This page is a collected archive of pronunciation-related discussions from the various community fora (Beer Parlour, Information Desk, Grease Pit, Tea Room) and is arranged chronologically.

See also: Wiktionary:Grease pit/Problems displaying IPA + Classes for support of Unicode ranges

copied from Wiktionary talk:IPA Characters

Someone has transcribed English digraph ng by the (retroflex nasal) IPA symbol. It should be (velar nasal) instead. Vincent 01:25, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Since you are the one who knows where this is happening feel free to change it, and discuss it with the offender, who probably doesn't know the difference. Eclecticology 07:14, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

A linguistics question that you may have to read aloud: I've seen the -nk phonetic as in "ink" transcribed as /ŋk/. For the -ng phonetic as in "-ing", what is the sound that sometimes follows /ŋ/? I don't know how to illustrate it. Perhaps it is most notable in "dang it" because of the ability to insert various strengths of /g/ in that case. In a not-so-hick pronunciation though, and in other vowel-linked combinations like "sing a song about..." there's still a pop after /ŋ/. It'll probably be pretty hard to hear because it's something I never noticed until I came to Taiwan, where a similar sound in Chinese is used without a pop at the end of syllables. But I'm pretty sure it's there, and I'm wondering if maybe it's the velar approximant /ɰ/, even though it's supposedly unused in English. Davilla 06:54, 10 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

/ŋk/ is standard for "-nk-". For "-ng-" there are two possibilities: "singer" contains /ŋ/ only whereas "finger" contains /ŋg/. There are some dialects where "-ng-" is always pronounced as /nŋ/. I had a friend with British/Australian upbringing who had this pronunciation and was not aware of it until I pointed it out to him. I don't know which part of English he and his parents were from. In cases such as this it's only relevant for narrow transcriptions - which are not the domain of dictionaries because there are so many variants. Dictionaries instead use broad transcriptions from which people familiar with certain dialects can usually derive those particular pronunciations. You would have to consult a linguist familiar with IPA for a narrow transcription of the particular pronunciation you are referring to. — Hippietrail 19:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

Yes, for some words even the AHD shows the equivalent of /ŋg/ as in "finger". What I'm talking about is the other possibility, as in "singer" or the various examples I cited above, as it applies to a broad transcription, that is, all accents, although the question is certainly still terrain for a linguist. In passing from /ŋ/ to /ɝ/ or another vowel, there is an intermediate sound, a pop, that isn't present when passing from /ŋ/ to a consonant sound such as /k/. This is consistent with the dropping of final consonants in English if the proper transcription of -ng were in fact /ŋɰ/ or something similar. It's also consistent with the inability of Chinese to end speech with a consonant sound, since the pop is not present in the pronunciation of ㄤ or ㄥ at the end of a word. A result of this is that my students do not pronounce "pong" the same way I do, even though all of the sounds in /pʰɑŋ/ and shared between Chinese and English. Davilla 21:53, 10 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:IPA Characters

I was wondering exactly how the IPA characters should be represented in the pronunciation. I copied the chars out of the incomplete quick-reference chart, but that doesn't tell me exactly what they are. The cross-reference for ɪ says "Iota", so I think you're simply using greek characters, but Unicode has a special range for IPA and some special characters don't have isomorphs anywhere else.

In checking again to get things straight for this question, I answered the first part of this myself: by pasting the browser's text into Unipad, I see that the ɪ is in fact encoded as U+026A, the IPA version.

So, how many people use the proper ˈ character (U+2C8) rather than ' (appostrophe)?

How does the browser manage to display them? Are the IPA characters in the basic Windows fonts now, or is the browser smart enough now to display them anyway? I wonder, because they are bolder than the regular letters, rather than matching what's around them exactly.

—Długosz 21:43, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"Iota" is the name for the /ɪ/ symbol of IPA, but it is not the same symbol as the Greek letter "iota" ("Ι", "ι"). They just happen to have the same name, that is all.

How many people use the proper IPA stress mark? Well, I always do, and it is listed in the IPA characters available from the menu at the bottom of the page you are editing, but I'm sure lots of people don't realise this is what should be used. I sometimes see a colon used in IPA instead of the length mark ("ː").

