Talk:Pronunciation respelling for English

message: This page was created due to continuing comments of readers who found the IPA somewhat difficult & unlike pronunciation guides found in American dictionaries. 
American dictionaries do not use a single set of symbols, but rather each company chooses its own set — although some symbols are consistently choosen for certain sounds (esp. consonants).
If anyone finds another set of symbols not listed here, then feel free to add it to the chart. (but I expect that these will be rather similar to what is already here).
I have also included the symbols commonly used in the Americanist tradition even though these are encountered in linguistics & not really found in dictionary pronunciation guides. peace – ishwar  (speak) 17:06, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Why

message: Some of the characters in this article do not show up correctly using Internet Explorer. The IPA symbols are all OK, but for instance  just shows up as a square. Using the Unicode template doesn't seem to help. --rossb 05:15, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you have a font that supports IPA characters, such as Arial Unicode MS?  Denelson83  05:36, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Dont understand the question. The IPA characters all display correctly based on the fonts specified in the article - although I wonder why the article lists specfic fonts rather than using the IPa template. --rossb 06:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow.  Good point!  Denelson83  07:04, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  hi. i dont use the template because it is inconvenient to fiddle with in tables. you can add it if you want. as far as i can see, the template doesnt fix the problem with displaying the extra long macron. whatever Angr did, it works on this particular version of IE I'm using now. IE just doesnt work well for this stuff, unfortunately. – ishwar  (speak) 19:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  If you subst the IPA template it shows up as . Maybe if you used that in tables it would have the same effect as using  everywhere but be more convenient? --Angr (t·c) 08:24, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

text:  I don't know what the example character is. (Too lazy to go to Linux and check.) But it does not show up in Safari at all, and appears just as a solid grey square. Whatever it is (and perhaps there are more), it does not seem to be displayable on MacOS X. BTW, the article itself shows up correctly and I don't see any solid grey squares there.—Gniw (Wing) 09:02, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

text:  you are speaking of this: <  > ? it shows up for me. i use safari & MacOSX. – ishwar  (speak) 09:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I only see a grey square. Weird. I guess not all Macs are equal. Maybe the OS version? I'm using 10.3; which version are you using?—Gniw (Wing) 09:56, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  i'm using 10.3.9. my standard font under Safari's preferences is Lucida Grande. i am guessing that you dont have a font installed that has this glyph. looking under the Character Palette to see which font has this glyph, i see that i have only 2 fonts that have this glyph, which are Charis SIL and Doulos SIL. Both of these fonts are free and available from SIL International (the Summer Institute of Linguistics, aka the Wycliffe bible translators). so, i guess that most fonts dont have this particular glyph. – ishwar  (speak) 10:15, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Which glyph are we talking about? I have Doulos SIL installed (I'm using Mozilla Firefox on Windows XP) and the page looks fine, but even so in your message above from 09:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

text:      Combining Double Breve html: ͝
I currently am using the following fonts which have this character: Aboriginal Sans/Serif, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Lucida Grande. The Lucida Grande comes with the Mac OS (and i think is unrelated to a Lucida Grande that appears on Windows machines). sorry for the confusion. – ishwar  (speak) 10:48, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can't view some of the characters 

message: I thought that perhaps it could be clearer to split up the vowels chart into one for vowels and one for diphtongs. What do you think? 81.232.72.53 12:04, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Bad idea: diphthongs are vowels.  I suppose you mean monophthongs & diphthongs.  The problem is that there are a number of phonemes which are realised as a monophthong in some dialects & a diphthong others.  Jimp 04:56, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separate charts for vowels and diphtongs 

message: Can someone add World Book Encyclopedia's pronunciation transcription system to the table for me? I would, but don't know how. On the right are two screen pictures of their key.Thank you in advance,Primetime 09:41, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: does world book really have  (??) =  ur? perhaps  is really oor? also does it is use th for both voiced & voiceless? – ishwar  (speak) 02:14, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Put your finger to your throat, and then say the word "thing."  Notice you don't feel any vibration during the "th".  That is a "voiceless" consonant.  Now, with your finger still on your throat, say the word "this."  Your throat will vibrate during the "th" sound.  That vibration is coming from your vocal cords, and the absence or the presence of that vibration determines whether the consonant sound you make is "voiceless" or "voiced" respectively.  Denelson83  03:13, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

