Talk:Roundedness

message: I'd really like to see a source on this endolabial vs. exolabial rounding.  72.130.89.63 (talk) 04:12, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Endo- vs. exo-labial

message: kwami asked me for my help about identifying the three vowels in the picture. From the top, they look like  respectively. The latter could be , but I'm not too sure about that.
Peter Isotalo 12:40, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Peter. It would appear then that the endo- and exo- got reversed, as I suspected. We should then relabel the pic, perhaps with 'compressed' vs. 'protruded'. kwami (talk) 20:10, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Answering request 

message: The article only lists Vietnamese as a language for which roundedness is a distinguishing characteristic for back vowels.  But isn't it one for English?  24.136.232.57 (talk) 04:51, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Not as clearly. RP, for example, uses rounding to distinguish /ʌ/ from /ɔ/ and /ɒ/ from /ɑ/, but there is also a length distinction (the second vowel in each of those pairs being longer than the first). In General American, on the other hand, /ʌ/ is much farther forward than /ɔ/ (and some varieties of American English don't have /ɔ/ at all), and /ɒ/ and /ɑ/ have merged. +Angr 06:51, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Roundedness as distinguishing for back vowels in English 

message: I've been speaking English my whole life, and I don't think I've ever used vowel rounding in it. I can't really figure out the descriptions though. If some dialects use vowel rounding, then either it's an important split or its loss is an important merger. 96.231.17.131 (talk) 16:11, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  What dialects of English use vowel rounding? 

message: Whenever I encounter an article referencing pronunciation on Wikipedia I end up on an endlessly recursive quest trying to understand the arcane explanations and descriptions, that are always defined in terms I do not understand which in turn are explained in the same obscure fashion. No-where, it seems, on the whole of Wikipedia is an accessible explanation of the basic principles and framework for understanding linguistics, phonetics and pronunciation that does not assume prior familiarity with the intimate details of the subject.
I don't struggle as much to understand articles on such abstractions as relativity, mathematics, art, music or even theology. It seems there are those who use language and those who study it, and the former must be kept from understanding why and how they say what they say so that the latter can study them.
In this article I need to understand labialisation, front vowels, back vowels and how to determine the height of a vowel just to understand the first introductory paragraph. And this is one of the less opaque articles on phonetics.
Quite simply, in my view linguistic articles on Wikipedia are consistently the most poorly explained; they are written as if for a phonetic textbook, not an encyclopaedia.
PLEASE! Can someone who does understand all this gibberish (and to me it is gibberish until I can find explanations that use plain English rather than being self-referential) tackle this and other pages with a linguistic bent and ensure that each one defines its core material in a way that doesn't need further research to understand it. 23:35, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is this and every other article on phonetics on Wikipedia written to confuse?