terms "contoid" and "vocoid" in modern linguistics?

More generally, how does modern phonetics distinguish e.g. a "consonant" in the sense of a sound with a certain kind of articulation, and a "consonant" in the more etymological sense "with-sounding", i.e., "not forming the 'nucleus' of a syllable". How is e.g. r in Brno classified (not to mention more irregular interjections et cetera, such as m in English "Hmph!"). Apart from the contoid/consonant separation (which I found out about in the Swedish Nationalencyklopedin), i've not found any clear terminological distinction between "consonant sound from articulation point of view" and "consonant sound from syllable forming point of view".

2. I also wonder whether in general the various voiceless vowel sounds in e.g. English (or Swedish) denoted by the letter h are classified as "consonants from articulation point of view". With "various sounds" I only refer to pronounced "stand-alone" h, noting that it then normally is articulated essentially as the voiceless or "whispered" variant of the succeeding vowel sound; possibly but not necessarily accompanied by a very minor "partial closure of the upper vocal tract". In a sentence like "He as been housed in a hard hot hell", the h_sounde are rather differently articulated, as regards rounding et cetera; each /hV/ is pronounced identical or fairly close to "whispered /V/" + "voiced /V/" (where /V/ stands for the respective vowel sound), as may be noted when you whisper the sentence.

I'm happy for either direct answers, or directions to where answers may be found, or directions to more appropriate places to put the questions. My primary concrete application would be in sv:konsonant and similar svwp articles, where of course Swedish usage is of primary interest; but I assume that Swedish linguists do not solve these problems in a fundamentally different manner from other linguists... JoergenB (talk) 20:32, 27 October 2008 (UTC)


 * While I'm not sure about question one, my understanding of /h/ cross-linguistically is that when it isn't a true fricative it is a voiceless version of the preceding sonorant (not just vowel). I believe the voiceless sonorant is considered part of the syllable onset but then we get into the complicated stuff of question 1 that I don't really have an answer for. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  04:09, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Which, in case of /h/ in English and Swedish (neither of which TTBOMK allow /h/ before a non-vowel) would basically mean that it's phonetically a (voiceless, whispered etc.) semivowel. Whether that solves anything, I'm not sure.
 * BTW, damn, contoid currently redirects to consonant, an article which doesn't even mention the term. We still have a long way to go here before things are up-to-date around here. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 10:13, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I think the terminology goes back to Kenneth L. Pike. In his book Phonemics - A Technique for Reducing Languages to Writing (Ann Arbor 1947, p. 5) he introduces the term Vocoid and Non-Vocoid, which he also refers to as Contoid. I'm not sure you would call this modern linguistics more than 60 years later. Anyway, I think it was a very good idea to keep the terminology of phonetic and phonological units straight, but it has not been picked up widely. I remember that this was still in the German SIL curriculum some 20 years ago, when I went through these courses, but it was later dropped because it was not used anywhere in mainstream linguistics. But since there are some published sources using this distinction, it wouldn't hurt creating proper articles for these. Landroving Linguist (talk) 09:20, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Notability of sounds?
When is a sound notable enough to warrant its own article? I mean the question broadly, but I'm also interested in particular in the case of the near-close central unrounded, and near-close central rounded, vowels &mdash; they've had their own symbols in X-SAMPA for years. I've also heard there was a discussion about this general question a while back, but I haven't been able to locate it; if anyone can point me toward an archive of such a discussion, I'd appreciate it. Pi zero (talk) 11:43, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I believe the general tendency is to have a 1:1 correspondence between IPA symbol and article. Current exceptions include the affricates and a few ejective consonants (the examples listed on the official IPA chart).  The near-close central vowels don't have their own articles, though there are separate sections for them since some languages contrast near-close central with near-close front or with close central.  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  03:46, 19 November 2008 (UTC)


 * The reason I'm asking (I tend to err on the side of saying too little, which often serves me well by avoiding edit wars but in this case seems a bit silly) is that it touches on an RfD discussion currently underway. The sections on the near-close central vowels have taken the form of prose templates, which have been nominated for deletion on the grounds that content belongs in mainspace.  That splits the discussion into two parts: whether it is true that content should be in mainspace, and where in mainspace this particular content should go.  An administrator has inquired as to where the discussion was (if any) that determined that these vowels shouldn't have their own articles.


 * This discussion may, evidently, be of interest to members of this wikiproject (and vice versa, so to speak). It's here: Templates_for_deletion.  Pi zero (talk) 11:23, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Why are there two of these pronunciation templates?
and.

They both seem to go about doing the same thing in different ways. The former automatically makes the penultimate and antepenultimate variables, but the latter makes you use. Seems like an awfully tiny practical difference. Since the latter is tagged as yours, I figured you guys might know why this is the way it is. Äþelwulf Talk to me. 12:05, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Merged. — kwami (talk)

Jim Croce
Hello there. There's a debate over the pronunciation of Jim Croce's name. The one source I've found lists it as: Croce, Jim (KRŌCH-ē), with the key "Ō, ō = over, roll" and "Ē, ē = evil, reel". Can anyone turn that into IPA? I have no expertise in this, so I thought I'd ask for help! (And if you'd like to come argue, here it is. ;) ) Thanks! --Falcorian (talk) 20:16, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅. —Angr 21:46, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the help! --Falcorian (talk) 22:49, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Phones
I was surprised to find this was such an incomplete page. Although it gives a definition, it doesn't explain how phones are expressed or illuminate the subtleties which phones convey. --122.106.104.127 (talk) 09:58, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * You might find what you look for in the entry phonetics. Just phone will automatically redirect you to the entry telephone, which even should not have a good definition of phone in a phonetic sense. The entry on phone (phonetics) is very slim, indeed. If you think it should contain more, then you will be welcome to add! Landroving Linguist (talk) 21:30, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Gropecunt Lane
Hello. I've just nominated this at FAC, and considering the relative vulgarity of the words used I wondered if anyone here would mind adding a phonetic link to the lead? Parrot of Doom (talk) 20:38, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Misrendering of ː
On one of my browsers, Firefox 3.0.11 for Windows XP, the symbol for a long vowel or consonant appears as a small-caps I if the font size is sufficiently small (I think 10 point, but I'm not sure). "About Mozilla Firefox" in the Help menu in my browser gives me: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729). --Atemperman (talk) 19:59, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
 * That sounds a lot more like the the font is so small that the two triangles are touching. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  03:24, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it happens to me too. It's not exactly a misrendering, because it isn't that the wrong glyph is being used, rather it's just that in this font at this size the two glyphs become virtually indistinguishable. +Angr 05:59, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
 * All true, but this doesn't make it any less of a problem. --Atemperman (talk) 17:09, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, it means the problem's solution is user- and browser-specific; there's nothing we as Wikipedia editors can do about it. +Angr 21:34, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * You could space out the glyph in the typeface yourself, if you really like it. LokiClock (talk) 15:58, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Article request: Journal of the International Phonetic Association
This is an journal highly-cited on Wikipedia (336 times, rank 88 in the compilation). I think it would be a good addition to the encyclopedia. Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 10:53, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Phonology of the shva in Hebrew
Please see Talk:Hebrew_phonology where we are trying to find out what the phonological values of the shva are in Hebrew. Please reply there. Debresser (talk) 06:17, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