I don't know whether it is the browser or the operating system that provides these. The IPA characters are part of Unicode, but not all browsers in all operating systems can display them. Firefox in Windows has no problem, but in Linux, I get the wrong characters for these symbols (maybe they are just not there in my Linux installation).

Incidentally, this is the principal reason for giving pronunciations in SAMPA, which uses ASCII characters from 33 to 127, which, as well as being easily entered using the keyboard, should be displayed correctly on any computer. — Paul G 16:38, 2 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:IPA Characters

I am familiar with a version of IPA from a decade or so ago. Here, the sound for "I"/"eye" is transcribed /aɪ/ (aI (?) in SAMPA). However, in the latest Shorter Oxford English Dictionary I think it was, this was updated to /ʌɪ/ (VI (?) in SAMPA). There were other changes to some other vowels as well. I've noticed that some people here use /ɔʊ/ for "oh"/"owe" while the IPA I am familiar with is /əʊ/. This might be another of the "updated" vowels that the SOED is using. No doubt the "current" version of IPA is documented somewhere on the Web. What standard should we be using here? -- Paul G 16:47, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I went to the trouble of (starting to) document the way I use it, at WEAE. I've used əʊ for "low", "locate" as a narrow transcription, as it tends to get dipthong'ed in American. But I'm using /o/ for the "generic" (broad in sound but detailed in enunciation) transcriptions here. A while back, I corresponded with other IPA users and decided to stick with /aɪ/ as the symbol even though it does NOT sound like that, here and now. It's what people expect, and the actual vowel sound will differ (consistantly) by region and period. Personally, I think it's more like /ʌi/ than /ʌɪ/, and with enough extra markings I could convey the exact Texas drawl or New Yolk variation. I also say /əʊ/ or /ʌʊ/.

So what is the "current" version: same as it always was. Record the detailed exact accent used, or pick a set of symbols for prototype sounds and document the range of sounds that make no difference in meaning. In the latter kind of transcription, it can't match the canonocal sounds, or you'd need a different dictionary for each major market!

— Długosz

The IPA is the same as it has always been. What you are seeing is changes in the standard pronunciations. —Muke Tever 16:59, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I agree with this, especially with vowels. Any phonetic transcription, whether IPA, SAMPA or something completely different is never better than approximate. That partly explains why English is spoken in different places with different accents. I tend to avoid pronunciation issues unless its there is a significant difference between two pronunciations such as in distinguishing between the verb and noun forms for "record". Eclecticology 20:52, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

SAMPA and the phonetic system of any dictionary like AHD are approximate because of regional variations. IPA can be pretty damn precise. What's approximate is the way we're using it. Davilla 05:13, 10 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

If possible, we should be consistent and use either /aɪ/ or /ʌɪ/. Which one, I don't think matters (although Oxford is likely to reflect the most up-to-date thinking on standard British pronunciation). I don't think I'd know the difference unless (possibly) I heard them side by side. I might tend to favour /aɪ/ because I think it's more obvious how to pronounce it. Amatlexico 21:51, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I've been using Wikipedia as a reference: w:SAMPA chart for English gives examples of the usual English phonemes; w:SAMPA chart maps between SAMPA and IPA. Ortonmc 22:10, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

copied from Wiktionary talk:IPA Characters

I've just been editing the entry for chercher and have come to wonder what the standard symbol is to use for the French uvular "r" in IPA. Is it /ʀ/ or /ʁ/? I seem to recall it is the former, but I don't have a French dictionary to hand to verify this.

Wikipedia says that /ʀ/ is the Parisian pronunciation (a trill) while /ʁ/ is a fricative, used by most of the rest of France. I tend to use a fricative, mainly because it's easier to pronounce, I expect. Given that /ʀ/ is Parisian, I suppose that makes it the standard.

Que disent nos contributeurs francophones?