text: sorry, i didnt mean to use lingo. i meant: does worldbook use th for both ? i didnt see tour in the table to the right. if worldbook uses the same symbol for 2 different sounds in these 2 cases, then no one could figure out what the pronunciations are (except by using another dictionary or by being a native speaker). oh well! peace – ishwar  (speak) 03:28, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  According to this message that Primetime left on my talk page, World Book does indeed use the same symbol for .  Denelson83  03:42, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  i see. thats too bad. it is my experience that many university students taking intro linguistics classes have trouble distinguishing between these sounds. and here is a reference that doesnt distinguish between them either! – ishwar  (speak) 04:07, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, what can you expect from a reference that wants us to pronounce Muses ? --Angr (tɔk) 06:22, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That is how 'muses' is pronounced. What other alternative is there? —dshep/2010.01.20   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.190.181.32 (talk) 08:54, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

text: This, in my opinion, is an example of the beautiful simplicity of World Book Encyclopedia. Here it provides a quick and dirty approximation of how something should be pronounced. Exact pronunciations are needed mostly by people who are traveling to a country where the term is used and want to blend in, or by language scholars. For me, however, World Book works marvelously. Primetime 09:10, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help 

message: I have copied this page into the article Pronunciation respelling for English and added a column to include the system used in The Concise Oxford Dictionary. −Woodstone
Now redirected this page to the copied and enhanced version at Pronunciation respelling for English. −Woodstone 21:28, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turned into article 

message: Dear colleagues—Is there any reason this page should not be merged into the other one? We would like to reduce the plethora of MoS pages, and merging those that cross over significantly with each other is an obvious way of doing this. There is even an Entering IPA characters section there. Could this page be simply copied across to be a (large) section within that page? Tony (talk) 12:57, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Article had been copied over to mainspace and then restored on WP space, where you found it. The forks are now merged; no point to merging with MOS. kwami (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge with MoS (pronunciation)? 

message: This page had been copied from WP space to mainspace, but then recreated in WP space when the inter-space link was reverted. I've now merged the page histories. The entry just above is the last from the talk page in WP space; starting below is the discussion that started on the mainspace fork after the article was copied over. kwami (talk) 20:09, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Fork merge

message: This page is a copy from Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation)/IPA vs. other pronunciation symbols [note: a page which as of 17 March 2006 redirects to this article], which deserves a place as a normal article. I added a column for the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
I do not know if the "Oxford Dictionary" uses the same system. Technically I have not yet found a way to render an overarching bar or bow over two letters, so I represented the occurrances as two separate bars and bows. I have not found y-bar and y-bow either (alternatives for ī and ǐ). −Woodstone 14:50, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Most British dictionaries, including Oxford ones, use IPA phonemic transcriptions (although their IPA transcription schemes vary from dictionary to dictionary, e.g. for the vowel in cat Oxford uses  while Collins uses ).  The main exception is Chambers, which uses a diacritic-heavy system fairly similar to the American ones.  At the moment the IPA column gives GenAm pronunciations; I'm not sure what the best way is to accommodate British dictionary transcriptions.  One possibility might be a separate table with columns for the different IPA schemes used and for Chambers (and any other non-IPA schemes used in British sources.)--JHJ 20:32, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

text: As British dictionaries mostly use IPA, if that's your view I think you should put it back to making it clear that it's essentially about General American (which it is, even in the examples column - it thinks that horrid and hoarse have the same vowel).--JHJ 21:10, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I've made an edit along those lines.  I was thinking of the OED (except for the 1st edition) and the New Shorter Oxford, which do use IPA.--JHJ 12:52, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [Talk page on mainspace fork]