All possible syllable codas?
See the discussion with the same title at Talk:Syllable coda. _ _ _ A. di M. 10:58, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Help with IPA
I'm not really good with the IPA system and I was wondering if somebody could come up with the IPA version for Kiliaen van Rensselaer (Dutch merchant) based on this recording. Would anybody be able to help? Thanks.  upstate NYer  14:52, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Created a transcription, with help from the Dutch phonology page. — Eru·tuon 00:20, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Pronunciation of -ium
Input from those with expertise would be much appreciated at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Elements, where the proper respelling pronunciation of -ium is being disputed. --Cyber cobra (talk) 23:51, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Aspiration
Does anyone have some sound files that could go on the Aspiration (phonetics) page? I think recordings of aspirated [pʰ], [kʰ] or [tʰ], displayed alongside the plain versions, would help the general reader understand what aspiration is, since English-speakers do not habitually pay attention to it. Perhaps they could be added to the voiceless bilabial plosive etc. pages too? Lfh (talk) 17:28, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

North Indian speech has plenty of aspirated stops. I am sure there is one wmong us who could provide the recording. Also, if you search for (Hindu) Sanskrit or (Buddhist) Pali chanting samples on the Internet you'd find some.--66.169.174.37 (talk) 16:51, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

canIPA
http://venus.unive.it/canipa/dokuwiki/doku.php

I figured there might be some interest in this around these parts. It's a reformation of the IPA, apparently popular in ConLanger communities for its degree of freedom in notation. I find it indispensable for vowel notation (though to be clear I'm only an orthophile), and after reading the manual and looking at some of the charts he's produced of languages, I think you'll understand why. I doubt it's going to be popping up in WIkipedia articles any time soon, as it hasn't even taken hold with other linguists yet, but it's still worth reading about. A link to the designer's website for the system precedes. LokiClock (talk) 02:23, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Interesting, though it seems that the main difference is that the extra characters in canIPA can be represented in IPA with diacritics. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  03:19, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
 * In some parts that's true. In the case of vowels, the diacritics have to be taken to extreme degrees for fairly commonplace sounds. In those cases it's just a matter of resolution. In other parts, the IPA is rudimentary in its notational capacities, such as for stress and intonation. In still other parts, inaccuracies easily shown to be such are built into the system. Without the proper mapping of the phonological systems, the phonology of a language appears to be incoherent and ultimately trivial, whereas the canIPA reveals its nature as a structure, a larger pattern. LokiClock (talk) 02:55, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Just to show that it makes a difference in the description of language, not just in notational complexity, compare an IPA table of standard central Swedish "monophthongs" with the "Phonosynthesis of Swedish" document here.
 * How does that illustrate that it's not just a difference in notational complexity? All that is said in the pdf file can be said with the IPA, just with different notation.  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  07:19, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
 * First of all, rounded/unroundedness is immediately indicated by the form of the marker on the chart, rather than requiring the letter to be written on it. In terms of graphic and semiotic design, this has a number of benefits. The lines coming from the markers are where a diphthong ends. In the case of å, the difference in articulation is lost on the IPA, which homogenizes near-enough sounds, like the start end end vowels of Swedish å. The IPA is not really equipped for representing such scientific measurements of articulation, only for representing the internal consistencies of a system.
 * That difference is what is meant by the terms inter- and intraphonemic notation. Imagine a Swedish deaf person trying to learn to speak English by learning the IPA. They will learn to pronounce /o/ as their å, which means English and Spanish /o/ will also be that sound, and all the other grades between it and another place on the IPA chart. They will have a very thick accent, because they are applying the phonetic realizations of one phonemic system to different phonemic system with different phonetic realizations of it's phonemes, which are relatively similar in articulation to the other speaker's phonemes.
 * We actually see this problem on Wikipedia, where our reference audio clip for vowels are not actually flat or in their canonical articulations, but yet they're still valid representations of the articulations they were made for, because in their phonemic system, their (e.g.) fronted short diphthongs are not distinguished within that language from a nearby canonical articulation.
 * Consider further a native speaker describing his language in the IPA. In the future, when we look at his description, you can't glean from it with any accuracy what the phonemes were actually like, just their vague position and structure. That would be enough to build a theory of the exact articulation of their language, but you can never know what the system was exactly.
 * Another main concern is the position of central and centralized vowels. In order to properly convey the effects of unrounding or rounding on the phonemic system, it is necessary to show the centralizing of rounded front vowels or unrounded back vowels. Representing this properly causes a meet with phonemics and acoustics because the system is enhancing the formant shifting caused by the change in labial articulation. If such consequences could be readily apparent from accurate measurement of articulations, and it doesn't require a splitting of hairs, they should be noted in the diagram of the phonemic structures to which they pertain. Lumping them in with the nearest two canonical articulations confuses phonetic realities which might represent very different phonemic realities or historical configurations. – LokiClock (talk) 00:43, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * You say that the IPA isn't set up to represent the notational complexity of Swedish å, but it is. You just have to use diacritics.  You said it also made a difference in the description of language but so far you've just demonstrated transcription issues. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  03:11, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I concede that I haven't provided any real examples to that effect. However, it being possible does not mean its easy or even reasonable. For one, how often do you see people using these diacritics? For the most part, positional diacritics are limited to the realm of narrow transcription, because using diacritics all the time to represent these common phones is cumbersome, and thus impractical for everyday use. As a basic design principle, the less accessible a feature, the less it's accessed. Besides infeasibility, diacritics cause people to perceive the phones as special, and so they are only specified in special circumstances, such as especially narrow transcription. It should be reasonably easy to represent reasonably common phones, such as close near-back unrounded or rounded vowels.
 * The vowel system itself is poorly structured – vowels are basically triangulated to the nearest canonical position and transcribed in terms of relative offsets from these admitted positions. Less north of England than Wales, so it might as well be Somerset. The canIPA instead clearly defines spatial axes, a metric by which any arbitrary phone's symbol can be immediately and unambiguously referenced to three levels of precision per box (1 mm tongue height) at the narrowest with relative ease. With the IPA on the other hand, because of the inconsistent distances between canonical positions, even assuming exact fractions, the difference between /e/ and /˔ë/ is not going to be the same as the difference between /˔ɛ&uml;/ and /ɛ/. Furthermore, how are you supposed to deal with constructions like /˔æ&uml;/? The /æ/, /a/ ambiguity creates serious problems for notational rigor.
 * As far as pure deficiencies of the system, the IPA is certainly not equipped for proper intonation notation. I'll try and think of other examples later. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 06:10, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Needless to say I never really followed up on that, but I'll note that the reform's purpose is not to add features, so that's kind of beside the point. The main practical problem with notation based on phonemic distinctions is that you can't glean the proper pronunciation from phonetic notation. Diacritics can work around this in theory, but in practice, how many transcriptions do you see that narrow? They are usually dropped because they can be inferred by someone who already knows the true positions those vowels usually take, to the expense of the phonological intuitions of anyone learning from the texts. "You just have to use diacritics" is no excuse when those diacritics simply aren't used in the majority of instances where they're necessary to communicate the phonological reality. Even with diacritics, as I said earlier, vowel articulation is ambiguous. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 20:59, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion: Make all IPA symbols in tables link to their respective vowel/consonant article
The IPA tables in many articles, for example IPA for Spanish, are rather difficult to use. The IPA symbol is listed, but there's no link to the corresponding article. You can go to the Table of consonants or the Table of vowels and look for it there, but (aside from being rather tedious) that can be a bit difficult since there are so many - particuarly for the consonants, and many of the symbols closely resemble one another. Also, many people don't even know about those tables, and thise causes even more difficulty in finding the arricle for each sound.

