Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Pronunciation/Archive 1

message: *Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation)
*Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (pronunciation)
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See also: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style
What about pronounciation rules? Some pages (Guernica, for example) have a pronunciation guide. In the current format, these usually clutter the first (definition) sentence, and it looks ugly. A common practice in encyclopedias is to put the pronounciation in italic immediately after the word is first mentioned. In our case, we'd have to link it as well, so something like s{mpA:? Any other suggestions? Jeronimo 14:05 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)
Including pronunciation is quite hazardous, I think. Whose pronunciation
do you use? - Khendon 14:16 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)
:I don't find SAMPA the least bit communicative, but people have complained about the handmade phonetics, as in Guernica (which I added).  I prefer the latter, as communicating more information to more people despite the issue raised by Khendon.  Look at the SAMPA and concise SAMPA and see how much you get out of it.  I don't think SAMPA is all that well known, either. Ortolan88
:: The problem with "handmade" phonetics is that there's no standard. Different writers will split different phonemes and transcribe them differently. I agree that SAMPA isn't very well-known. I would much rather have IPA, which is -- all British dictionaries use it. However, AFAIK, we can't display IPA in HTML. :( The advantage of SAMPA is that it is one-to-one correspondance with the IPA -- so when one day HTML can do IPA, it won't be hard to convert it.  -- Tarquin
:::We can display IPA in HTML, using numeric character references.  But, it's A) ugly in source, B) not easy to type, and C) they don't show in all browsers; a lot of people don't have the fonts, or don't have them configured. --Brion 20:24 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)
:: The "handmade phonetics" (as at Guernica, indeed) are ugly and often far from correct. Pronounciation should be denoted in a correct way, and an informal method won't do for that I guess. I don't care which method is used, as long as there's a page where I can find what the signs mean (you have to do that as well with your dictionary, so this shouldn't be a problem). If SAMPA's easy to display, let's go with that. Jeronimo
::Just a whimper here, but at least one native Spanish speaker has edited Guernica several times since I put the "Gayr NEE ka" pronunciation in there, which is much clearer (and therefore more accurate) than "SAMPA [gernika]", which doesn't even show where the stress goes, one of the most important aspects of pronouncing Spanish.  Ortolan88
::: SAMPA does support stress, through a mark placed in front of the stressed syllable: [ger"nika]  Poccil (Talk) 18:15, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
My opinion is that it should depend on what sort of word we're "pronounciating".
If it's a difficult English word, then we should use handmade English "phonetic" spelling, taking care to include exactly the same dialectical ambiguity in our phonetics as in the word itself.
For example, if there's a question about whether a certain /r/ should appear in the word, then we should spell it phonetically with an "r" whose possibility of pronunciation in a given dialect would match.
OTOH, if it's a foreign name, then we should use IPA (or an ASCII equivalent such as SAMPA) to render the phonemes of a standard dialect associated with that person or place.
— Toby 14:04 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)
SAMPA/To Do has a list of pages with pronunciation guides on them, if we ever decide on a solution. Martin
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Here's another new user question: How does one indicate pronunciation in an entry. Is it acceptable/desirable to do so? I haven't find any information about this. The example I have in mind is the Arkansas River and the city of Arkansas City, Kansas. The common pronunciation of Arkansas is like AR-kan-saw, but we Kansans do things a bit differently. The river starts in Colorado with the above mentioned pronunciation, but as it crosses into Kansas, the pronunciation becomes like ar-KAN-zus. The city name is also pronounced the latter way. The river reverts to the "normal" pronunciation when it enters Oklahoma. Thanks for any advice. 
Zeaner 00:03 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)
: Even if that's a somewhat vague answer: I think the criterion should be the relevance of the pronunciation. A Frenchman with only a basic knowledge of English asking a Londoner how to get to Beauchamp Place (near Harrods) will never be able to make himself understood, so it may be important to point that out. Also, in a bookshop it can be quite embarrassing if you have no idea how to pronounce names like Carl Hiaasen or Chuck Palahniuk. I don't know if similar misunderstandings could crop up if a tourist said AR-kan-saw instead of ar-KAN-zus. --KF 00:19 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)
How to represent pronunciation is one of those issues that keeps getting discussed but never resolved. Take a look at Talk:Language and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (under the "Pronunciation" section) for some previous discussions. In your particular case, I think your information is very interesting, so I would include it just as you have here, with a homemade pronunciation guide. If the issue of how to represent pronunciation ever gets sorted out, someone can go back and change it. If not, it communicates what you want to say perfectly well. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:38 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)
:The absolute best way to represent pronunciation, of course, is to record a sound file (preferably encode as Ogg Vorbis) and upload it. --Brion
Is pronunciation of a printed proper name or words on Wiki a real issue? If you're from Oklahoma, you might pronounce "oil": all, or from New Zealand Oy-el. Dictionaries do help. Dialects vary all over the world. BF
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For what it's worth, I've drawn up a proposal for phonetic spellings for English words that is much simpler than SAMPA, which appears now at Wikipedia:English phonetic spelling.  It's there as a draft, mostly, for you to tear apart; I have begun incorporating it into a number of pages about which there was some recent debate at Wikipedia:Pages needing attention.  -- Smerdis of Tlön 22:49, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

