Template talk:IPAc-en
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The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?
The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.
For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it. Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion. The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.
Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{IPA-all}} or {{IPA-endia}}. The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.
The English rhotic is pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic. |
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Missing HTML class "IPA-label"
I was just setting up some custom CSS to make translations and such easier to read when I noticed this template doesn't add the class "IPA-label" to the label it generates, unlike the other IPA templates. Is that intentional, or should it be added?
For example:
{{IPA-fr|fubaʁ}}
results in:
<span class="IPA-label IPA-label-small">French pronunciation:</span> ...
which, for reference, is rendered as:
French pronunciation: [fubaʁ]
While for this template:
{{IPAc-en|lang|f|u|b|a:r}}
results in:
<small>English: </small>...
rendered as:
English: /fubɑːr/
— W.andrea (talk) 01:53, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
Template-protected edit request on 24 April 2024
 | This edit request to Module:IPAc-en has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
I talked about this above. Basically, this change is to bring the markup inline with Template:IPA.
In Module:IPAc-en, change
| − | + | <span class="IPA-label IPA-label-small">%s</span> |
(Note: The template documentation doesn't need to be updated since it doesn't mention this behaviour.)
By the way, Template:IPA also has a small parameter that maybe this template should implement as well, but that's beside the point.
— W.andrea (talk) 20:10, 24 April 2024 (UTC)
- That alone won't be enough because without Module:IPA/styles.css
IPA-label-smalldoesn't work.
Done. Nardog (talk) 20:35, 24 April 2024 (UTC) - Ideally this module should just call the IPA module instead of handling the label, audio, etc. on its own. Nardog (talk) 20:42, 24 April 2024 (UTC)
What's with the double slashes?
I've noticed that IPA is now wrapped in double slashes: ⫽
Is this a new standard? A coding change perhaps? Not a complaint, just genuinely curious what the reason is.
Editor510 drop us a line, mate 17:51, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
- I just noticed this too and, as mentioned in the edit summary Special:Diff/1233122572, some people think it makes it clearer that this is supposed to be a diaphonemic rather than phonemic transcription. It does, but only to those who already know about it. One problem I personally have with this change is that it makes things ugly because the double solidus usually ends up coming from some poorly designed fallback font on most systems. (No, it doesn't display in Gentium Plus for most people.) And I don't believe it's going to serve its intended purpose. Attentive reader will notice it's something different, but will have to check it in Help:IPA/English anyway because double slashes are just as ambiguous as single slashes (it surely must be a morphophonemic transcription, right?). But people who read Help (and MOS) pages and people who argue about which dialect to use are not the same people in the first place. – MwGamera (talk) 18:38, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
- I object to these changes too, and the way they've been implemented. Even Wikipedia's own article implies that ⫽⫽ is a fringe method of displaying IPA, being less common than the "less common conventions" in IPA – see International Phonetic Alphabet#Brackets and transcription delimiters. For aesthetic reasons, the ⫽⫽ takes much more than double the space of // in an article's 1st sentence, where brevity is important, and that's if the unusual characters render properly. They are non-ASCII?
- What discussion there was ended 15 months ago and can't be revived. They seem to be unwise changes. If many others have doubts I'd favour reverting for now.
- 1RightSider (talk) 22:04, 7 July 2024 (UTC)- Where did this discussion take place? Agree that it should be reverted. And where was the change actually made? There are no recent changes in the template's history. --Un assiolo (talk) 00:22, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
Template-protected edit request on 8 July 2024
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Revert edit by Nardog. The edit appears to have been made suddenly and without consensus. Users are confused, as English IPA everywhere on Wikipedia now displays differently with nonstandard IPA notation, using non-ASCII double slash symbols rather than the single slash standard which has been used on Wikipedia forever.
Change nonstandard, non-ASCII double slashes (⫽) back to standard IPA single slashes (/). 174.115.78.157 (talk) 04:50, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
- To editor Nardog: to let you know of this request and to get your take. No action taken thus far. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 05:44, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
- I saw this notation on one article and was surprised, as I had never encountered it before, even as someone with some knowledge of IPA. I figured it was a fluke with one article. Looking at more and more articles, I realized that the English IPA template (technically module) must have been changed. I won't claim to be an expert on phonetics so maybe there's some justification for the double slashes, but it's quite a shock as a reader. Skimming the article on diaphonemes (which seems to be related) left me scratching my head.
- This may be a small edit, but it is to an extremely visible template. The edit summary pointed to a discussion from April 2023 involving only a handful of users: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Pronunciation/Archive 11 § Distinction between varieties of English. I think there probably should have been a wider discussion first, but now that the change has been made, I guess more people will be drawn to comment. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 06:44, 8 July 2024 (UTC)