So my suggestion is that all of these symbols in tables should link to their corresponding articles. For example then, the "θ" in the IPA for Spanish article would be a link to the Voiceless dental fricative article, where readers could find more in-depth discussion about that particular sound, listen to a recording of it, see where it's used in other languages, etc. This would be a *huge* improvement in the ease of use for the phonetic related articles.

I'm not a script-writer myself, but I would imagine that it wouldn't be too tricky to make some sort of bot/script that would automaticly turn al of the IPA symbols in an article or table into links. (In the example I gave: θ.)

What do others think?... Helvetica (talk) 15:19, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I wondered about that as well. I don't know whether it was an actual decision made on linguistic grounds (e.g. the formal description of a particular sound may not match its pronunciation in some specific language) or simply that no one has got round to it.  If the latter, I don't mind volunteering to make a start on the most widely-spoken languages and we can see how it goes from there.  But not if that's deemed a bad idea.  Lfh (talk) 22:02, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * In a number of cases (most notably English), the transcription is Pan-dialectal, so that a given character represents different sounds depending on dialect. WP:IPA for Spanish, for instance, uses  to represent what is pronounced, , , or  depending on dialect.  This isn't to say that we can't edit the guides to help readers unfamiliar with the sounds, only that simply linking the character to an article on a given consonant or vowel may not do the job accurately enough.  I've edited WP:IPA for Portuguese and WP:IPA for Russian to tweak the guide towards your suggestion.  Do you think that sort of thing is helpful enough?  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  22:30, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I thought something like that might be an issue. I should point out that I've already linked the vowels for Russian, because they were linking to unhelpful orthographic pages, and all the sounds for Armenian, as a temporary hold because that page has not yet been fleshed out with any examples. Lfh (talk) 23:09, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It will be difficult for WP:IPA for Irish, because while we have an article on, for example, the voiced bilabial plosive, we don't have articles on the two kinds of /b/-sound in Irish, the voiced palatalized bilabial plosive and the voiced velarized bilabial plosive. +Angr 23:26, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd skip the characters that are no different than what an IPA-illiterate would expect (b, d, g, s), though you still have a good point. That's another good reason to use other methods to help clarify the sounds for our readers.  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  23:54, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

"In a number of cases (most notably English), the transcription is Pan-dialectal, so that a given character represents different sounds depending on dialect. WP:IPA for Spanish, for instance, uses [ʎ] to represent what is pronounced [ʎ], [ʝ], [ʒ], or [dʒ] depending on dialect. "

I'm not sure if I understand the problem...In cases where there are differenct pronunciations depending on dialect, can't the alternate sounds be included in the table and linked to as well. Furthermore, if it's a problem with links then wouldn't it also be a problem without links as well...I mean anyone can go through the more tedious process of finding the article the the sound which corresponds with the symbol ([ʎ] in the example above), so the effect would be the same as if there were a link, no?

"It will be difficult for WP:IPA for Irish, because while we have an article on, for example, the voiced bilabial plosive, we don't have articles on the two kinds of /b/-sound in Irish, the voiced palatalized bilabial plosive and the voiced velarized bilabial plosive."