message: Could someone point official wikipedia policy to 203.220.171.* (see , ,  , ) and User:Darrien (see ).  (I know I could do this myself, but I thought I'd bring it to the attention of you pronounciation guys!)  There has been constant revert wars on Australia, Melbourne, Sydney for at least the past week.
User:Mark has pre-emptively warned them not to start doing it on Talk:Perth, Australia, and I don't blame him in the slightest! -- Chuq 12:54, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronounciation revert wars 

message: Are there any developers here? One thing that would be nice, (if not to complicated to implement), would be something like this: the SAMPA form, (which is easier to type), could be standardized thoughout Wikipedia, which would be given its own special wiki-linking mechenisim, like //@U//, which the server would then visually serve as /əʊ/. Additionally, an individual editor could choose to add a more commonly understandable phonetic, as in //@U no//. When the user clicked on the link, either:
*a new window would open, or
*a dynamic XHTML layer would pop up,
showing something like this:
   IPA : [əʊ]
 SAMPA : /@U/
 
 IPA symbols used:
   ə    about
   ʊ    put
 
 SAMPA symbols used:
   @    about
   U    put
 
 Common phonetic transliteration:
   no
In other words, PHP, Perl, whatever, could dynamically parse the characters used, and then display just the info the user needs to figure out pronunciation, along with an optional common version that (at least some) native speakers of English would more readily understand. What do people think?
P.S. Um... my example IPA and SAMPA values above were just sort of randomly grabbed off of WP's articles for them. I don't know if they're accurate. :) Please correct them if I'm off.
func(talk) 19:18, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure about the popup with explanations - it's nice, but unnecessary - but think that a tag like <IPA>@U</IPA> rendering as [əʊ] would be fantastic. And this could be done through a Wikimedia extension. --jnothman talk 05:30, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Technology Solution? 

message: Is there an IPA in english chart for editors, that gives the HTML codes we need to use? -- Tarquin 11:08, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chart for editors 

message: Given the strictures concerning different varieties of English, should we be adding "rhymes with" to articles?  Many common words are pronounced in very different ways by different people (there's an amusing true story about regional versions of the B.B.C. news at the time of the Klaus Fuchs affair...). --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 16:24, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "rhymes with"... 

message: I've been quite active in recording pronunciation files for titles of various articles, such as Dag Hammarskjöld, borscht and Joseph Stalin. I'm not sure if Spoken Wikipedia is the right forum to discuss these matters and I think this page should be reserved for transcriptions. I believe we would benefit from having a separate project page to discuss matters concerning pronunciation files. It could contain general guidelines and suggestions for how to record the files, what standard dialects to use and perhaps lists of articles that contain pronunciation files. Would anyone object if I started a separate project page for recording and uploading pronunciation (sound) files at the current redirect Wikipedia:Pronunciation?
Peter Isotalo 15:40, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sound file project page 

message: I'm not a linguist; I just wanted to show the correct pronunciation for "Fodor's" (the publisher) using the recommended IPA. After an hour of reading and trying, I gave up. It's not that I have a problem with (other) pronunciation keys, it's that the articles are written for those already versed in the subject. After I found simplified key, I either misunderstood or it was incomplete (couldn't find the "er" sound). When it came time to write the pronunciation into the article, I was totally lost!
I'm sure IPA isn't that hard, it's just that the existing resources are of no use for casual readers (especially those who don't have an hour to waste!). As it stands, it is useless for the casual reader. This isn't idle criticism; I'm more than willing to help out and take orders if it helps make IPA easier to understand. Just let me know how I can help. :) —Foofy 00:48, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: No help for newbs!

message: I think the situation with Cantonese pronunciation guides using IPA is in very bad shape in Wikipedia because of the recommendation to use brackets for phonemic transcriptions.
In Wikipedia, the convention is for [k], [p], [t] to represent unaspirated sounds when transcribing Cantonese, and [kʰ], [pʰ], [tʰ] to transcribe the corresponding aspirated stops. This looks pretty phonetic to me (esp. if our target readership consists of English speakers), but a random reader would have no way to know that this is phonetic, as elsewhere in Wikipedia, the use of brackets do not imply phonetic transcriptions. In articles where no transcriptions contain aspirated stops, the IPA transcriptions become ambiguous and thus rather meaningless. (This IMHO-bizzare convention is now codified into an article of its own, IPA (free style), which I find extremely misleading.)
I think that, in order to bring some sanity back to the pronunciation guides and to avoid misleading people, it is essential to change the guidelines to use slashes for phonemic transcriptions and brackets only for phonetic transcriptions.—Gniw (Wing) 08:41, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's another vote in favour of slashes. --KJ 01:05, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Brackets vs slashes