Talk:International Phonetic Alphabet for English/Archive 1

message: If it's American English, you might want the title to say that
: Well, the intention is to also include British English, I just haven't gotten to it yet :-) Nohat
: Will that be Southern British English, Midland British English, Northern British English, Scottish British English, Northern Irish British English, Welsh British English, South Western British English or Geordie ?  I ask because they differ from each other radically.  If "British" English exists at all, it's a written language not a spoken one. -- Derek Ross
::It's Received Pronunciation, the system used in British dictionaries, even if no one actually talks that way. Having the particular IPA symbols for the various dialects of British English, and American English, for that matter, would certainly be an interesting page, perhaps elsewhere on Wikipedia. However, for the most part, phonetically speaking, a direct mapping can be made between the sounds of a dialect and either standard American English (SAE) or Received Pronunciation British English (RP). Additionally, descriptive work on dialects is generally made in terms of a standard dialect. There aren't official standards for English, but there are generally agreed upon standards for SAE and RP, and what I put here I think generally reflects that.  Nohat
Hey, my speech is pretty close to RP! ;) What does everybody think of doing SAMPA here as well? It could be confusing have two columns of symbols, but then again, for many users, this page is just lots of "?" ... -- Tarquin 21:01, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: PPS - I made some OGG recordings of RP phonemes some time ago that we could link here. I think they're linked on the talk page for the RP article. -- Tarquin 08:56, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Obsolete discussion of title

message: Isn't cot (a bed for a baby) pronounced as /kɒt/ in British English? /ɑː/ is the sound as in father, /'fɑːðə/. —Sinuhe 11:09, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that's correct. -- Tarquin 16:20, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation of 'cot' 

message: Can't the information on this page be located at, say, the phonology of English instead? After all, it would be strange if we had articles for International Phonetic Alphabet for French, International Phonetic Alphabet for Japanese, International Phonetic Alphabet for Mandarin Chinese, etc; instead, IPA is used for those languages to explain their sounds, either in their phonology sections or in separate phonology articles. Moreover, we will eventually have a phonology of English article, which will completely duplicate the information on this page anyways. So why do we need this article? -- ran (talk) 16:47, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)
That makes sense. -- Derek Ross |  Talk 18:29, 2004 Nov 1 (UTC)
:Certainly an article on English phonology would be interesting, but it would also be of a much larger scope than this article. Besides individual sounds, it would discuss syllable structure, intonation, phrase boundaries, cross-word phonetic effects, coarticulation, and all the other topics covered by phonology. This article's value is in the fact that it is simply a list of the IPA symbols used for transcribing English, nothing more. That in and of itself is useful, but it is also useful for readers who don't know IPA and encounter IPA transcriptions of English. This page is linked to from some of those pages already, and it is in Template:IPA. Nohat 21:21, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPA for English? 

message: I am a North American speaker, and I think I pronounce the diphthong in play with something closer to [EI], rather than [eI]. Should we rename the phoneme to that, or am I just weird? --Sonjaaa 07:27, Jan 13, 2005 (UTC)
:You're just weird. Kidding aside, [eɪ] is a pretty standard transcription used for English for the vowel in play. Given that, the salient acoustic attributes of diphthongs are not the exact starting and stop points of the diphthong, but rather the direction and distance. Therefore, it is likely that in the production of a dipthong like [eɪ] the starting point could vary considerably, and [e] and [ɛ] aren't really very far away from each other in the vowel space. There are, however, solid historical and phonological reasons to stick with [eɪ]. Nohat 01:19, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  /EI/? 

message: I've added the IPA template to most of the IPA transcriptions in this article - in particular all of those that include special characters (coded with &#) which should make the article readable on many more browsers (including the much derided MSIE). rossb 21:56, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPA template 