In cases like that, then I don't see any harm in having brown-links. They'll turn blue if/when someone writes an article for those sounds. Helvetica (talk) 13:05, 6 December 2009 (UTC)


 * If you're suggesting that our IPA transcription guides for Spanish have boxes with something like then you're not getting the point of having a pan-dialectal representation; it's so there's consistency in the transcription.  It makes sense in the guide to explain the variance in pronunciation.  Check out the footnote on the trill at WP:IPA for Portuguese, that is how to best explain the variation and link to the important articles.
 * I would oppose the creation of, e.g., voiced palatalized bilabial plosive. Not only would it set an unwieldy precedent but it would add a lot of clutter and spread out a lot of information that could just be housed at palatalization.  More importantly for the topic at hand, by allowing brown links you're still not clarifying the sounds to the reader, which is the whole point to having the links. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  19:26, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Why not just make the title of the table link to the appropriate IPA table? ex. Spanish Vowels. Linking to each symbol has numerous problems: It obscures diacritics, making the table less useful for referencing narrow transcription; It assumes the reader doesn't already recognize the IPA symbol. If they don't, they should see it in place in the table, and if they're really interested they can go to its article; It adds extra tedium to the production of tables for articles. I would say that any characters that can't be found on the tables should be linked to, and any frequently used diacritics should be noted in the article. ex. Below are the vowels of the language. Tildes above a letter denote nasalization. LokiClock (talk) 12:40, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
 * All this time, I was under the impression we were just talking about the WP:IPA for X pronunciation guides, which do more-or-less assume that readers are unfamiliar with the language at hand and/or the IPA. For other articles, I do not support a general policy of linking to articles.  You have good suggestions, Loki.
 * Another thing, linking done right doesn't obscure diacritics. Do you see a difference between  and voiced bilabial fricative? — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  20:11, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, okay. I thought the tables in question were those in languages' articles. And actually I can't, but I'm sure one's much better with your style sheet. :) LokiClock (talk) 15:55, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
 * They're both underlined for you? — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:12, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Neither. LokiClock (talk) 20:43, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, well then that's not a problem since it's only the underline that would obscure diacritics. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  21:18, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

IPAlink template ready to use
Hi there, I created a new template called IPAlink, which allows one to automatically link an IPA symbol to its corresponding sound article, like so:. This should make it a lot easier to link up the IPA symbols in pages like WP:IPA for French, as per Helvetica's proposal above, because it's simply a matter of changing  to.

Other pages and templates could/should use this new template, e.g. Template:CSS IPA vowel chart. Cheers. 222.145.134.103 (talk) 08:10, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Pan-dialectical transcription in "WP:IPA for X" project pages
Hi there, I appreciate the pan-dialectical argument, but I think that people will always get confused and ask to add a link to the corresponding sound article (like Helvetica did above), until we clarify this in the project page.

By "clarifying" I don't mean adding a whole page-long section that nobody will ever read, explaining what we are doing, but, for example, make it more obvious whether e.g. the IPA symbol "θ" in the Spanish table is actually [] (and therefore it should be linked) or it's actually //. Since in this case it's the latter, I understand that it should not be linked. However, the various sounds that this symbol is realised as in different dialects should be listed in the footnote, with links to the sounds.

So I'm proposing we do something like this

In essence, we will continue to see a struggle until we realise that people come to these pages primarily to work out how words are pronounced, and until we make it a priority for these pages to offer a clear and succint explanation of that aspect. Cheers. 222.145.134.103 (talk) 08:37, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
 * That seems like a reasonable proposal. We want to be careful about how specific we want to be and which dialectal differences we want to consider noteworthy.  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  00:12, 14 June 2010 (UTC)


 * FYI, I started using IPAlink and IPAblink throughout the various articles to that effect. 114.146.84.231 (talk) 13:22, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Requested move: Manners of articulation to Manner of articulation
Manner of articulation was recently moved to Manners of articulation. I have requested that it be moved back. Comments and suggestions are welcome at Talk:Manners of articulation. Cnilep (talk) 18:09, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Phone tables
Tell your kids: User:Aeusoes1/Phone tables outlines the table formatting as has been done and discussed for the past few years at the phone articles. I figured I'd formalize it a bit for people curious or willing to contribute. Feel free to edit (particularly if you can find discussions representing consensus for statements tagged as being undiscussed). — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 17:05, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

A simple IPA help request
Hi, i have a source for phonetic versions of local placenames, however it contains a symbol i can't find in the IPA. It is an O with two dots underneath it. The place name is question is Upperlands, pronounced pretty much as you'd expect. The phonetic for it given in - but has two dots underneath the "o" and i can't find it or an IPA letter similar for it.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Mabuska (talk) 12:56, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * My guess is that the IPA equivalent would be . Do you have any other instances of it? — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  13:26, 19 January 2011 (UTC)


 * I do, three variations of the same place: /,moni'n'ini/, /,moni'n'i:nə/, and /,moni'i:nə/, otherwise spelt as Moneyneany and Moneyneana. The Money part is pronounced like money, and all three are meant to have the two dots underneath the "o". Mabuska (talk) 13:49, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Yeah, is your best bet.  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  05:43, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, it matches the "aw" sound as in "mud" for those places. Many thanks! Mabuska (talk) 11:04, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Help with pronunciation
I've been trying to figure out how to pronounce "Tjikko" as in Old Tjikko. I assume its a Swedish name and its been bothering me ever since I created the article as to how you pronounce this word. If anyone can help me out here, or feel free to edit the article itself. Thanks. -- ErgoSum • talk • trib  03:49, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Probably, but I can giv no garantee to the pronunciation of an originally dog's nickname. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 21:36, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm going with " " thanks to input from a conversation over at the reference desk. Thanks anyway. --  ErgoSum • talk • trib  02:15, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Rendering the name as if pronounced in English is a terrible idea, if I may say. You'll want to compare transcription with the page IPA for Swedish and Norwegian, not the English counterpart. (IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet; there isn't a separate "English IPA" or anything of the kind.) Given how Swedish phonology works, and reading the comments at the reference desk, it seems the correct transcription would be . (The recording there did sound like with an affricate at the beginning, but that sound is not standard Swedish.) -- Trɔpʏliʊm  • blah 18:29, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