— Paul G 10:26, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

/ʁ/ is the pronunciation that French SAMPA /R/ implies; X-SAMPA /R/, which is equal to /ʁ/, specifically uses French roi as its example. —Muke Tever 16:25, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'll check my Collins French-English dictionary when I remember to, and report back. I'm fairly sure that my monolingual French dictionary uses /r/ (presumably because it does not need to distinguish between this variety of "r" and any other). — Paul G 17:22, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have seen several symbols used by several dictionaries. In fact I see the same situation with most languages. I think we should take the monolingual dictionary approach. That way we'll be able to use the same pronunciation section on every dictionary in the future when content-sharing will be possible. A bulky phonetics textbooks I read months ago talked about the concept of "Romanicness". The principle is to always choose the symbols which most resemble those in the Roman alphabet. Only choose more exotic ones when there is a need to distinguish. Narrow transcriptions will of course use more exotic IPA symbols. This is the same reason we should always use "r" in English and not the exotic retroflex and upside-down variants that some contributors were using some months ago. — Hippietrail 01:08, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

In French, the "r" is pronounced , everywhere, especially in Paris. In Old French, it was pronounced (trilled). I don't think the phonem is used in any French dialect.

I think it's really a bad idea to use a monolingual approach since Wiktionary is multilingual. In the French Wiktionary, we use the specific phonem everywhere, despite it's not easy to write it. If you take a monolingual approach, with phonologic transcription (only making distinction between different pronunciations of the letter in one specific point of view, for example a language) instead of phonetic transcription, it will be useless for non-English users : they won't know the "r" pronunciation in English isn't the same as in French, etc. SergeBibauw 02:39, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Just remember, most translating dictionaries only have to deal with two languages so they only have to come up with a set of symbols that can handle the commonalities and differences between those. They then do use only broad transcriptions, not the narrow transcriptions which would be a nightmare and has been discussed before. Trying to come up with a set of symbols which works for all languages without being constantly argued over would be nigh on impossible. — Hippietrail 04:58, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

But that is exactly what IPA is intended to do – it is the International Phonetic Alphabet, after all. The reason it works for all languages is that it represents articulations of the organs of speech. So /ʁ/ stands for a uvular fricative rather than the less precise and somewhat subjective "r sound as it is spoken in France". Incidentally, my bilingual dictionary uses /ʀ/, which seems to contradict what SergeBibauw says. This dictionary is, however, the 1978 edition, and IPA has been updated since then. — Paul G 16:44, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Even some bilingual Fr-En dictionaries use for both the English and French 'r' (e.g. Harrap's), while Collins uses for French (which isn't strictly speaking the most correct symbol). Whatever choice we make with 'r's, Hippietrail is quite right about the IPA. It would actually be unwise for us to attempt to use the IPA to represent the precise pronunciation of French - for reasons I'll come on to in a moment. There is no phonemic difference between and in either language.

Note that English speakers aspirate initial 'p' and 'b', particularly when they precede a vowel; French speakers don't. Similarly, English speakers have an alveolar articulation of 't', 'd' and usually 'n', while French speakers have a dental articulation. To be clear, there are two ways of transcribing. One is called phonetic or narrow transcription - this is detailed. The other is called phonemic or broad transcription. A broad transcription of "pen" is what is found in dictionaries, regardless of whether they are monolingual or bilingual: rather than the more accurate (narrow) transcription of /p^hε~n/. I assume we won't attempt narrow transcription. Technically, narrow transcriptions should be within / / and broad ones within , according to David Crystal, but he allows that "in the broadest possible sense", a broad transcription can be treated as a narrow one. So, there is more than one way to write the same thing in the IPA. Like hippietrail I do seem to remember reading somewhere, though I can't say where, about the principle of "romanicity", meaning that linguists sometimes choose to use a less precise approximation (in terms of transcription) because the symbol is more familiar and there is no phonemic distinction between the sounds within the language. --Richard 18:43, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2004

The Spanish for "balcony" is balcón, which is pronounced in IPA transcription, or approximately "bahl-KAWN." --Gelu Ignisque

copied from Wiktionary talk:Representing pronunciation

I have begun adding AHD (American Heritage Dictionary) pronunciations as given by dictionary.com - mainly because most US dictionaries don't use IPA.

• AHD pronunciation isn't as precise as IPA so I think it should be used only for American pronunciations.

Can AHD be freely used? We are not supposed to copy content from dictionaries. If a dictionary has the pronunciation in AHD, it is not forbidden to convert it to IPA yourself.Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've just been using "AHD" because I couldn't find a better term. After doing more research I've learned that American dictionaries each roll their own pronunciation scheme although most have much in common and Unicode has all the necessary characters though I can't find a font yet which includes the character to distinguish the "oo" in "foot" from that in "hoot". I doubt that it's possible to copyright a pronunciation scheme though the pronunciation guide page in a dictionary is surely copyrighted and the entries, including pronunciations would also be protected. I bet this actually would coverting them from one representation to another. Then again, the pronunciations of words themselves are in the public domain...