message: *BOOO No one seems to care about Leaving Out The OED Pronunciations  ( that is so wrong) 
*So If you would Just add What you have and/or know about The OED Pronunciations That would be grate
*then any one who sees anything wrong with The OED part Can just edit it     
--Antiedman 18:18, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Side note to OED

message: This is certainly on topic.  Find at 
It tries to find some common ground on this subject. -Robin  2015-08-13 UTC   — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.92.176 (talk) 23:27, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kleer English Dictionary - A Respelling of English 

message: This is interesting, but slightly outside the topic.  Perhaps foreign respelling schemes for English belong in a separate table or a different article?  —Michael Z. 2006-07-05 14:19 Z
:I agree, this article is about respelling English for English speakers. So indeed the Brazilian variant does not belong here. −Woodstone 15:20, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And yet no one removed it. I'm doing so now, and replacing it with Kenyon and Knott. —Angr 16:47, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Practical English Dictionary for Brazilians 

message: The list of Title Abbreviations omits "PEDB".  Can someone supply the proper expansion?  The only expansion I know of is "Prostate Expression Database", which I assume is not what was intended here. :-)  --128.125.196.55 18:47, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good question. I wanted to ask it myself. --82.139.47.117 16:32, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you hover your cursor over "PEDB" you see that it stands for "Practical English Dictionary for Brazilians". —Angr 16:41, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  PEDB? 

message: The statement that most British dictionaries now use IPA is not documented.  The only ones mentioned are dictionaries designed for non-native speakers! Kdammers 00:53, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unsupported claim 

message: /əu/	This traditional transcription is probably more accurately replaced today by /ou/ in both British and American English
This statement is found in an online commercial teaching site which advertises software. I see no way to establish its reliability. In contrast, most mainstream dictionaries and textbooks today use /əu/, and academical linguist John Wells  acknowledges that when Gimson replaced /oʊ/ with /əʊ/, he was right in terms of phonetics, although an /ɜʊ/ would have been even more accurate, since the first part of the diphthong is practically the same as in "bird" (stated also here). Another author of a phonology of English has adopted the latter transcription . Wells does express his personal opinion that it might have been better if Gimson had kept the oʊ - but not on grounds of it being more accurate; just to keep things simple for foreign learners of both RP and GenAm. This pedagogical consideration can't be interpreted as supporting the present wording that /əu/ is more "accurately" replaced by /ou/.
So I think the source for the present form of the statement is insufficiently reliable and conflicts with more reliable sources. I am modifying it accordingly. --91.148.159.4 15:04, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: /əu/

message: Has anyone thought that IPA and other complex transcription methods are too hard for children to use?
My point is IPA, although exact, can't be used with kids to teach them to read English properly.
Compare with Furigana (small Hiragana letters above or beside the Kanji) usage in Japanese:
大(だい)
学(がく)
Or Pinyin in Chinese:
大(dà)
学(xué)
Also, in Arabic there is a vocalised version to help children and foreigners to master unvocalised Arabic: compare ٌمُدَرِّسَةٌ (fully vocalised) and مدرسة (unvocalised) mudarrisa(tun) "a (female) teacher".
While IPA helps adult foreigners who are able to master IPA, it's not user-friendly enough to use in children's books.
Do we have a consistent system that teachers children to read English? --Atitarev (talk) 23:34, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This page is for discussion of the article, not discussing the subject of the article itself. Your observation is a good one; if you uncover an existing "Pronunciation respelling for English" that is suitable for children, please do insert it into the article with the appropriate citation. Shreevatsa (talk) 01:42, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You have a good point. I should have made myself clear. I am also looking for some more or less standard or, at least the most common respelling methods used in education. If I find one I will add to the article. --Atitarev (talk) 03:01, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  One target audience is not addressed 

message: The article states that "the IPA system is not a respelling system because it uses symbols such as ð and θ which are not used in English spelling".  Now, it may be true that the IPA system is not a respelling system, but this cannot possibly be the reason for not considering it as such, given that almost all the respelling systems mentioned in the article use ə, many use ŋ, and three even use ð (maybe these three aren't respelling systems either, but if so, the article is unclear). 20:56, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Respelling vs IPA