English phonetic alphabet (EPA)
Does anyone know anything about English phonetic alphabet (EPA) ? It's been nominated for deletion. 64.229.103.232 (talk) 07:06, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Telugu phonology clean up
The Telugu phonology section in this article is terrible. Can I have some help fixing it? cntrational (talk) 18:16, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Alright, removed the atrocity that was there before and added a proper IPA table, based off the IPA listed on the Telugu script page. Things that need clarification and verification: Does Telugu really have vowel harmony? If so, how does it work? Is it /ɕ/ or /ʃ/? Is /ɨ/ a real phoneme? Does it have allophony of [w] and [v], like Hindi-Urdu? I don't have the knowledge to figure those out, so I need some help there. cntrational (talk) 21:53, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

rename articles on "close vowels" to "high vowels", likewise "open vowel" -> "low vowel"
Hello. I'd like to suggest that we rename articles such as close front unrounded vowel to "high front unrounded vowel", and similarly "open" -> "low". I know that the IPA prefers "close/open" to "high/low", but this seems to conflict with normal usage, and Wikipedia is supposed to follow normal usage, not anyone's prescriptive usage. Some evidence:


 * The standard reference on phonetics, Ladefoged's "A Course in Phonetics", consistently uses "high"/"low" and doesn't even mention the terms "close/open" as far as I can see. Likewise for "The Sounds of the World's Languages".
 * Note that we say "vowel height" not "vowel closeness". Even the article on close front unrounded vowel says its "vowel backness is front", its "vowel roundedness is unrounded", and its "vowel height is close" (???).  Similarly we have vowel "raising" and "lowering", not usually "closing/opening".
 * EVERY SINGLE author I've looked at in the last half-hour or so among my books uses "high" and never "close". This includes e.g. Beekes's book on Indo-European; Fortson's book on Indo-European; every author in Comrie's "The World's Major Languages", as far as I can tell; Colin Masica's "The Indo-Aryan Languages"; Sihler's "New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin".  There are only two marginal exceptions, both books written by David Crystal.
 * In his "Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language" p. 155, he says of vowel height: "Normally, three or four degrees are recognized: high, mid (often divided into mid-high and mid-low), and low. Alternatively, tongue height can be described as close, mid-close, mid-open and open." This clearly indicates that he too prefers "high" to "close".
 * In his "A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics", he claims that "close" is "a term used in the four-level classification of vertical tongue movement" (close, half-close/mid-close, half-open/mid-open, open); but then in the same entry, he says that in a three-level classification, the terms "high", "mid" and "low" are used. Personally I don't believe this.  Ladefoged uses "high, mid-high, mid-low, low" for his four-way classification; Beekes uses "high, middle high, middle low, low"; Colin Masica uses "high, higher mid, lower mid, low"; nowhere have I actually seen the distinction that Crystal claims.  In fact, Crystal isn't even self-consistent; e.g. in his entry on "cardinal vowels", he says "Using the front of the tongue, and without rounding the lips, four primary vowel types are produced, and these are given the symbols (from high to low ), ,  and ." This is despite the fact that when he actually shows an IPA-style cardinal vowel diagram, he uses "close" vs. "open", which suggests to me that he, too, prefers "high" and "low", but tries minimally (and not always successfully) to avoid inconsistency with the IPA-dictated terms "close" vs. "open".

Given this evidently very strong predilection for "high/low" in place of "close/open", I think that using "close/open" significantly hinders understanding of the phonetics articles on the part of lay/semi-lay readers &mdash; not to mention the obvious confusion of statements like "its vowel height is close" (see above). I suggest then that we rename the articles to use "high/low" and use this terminology consistently, and simply note that the IPA prefers "close/open" but predominant usage is "high/low".

Comments?

BTW I brought this up here because it covers a number of articles. If someone suggests a better place for the discussion, I'll gladly move it.

Benwing (talk) 06:38, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

A couple more points:
 * 1) The use of "close" instead of "closed" can only lead to more confusion and is yet another reason to avoid these terms. Yes, I know that "close" is sanctioned by usage, but it still makes no sense whatsoever that the opposite of "open syllable" is "closed syllable", the opposite of "open class" is "closed class", but the opposite of "open vowel" is "close vowel".  This use of "close" is (IMO) unnatural and doesn't follow standard English practices. (Note below, where one phonetician talks about a "closed vowel", obviously for exactly this reason.)
 * 2) The page on close vowel says the usage of "high vowel" is "Americanist". Whether you take that properly to mean "people working on American languages" or vaguely to mean "Americans", it's clearly not true in either case.  The authors I mentioned above are from all over the world and none of them focus on American languages.

BTW I thought I'd check out the "Handbook of the IPA" to see what it had to say, since it has both an intro and sections on individual languages written by various authors. This is an official publication of the IPA, so you'd expect to see "open/close" preferred to "low/high". Indeed, the intro consistently uses "close"/"open". You'd also expect to see the individual authors tend to use "open/close", since their purpose is primarily to serve as illustrations of the IPA.

So a little survey:


 * American English: (by Ladefoged) "mid-high front glide"
 * Amharic: no usage of terms.
 * Arabic: "high central unrounded vowel"
 * Bulgarian: may be "somewhat more closed than shown" (NB not "close")
 * Cantonese: various vowels are "lowered in syllables closed by a plosive or nasal"
 * Catalan:"high vowel"
 * Croatian:no usage.
 * Czech:"non-low vowels" but "short vowel is noticeably less close"
 * Dutch: no usage.
 * French: "mid-high and mid-low vowels", "high vowel"
 * Galician: "open central vowel", "open back"
 * German: "low back vowels", "high and mid back tense vowels" but "closer vowels in a close/open pair"
 * Hausa: "high centralized vowel", "short high vowels", "fairly low, central(ized) vowel"
 * Hebrew, Hindi: no usage.
 * Hungarian: "low pair" (of vowels), "higher and backer", "higher and more peripheral"
 * Igbo:"auditory height differences of the vowels"
 * Irish: "close rounded vowel"
 * Japanese: "close to close-mid nasalized vowel"
 * Korean: vowels are "lowered" but "mid-open back unrounded vowel"
 * Farsi: no usage
 * Portuguese: "high back unrounded vowel"
 * Sindhi: no usage
 * Slovene: "degree of openness" of vowel
 * Taba, Thai: no usage
 * Tukang Besi: "High front vowel, mid front vowel", etc.
 * Turkish: no usage

Results:

both high and close: 3 high: 10 close: 5 neither: 10

Even here, high wins out over close.