message: Although there is variation, and the observation does not hold for many from the East coast, the vowels of 'lot' and 'father' are identical for the majority of North Americans: 'father' and 'bother' are a perfect rhyme, and 'bomb' and 'balm' are homophones (provided the latter is pronounced without the "l"). The question is whether that vowel is long or short. British pronunciation dictionaries that include American pronunciation, e.g. Wells' Longman, transcribe it as long. But I think that's wrong for both phonetic and phonological reasons. On the phonetic side, the vowel of "hot" is not significantly longer than the vowel of "hat" in American English, so it doesn't make sense to transcribe the former [hA:t] but the latter [h{t]. (Both are longer than the vowel of "hit", but that's just because low vowels are inherently longer than high vowels.) On the phonological side, long vowels and diphthongs are prohibited before certain clusters in English, including [sp] and [sk]. There are no words in English like [ki:sp] or [tu:sk]. If "wasp" and "mosque" are transcribed [wAsp] and [mAsk], they obey this generalization, but if they are transcribed [wA:sp] and [mA:sk] they seem to be peculiar exceptions. For these reasons I think it's better to treat AmE [A], in both "father" and "lot" words, as a short vowel. --Angr 13:09, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I consider the "a" in "father" as long for several reasons:  1) most dictionaries (including the one you refer to) transcribes it as long, 2) the stress is on the first syllable, making it long, 3) it is apparent to me from pronouncing the word that it is long, 4) I do not notice a difference in length between BrE and AmE.  You say that long vowels and dipthongs are prohibited to appear before certain [consonant?] clusters in English, but "father" probably doesn't fit that case.--Tokek 17:34, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: Usonian dictionaries don't transcribe  as long because the length isn't phonemic. But I speak something pretty close to standard US English, and it's definitely long phonetically. Actually, this vowel tends to be longer than others in most languages that have it, probably because it physically takes longer to drop the tongue that far. But compare father with feather: in feather, the th is ambisyllabic. (That is, it belongs to both syllables, ending one and beginning the other, so it's impossible to decide where to put the syllable break. This is one of the places where English is just plain weird.) You get ambisyllabic consonants after short vowels in English. However, in father the break is clear, fa.ther, implying that the vowel is long: . Of course, it's another question whether you want to bother with that level of phonetic detail. kwami 22:41, 2005 May 16 (UTC)
Yes, low vowels are always longer than high vowels because of the former's greater sonority. But I don't think AmE  is significantly longer than the other low vowel, . I'm sure if you recorded several General American speakers saying Say 'hot' for me and Say 'hat' for me and averaged the durations of hot and hat you'd find no significant difference in duration between them. (On the other hand if you compared several Americans' Say 'hot' for me with several RP-speakers' Say 'heart' for me, you would probably find the latter to be significantly longer, which is why it annoys me so much that British dictionaries attempting to show American pronunciations always transcribe American hot as being the same as RP heart.) As for ambisyllabicity, it's impossible to define phonetically; it can never be more than impressionistic. Psycholinguistic experiments designed to determine whether intervocalic consonants are ambisyllabic in English have given contradictory results. Daniel Kahn claimed that flapping applies only to ambisyllabic /t/, but since flapping applies after long vowels (heater ) and r-colored vowels (party ) as well, he must have made different assumptions about ambisyllabicity than you do. (For my part, I don't feel the syllable break in father is any clearer than it is in feather.) --Angr/comhrá 22:58, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lot and father 

message: In response to a request from a nonlinguist Wikipedian, I've added a quick reference chart in alphabetical order (with special symbols coming after the letters they most closely resemble) where those who encounter IPA transcriptions can look to see what the symbols mean, without knowing what "stop", "fricative", etc. mean. --Angr 21:22, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quick reference chart 

message: With the addition of Australian versions, this article is getting to look a bit cluttered. Would this be the time to drop the SAMPA codings from this article - particularly now that we've got the IPA template, so that even those using Internet Explorer can read the characters? rossb 08:12, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds good to me. Be bold, Ross. --Angr 09:22, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: Indeed, I agree with everything Ross has said.  SAMPA has slowly been removed or replaced by IPA in most other articles so why not here too. – AxSkov 09:55, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: Good. However, I've in put a reference to SAMPA in "See also" so it isn't lost completely. Thincat 09:54, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can we drop SAMPA 

message: My dictionary (Collins) uses a superscript schwa to indicate syllabic n or l, rather than the dot notation. Which is standard? Are both? -- Tarquin 11:04, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The vertical line under the letter is standard IPA. The raised schwa is common in dictionaries because it's easier to typeset (no worrying about getting the little line directly under the l) and easier to see. Some people don't do either, and just transliterate a word like buckle as , which is unambiguous. But the problem with doing that is that you then can't distinguish between the two-syllable and the three-syllable pronunciations of words like settler. --Angr 12:31, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Syllabic n or l