message: Many of the symbols are simply boxes on my screen, and I have no idea how to change that.  Can't we have a more user-friendly page? Kdammers (talk) 13:18, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The boxes are still on my screen.  The chart is pretty useless as is for a lot of people. Kdammers (talk) 05:06, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lots of squares 

message: Do all the dictionaries really fail to distinguish between the vowels in the second syllables of "edible" and "circus"?  In RP they are certainly distinct, so I would expect at least the British ones to do so. Grover cleveland (talk) 05:52, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Weak vowel merger?

message: Examples of keywords from these lexical sets are conspicuously absent from the table.  If anyone has access to the dictionaries, it would be good to add them.  Cheers.  Grover cleveland (talk) 05:56, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added some space for NORTH and FORCE. Grover cleveland (talk) 16:21, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: LOT-NORTH-FORCE?

message: The letter N is not represented in the consonant table. Bob the WikipediaN (talk • contribs)  17:34, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The letter N 

message: In the chart, wasp is given as an example of ɒ, like 'not' or 'pot' - I would pronounce it like 'caught, paw' or ɔː.  Is this just me, or is it dialect dependent?
Hew Johns (talk) 21:20, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: No idea.  The OED has [ˈwɒsp] for RP.  — kwami (talk) 21:33, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  I (southern UK accent) pronounce "wasp" like "toss", with a vowel that is very similar, if not identical to the vowel in "not" or "pot" (I'm not sure if the slight different is simply because of the following consonant). It is definitely very different from the vowel in "caught" or "paw", which I pronounce the same as in "or", "war", "law", "sore". Bluap (talk) 21:52, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  How do you pronounce wasp? 

message: 204.186.34.118 (talk) 20:12, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which systems are used by major newspapers? e.g. New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal 

message: Why do we have /hw/ listed where IPA uses /ʍ/? The sounds are quite distinct. -- Evertype·✆ 13:24, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Same reason as for /r/:  It's more accessible.  Many phonologists analyze the sound as /hw/.  Not sure how the sounds are distinct: they overlap.  — kwami (talk) 21:32, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  ʍ is not hw 

message: This article is meant to show the many variants of "pronunciation respelling" in use. The article English orthography has a similar table to show the many orthographic variants to spell the sounds of English. Please do not mix elements of the latter into this table. One example of pronunciation of the sound represented in the row is sufficient. Only for unfamiliar or non-English sounds several examples may be useful. −Woodstone (talk) 10:16, 5 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Respelling variants, not orthographic variants 

message: Isn't the comparison table wide enough already? Now after Kwami's edits the Wikipedia respelling system is found both in column "WPRK" and column "Wikipedia²". Since they're not identical I'm not sure which one to get rid of. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:26, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, done. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:52, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duplication in table 

message: To avoid any misunderstandings. The inclusion of this new chapter seems to violate most obviously several rules: WP:NOTADVERTISING, WP:FRINGE, WP:WEIGHT, as well as possibly WP:CONFLICT and WP:OR. Moreover, as my personal note, such "innovative" systems existed in the 18h century already, that's nothing but another reinventing the wheel. So the bot was (accidentally) right, there is no place for that in this article.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern respelling system 

message: Just noting here that note number six regarding looptail g verses opentail g no longer references the text of the page properly. There are three instances of the number six on the page, one of which is the note number itself, the other two are in the body of the article near the top, but none are in the table as the text of the note would suggest. I am avoiding changing any pages myself for now in that my iPad’s IP Address seems to show up in a group that causes my edits to  _look like_ I’m some kind of wikihooligan, at least to a certain “Mr. E” man, though I assure you I am no such thing, alas, it has proved more effective to note my desired edits on talk pages rather than to be treated as a criminal and then end up fuming all night at a person I’ve never met. Thus, voila. 
RobbertMacGreighgor (talk) 10:21, 1 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Sixth Note points nowhere.