Benwing (talk) 07:56, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Looking through just JIPAs "Illustrations of the IPA" published after HIPA, I see the following:


 * Close/Open (19)
 * Belgian Standard Dutch
 * Estonian
 * Flemish-Brabant
 * Hamont Dutch
 * Itunyoso Trique
 * Kalabari-Ijo
 * Liverpool English
 * Luanyjang Dinka
 * Mah Meri
 * Mastrict Dutch
 * Nara
 * Nuuchalnulth
 * Polish
 * Received Pronunciation
 * Salsaca Quichua
 * Spanish
 * Tyneside English
 * Yine
 * Zurich German
 * High/Low (23)
 * Australian English
 * Central Arrente
 * Chickasaw
 * Friulian
 * Gayo
 * Goizueta Basque
 * Hasselt Dutch
 * Indonesian
 * Italian
 * Jamaican Creole
 * Kéo
 * Mavea
 * Nepali
 * Palula
 * Portuguese (Brazilian)
 * Sandawe
 * Shipibo
 * Southern Michigan English
 * Standard Bengali
 * Standard Georgian
 * Standard Yiddish
 * Tamambo
 * Tilquiapan Zapotec
 * Seems from just the IPA that usage is split, certainly not leaning enough to use it as a justification one way or another.
 * Keep in mind, also, that the awkwardness of necessitating a distinction between close and closed parallels potential confusion when considering languages that have "high" and "low" tones. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 14:43, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Hey, thanks for bringing this up! Looks like you have done your homework before posting this. I'm all in favor of doing things like the IPA demands, but this may really be a case where even the IPA is not that clear-cut as it wants to be. So I would not oppose a move from close to high. But ideally the IPA would think through this issue at their next conference, too. I may have the same opinion on your proposal from plosive to stop, below. Landroving Linguist (talk) 06:58, 3 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Aeusoes, you seem to have missed my point, which is that the split usage of "close/open" vs. "high/low" is occurring largely in IPA illustrations, as a result of an attempt to hew to the IPA's dictated usage. Outside of this, I rarely see the usage of "close/open", although I would be happy to be proven wrong.
 * You also seem to have misunderstood my comment about the awkwardness of "close" and "closed", which has little to do with the multiple use of terms like "closed/open" and "high/low". (BTW do you not realize that I'm a linguistics PhD student? I'm certainly aware of high tones and low tones.) My point is rather that the use of "close" to mean "closed" is awkward and contrary to normal English usage, and the usage of "its vowel height is close" (instead of "its vowel height is high") is going to be highly confusing to non-experts. Benwing (talk) 03:35, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I was responding to your statement that the HIPA shows that high wins narrowly with the IPA over close. It doesn't when you consider further IPA literature.  I haven't responded to the statement of literature outside of JIPA since I haven't looked.
 * I do see that I misread what you were saying about the term close (I thought you had made a statement about closed in relation to syllable weight in addition to what you actually said. My mistake).  Your claim that close/open is awkward seems subjective; I don't have a problem with it (though I could be used to it from reading relevant literature) and dictionaries/thesauri that I've checked list them as readily connected antonyms. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  04:01, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Right, it's not surprising you'll find usage of "close" and "open" a lot more in IPA literature since that is what they prefer. But as I said, everywhere I look outside of IPA literature I see "high" and "low" far more often.  I'll leave this alone now but I hope to get consensus for this move in the future. Benwing (talk) 05:10, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Ben, this is something that has bothered me too. Based on your comments, I wonder if you're misreading the word as I did for a long time: It's /kloʊs/, as in near, not /kloʊz/, as in shut. Or maybe that was just my illiteracy, but I think the reason I kept misreading it was that calling them "near vowels" didn't make any sense, while calling them "shut vowels" did. I don't find high–low tone to be a confounding factor with high–low vowels, but I suspect that may be due to not working with heavily tonal languages. I could see maybe saying a word has a high vowel to mean a vowel with a high tone, so maybe that would be worse. Neither option seems particularly good. — kwami (talk) 23:41, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, for awhile I read it as /kloʊzd/, but once I noticed the spelling as "close" not "closed", I read it as /kloʊs/. But you're right that it's exactly the fact that "near vowel" doesn't make much sense, and that "close" (rather than "closed") is hardly an antonym of "open" in normal English, that is one of the things that bothers me about this usage.  SOWL uses the obvious and what they call "traditional" terms "high/low" and I don't see why we shouldn't also. (In fact I don't think I've ever heard any of my linguistics professors talk about a "close" vowel, otherwise I imagine I would have noticed it, as it still sounds very wrong to me when spoken.) I don't think the issue of high vowel vs. high tone is really that confusing, certainly no more than "open vowel" vs. "open syllable" or "long vowel" vs. "long consonant" vs. "long syllable".  I've worked somewhat with Chinese, although for that language the tones tend to get notated by number or sometimes by their Chinese names ("ping", "yin ping", "shang", etc.) or by the translations of these names ("level", "high level", "rising", etc.).  My ling dept does a lot of work on highly tonal languages like Chatino, and I suspect they use a similar numbering scheme -- for highly tonal languages, there's a lot of variation across dialects, so absolute terms like "high" or "low rising" aren't very helpful.  I'm not sure about African languages that do have just "high" vs. "low" tones or "high/medium/low" tones. Benwing (talk) 09:16, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

I also have no objection to changing "close" to "high" and "open" to "low" in articles about vowels, but I wonder what to do with "near-close" (e.g. Near-close near-front unrounded vowel) and "near-open" (e.g. Near-open front unrounded vowel). While I too "grew up with" the terms "high" and "low" rather than "close" and "open", I've never heard "near-high" or "near-low". —Angr (talk) 09:30, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

plosive -> stop
While I'm at it, I suggest a similar change be made from "plosive" to "stop", e.g. voiced palatal plosive -> voiced palatal stop. Again, it seems to be a case of "IPA vs. the world". In this case, I think the evidence is even more strongly in favor of "stop", i.e this appears to be near-universal usage.

You could object that "stop" includes nasals. Ladefoged notes the possible ambiguity with "stop" meaning "oral or nasal stop" or just meaning "oral stop", but consistently adopts the latter terminology (stop vs. nasal), and IMO so should we (mostly, we do already).

Ladefoged also says that "plosive" is a subcategory of "stop" and only includes pulmonic airstream, i.e. no ejectives or implosives. The habitual use of "plosive" in place of "stop" in Wikipedia has clearly confused a number of people in this respect. Note the bilabial plosive page, which says:


 * The bilabial plosive is a consonantal sound. Several kinds are distinguished:
 * Voiced bilabial plosive (in English and in IPA written as /b/)
 * Voiceless bilabial plosive (in English and in IPA written as /p/)
 * Bilabial ejective, more fully 'Ejective bilabial plosive' (not in English, in IPA written as /pʼ/)
 * Voiced bilabial implosive (not in English, in IPA written as /ɓ/)
 * Voiced bilabial implosive (not in English, in IPA written as /ɓ/)

Here someone obviously took "plosive" as a synonym of stop.

Similarly, under uvular consonant you read near the top:


 * "Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, ..."

Again, someone obviously took "plosive" to mean "stop", since uvular ejectives and even voiced uvular implosives exist.

Similarly again, under velar consonant is listed a bunch of consonants, including a "velar ejective plosive". Under velar ejective it says
 * Its manner of articulation is stop, or plosive, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. (The term plosive contrasts with nasal stops, where the blocked airflow is redirected through the nose.)

All of this foolishness would be fixed by simply using "stop" in place of "plosive" consistently.

The one objection I could see is that "voiced velar plosive" is more specific in that "voiced velar stop" could (potentially) refer to an implosive stop while "voiced velar plosive" can only refer to the pulmonic "plosive stop". But by this same argument, "voiced velar plosive" is itself potentially ambiguous as it might refer to breathy voice, stiff voice, slack voice, creaky voice, etc. so we'd really have to say "modal-voiced velar plosive". And since no one objects to simply "voiced" referring to modal voice, there's no reason to object to "stop" referring to "modal-airstream stop". In any case, surely in practice no one is going to get confused; otherwise this would already have been a problem for the zillions of scholars who routinely speak of "voiced velar stops", exactly as I suggest.

BTW In proposing these moves, I am happy to implement them myself. It would help if there were a simple bot that let you do regexp-type replacements or renames on multiple pages -- or even just something where I could e.g. construct my own moves in a script and apply them all at once. Any pointers as to which bots are good at this? Thanks!

Benwing (talk) 10:18, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The examples of usage at Wikipedia that indicate a misuse of "plosive" as a perfect synonym for "stop" can also be addressed by editing that prose. Replacing "plosive" with "stop" in these instances doesn't necessitate changing article titles as well, particularly (as you have conceded) as it is imprecise enough as to suggest merging the nasal, implosive, and ejective articles together.
 * Usage also doesn't seem to follow you here. A quick JSTOR search shows oodles of articles using the term.  Looking at JIPA articles of the last ten years, it seems like "plosive" is quite common, particularly in the "Illustrations of the IPA" articles (and only one of which clearly confuses plosive and stop).  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  13:58, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Plosive and stop are not synonyms, and such a move would only serve to introduce ambiguity. [ŋ] is a velar stop but it isn't a plosive. "Voiced velar stop" could mean both [ŋ] and [g], while "voiced velar plosive" can only mean [g]. If one finds confused usage one should clean this up and not move the articles to conform to this confused usage. As for the voice-thing, it looks to me that articles like voiced velar plosive are actually indifferent to the type of voice (and wherever modal voice vs. just generally voiced are confused this should be simple enough to fix too). --JorisvS (talk) 11:15, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
 * But in practice "voiced velar stop" doesn't refer to velar nasals any more than it refers to voiced implosive velar stops. Benwing (talk) 03:42, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Isn't an affricate also a form of stop? — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  04:05, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure about that. From a featural perspective, "affricate" might be "stop + fricative", but that doesn't necessarily make it either a stop or a fricative.  In any case, I've withdrawn this request, as I see that the use of "plosive" as something more specific is useful. Benwing (talk) 05:06, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Ladin
I started a Ladin language section but I am neither a linguist nor do I speak Ladin. Could somebody look at it? Thanks. Andreas (T) 21:26, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Postalveolar -> palato-alveolar
I noticed today that User:Benwing renamed the postalveolar consonant pages to palato-alveolar. I couldn't find a discussion on this so I thought I'd start one here. Personally, I like the moves, particularly as postalveolar consonant has been expanded to mean something more than palato-alveolar consonant. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 13:55, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I was tired of getting confused over this issue and finally decided to do something about it. Benwing (talk) 05:04, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Dead languages
Over at Talk:Voiceless velar fricative, there's a discussion (which I forgot about until recently because of school) about the inclusion of dead languages in the example tables; this seems like a discussion that more people can chip in on to solidify any sort of consensus from the matter. — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 01:31, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

rename coronal-consonant articles with "alveolar" in the name?
I wonder whether it's very useful to have e.g. both voiceless alveolar plosive and voiceless dental plosive, or alveolar nasal and dental nasal; and meanwhile there isn't even a voiceless dental nasal or voiceless dental lateral to go along with the alveolar equivalents. Few languages contrast dental vs. alveolar coronals. For those that do, there's usually some other more salient secondary feature like palatalization or velarization. (And even for the few remaining cases like Malayalam or the Australian languages, the apical/laminal distinction might be more salient.) On top of that, many languages with supposedly "dental" sounds actually have denti-alveolar sounds. But even worse is that lots and lots of languages have speaker variation between "dental" and alveolar sounds (e.g. French), or have sources that disagree on whether particular sounds are dental or alveolar (Spanish, Chinese, etc. etc.). Hence the examples of languages currently in the "dental" and "alveolar" articles are probably in large part wrong.

It would seem to make more sense to choose names that are agnostic to where exactly the point of contact is on the dental/denti-alveolar/alveolar range, with subsections if necessary for the symbols with different diacritics (if we want the big infoboxes on the right), and things like voiceless dental nasal and voiceless alveolar nasal linking to the agnostic page. That way there won't be the problem of where to put languages with speaker variation or inconsistent sources; we simply note this fact in the appropriate column. Something like voiceless coronal nasal comes to mind, but this isn't quite right since all retroflex and many "palatal" nasals and laterals are coronal. Technically the distinguishing feature is "anterior coronal" ... but voiceless anterior coronal nasal??? I think voiceless dental/alveolar nasal might work best. Comments?

BTW this was actually motivated by the voiceless alveolar fricative page, where the alveolar vs. dental distinction is especially problematic and confused in the sources, and where there are a whole shitload of different types of fricatives that could potentially be called "voiceless alveolar fricatives", but for few if any of them is the salient feature actually "alveolar" (rather than tongue shape, sibilance, rhoticity, laterality, etc.). Benwing (talk) 09:39, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Templates for articulatory features should not contain over-general information
I just wrote the following in Category_talk:Consonant_templates before noticing the ALERT banner at the top of the talk editing page. Thesd templates describe the articulatory facts of the feature they are about: e.g., transcluding template:affricate produces the following bulleted text:

While it is certainly useful to "centralize the redundant wording in the 'Features' section of the many individual consonant articles" (Category:Consonant templates), that unification of wording can lead to inappropriate and incorrect readings.

Alveolar lateral ejective affricate was certainly neatly and compactly formatted, like so:


 * <tt>Features of the alveolar lateral ejective affricate:
 * </tt>
 * </tt>
 * </tt>
 * </tt>
 * </tt>
 * </tt>

But this neat and simple construction produced the following text (boldface added):


 * Features of the alveolar lateral ejective affricate:
 * Its manner of articulation is affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then allowing air flow through a constricted channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
 * Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal (the apical articulation is common in languages such as English, while the laminal articulation is common in, for example, the Romance languages).
 * Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
 * It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
 * It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream over the sides of the tongue, rather than down the middle.
 * The airstream mechanism is ejective (glottalic egressive), which means the air is forced out by pumping the glottis upward.

English and the Romance languages have no alveolar lateral ejective affricates, as the parenthesized text implies that they do. I have replaced the transclusion of template:Alveolar with a copy of the wikitext, omitting the inappropriate part. I suggest a general reexamination of these centralized texts and their uses, to avoid such infelicitous misgeneralization. See
 * Template talk:Alveolar
 * Talk:Alveolar lateral ejective affricate

--Thnidu (talk) 02:42, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, you've canvassed this in three other places (here, here, and here) and I'm assuming the issue goes beyond the specific example since we can easily take out the problematic prose from the template and add it to the pages where it does apply. Beyond this, how else is the use of these templates problematic? — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  14:07, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick reply. The fix you describe should do the trick. I'm not a WP expert in any imaginable sense, and I thought/hoped there might be some way of making transclusion conditional for some parts of a template ("transclusion with subtraction"?) --Thnidu (talk) 03:18, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That's an even better idea than the one I had. It should be doable, though I'm not hip to coding.  — Æµ§œš¹ <span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  04:04, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think the English/Romance bit is particularly relevant even when it is accurate, so IMO we could simply delete it. [I just did.] There are already variant templates in some cases because of concerns like this, and we could always make more. I'm not sure it would be worth the effort to make parts optional or customizable, though it would be straightforward enough to do if we wish to go that route. — kwami (talk) 04:20, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Looking for reference paper
Hi. I'd like to use this paper from Journal of the International Phonetic Association as a ref for Thai alphabet and Thai language, but it doesn't seem to be carried by any library in this country. Wondering if someone here could help with access? Thanks. --Paul_012 (talk) 23:17, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

IPA pronunciation
I'm looking for a user who understands IPA well enough to add pronunciations to a few articles whose subjects I know have non-intuitive pronunciations. I don't know IPA well enough to do it (which is to say, I don't understand it at all). Is there a user here who would be willing to do them for me? If so, could you please drop me a note on my talk page? Thanks. Acdixon (talk • contribs • count) 17:25, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Help requested - Labiovelar consonant
Hi all. Labiovelar consonant has recently been turned into a disambiguation page, and we need expert help to WP:FIXDABLINKS; I don't think any of us at WP:DPL know enough about the subject to do the work. Could someone help fix the links? It's not too bad; 105 links need to be resolved. This tool can be of some use; it links to Dab Solver, an excellent dabfixing tool. Thanks, -- Ja Ga  talk 17:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, maybe it would be better to revert? -- Ja Ga  talk 04:29, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I have also tried to disambiguate and failed miserably. Pages such as Fon language make me wonder whether WP:DABCONCEPT applies here.  In the second table's final column, Labio-velar covers the relatively broad concept of both labial–velar consonants such as  and labialized velar consonants such as .  Maybe someone more knowledgeable should rewrite Labiovelar consonant as a short essay on the difference between the two, with a couple of prominent links to the main articles.  Certes (talk) 18:35, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Proposal of WikiProject Applied Linguistics
Hi everyone, I have made a proposal over at the WikiProject Council to start WikiProject Applied Linguistics. I would be grateful to hear your thoughts about how this project might fit into the larger scheme of WikiProjects at Wikipedia. The proposal page can be found at WikiProject Council/Proposals/WikiProject Applied Linguistics. Thanks for your time. — <b style="text-shadow:0.15em 0.15em 0.1em #555; color: #194D00; font-style: oblique; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif"> Mr. Stradivarius ♫</b> 04:42, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Please see the thread below for the latest version of this proposal. — <b style="text-shadow:0.15em 0.15em 0.1em #555; color: #194D00; font-style: oblique; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif"> Mr. Stradivarius ♫</b> 10:36, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject Linguistics proposal: your comments are requested
I have created a proposal that the smaller daughter WikiProjects of WikiProject Linguistics be converted into task forces. This would mean that this WikiProject would be converted to WikiProject Linguistics/Phonetics Task Force. Your feedback on this matter would be much appreciated. The discussion can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics. Regards — <b style="text-shadow:0.15em 0.15em 0.1em #555; color: #194D00; font-style: oblique; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif"> Mr. Stradivarius ♫</b> 10:36, 25 September 2011 (UTC)