I do think it's worth having an "American Dictionary" field since Americans are not accustomed to IPA or sampa from that matter. It may be worth making our own version and giving it a different name however. You can read about the various dictionaries' versions here: http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxhowtor.html Hippietrail 12:36, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• IPA is designed to be able to represent all pronunciations so it can be used for US as well as British pronunciations.

And the pronunciations of most any other language. That's why it would be a good idea to standardize on IPA, I think.Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• SAMPA is designed to be a 1:1 mapping of IPA onto ASCII so the IPA and SAMPA lines should match exactly.

• Many functional words such as "the", "was", "than", have a stressed and an unstressed pronunciation.

• Many words have pronunciation variants even in the same part of speech.

I think we have no choice but to add them all and comment when or where they are used.Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Actually my question isn't about whether to add them but how to add them. Should we have transcription types across and pronunciation variations down? What happens when there are more than two kinds of differences? Currently we have one line for IPA and one for SAMPA but when there are different pronunciations various articles do various things. We need one standard way. Take a look at chalk right now for instance. Hippietrail 12:36, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• Dictionaries don't always agree on which variants are valid or which order to arrange them in.

We can sail our own course.Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• Dictionaries don't agree on how to use IPA. For instance, OED uses ɛ, /E/ where other British dictionaries use e, /e/.

e is what you hear in sail, gate, say. veel (nl), été (fr)

ɛ is what you hear in sel, get, letter, sé (es), vet (nl), lettre (fr)

Dictionaries that don't use them this way are plain wrong. Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's really not so black and white. Can you give me a reference where I can read why my Larousse dictionary is plain wrong. I can dig up some references on how complex the issue really is if you like. I've been going through the pronunciation guides in all the major dictionaries in my collection and my local library and I can assure you there is much variation - and for good reason. Hippietrail 12:36, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

• Some IPA dictionaries use a superscript r to show "linking r" whereas I have been using (r). Using the superscript looks better but spoils being able to cut and paste from Wiktionary's IPA.

Actually I've found IPA ʴ /ʴ/ which is a superscript inverted r designed to show rhoticity. This would be the best candidate. My Larouuse shows "leather" as , but we could show , .Hippietrail 12:36, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Don't forget /lɛ.ðɚ/ ? That is, there is a symbol specifically for the "er" sound.

Well "ɚ" etc are designed to to show specifically rhotacised vowels. In English this is specific to certain dialects so perfect for transcribing American pronunciation but not for British or Australian or for trying to find a unifying transcription. It certainly shouldn't be used for "connecting r". Hippietrail 04:40, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

• Some dictionaries use a schwa in "syllabic" endings such as in "simple" /sImp@l/, some do not: /sImpl/. The same (equivalent) may be true for American dictionaries.

I hear the @, so I believe it makes sense to write it. Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You hear it, many trained linguists do not. To my ears as a native speaker it's clearly unclear. IPA uses a small vertical line below the letter to show that it is syllabic. In Unicode it is ̩ /o̩/ and SAMPA uses /=/ before the syllabic letter. My Larousse and Collins (European) dictionaries on my desk all give "simple" as , , using a syllabic with no diacritic but other larger dictionaries I've consulted give , . Dictionary.com (American) doesn't use IPA but does insert an explicit schwa. Hippietrail 12:36, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Another system, which I think makes a lot of sense, is to include the @ but raise it (write it as a superscript). I don't think it makes sense to miss out the schwa entirely because the "pl" sound as the end of "simple" is so different to that at the start of "plough". By contrast, "pl" (with optional schwa at the end rather than in the middle) would be a good transcription of how "simple" is pronounced in French. Amatlexico 21:04, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

To differentiate the French and American differences in pronunciation of syllabic consonants it would make sense to use /5=/ for the American pronunciation, and /l=/ for the French. (Sorry, I can't see the IPA.) In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this standard is already applied.

I assure you that /^@l/ (or rather /^@5/) is not the same! As an example, consider the last syllable of "mountain", which can be pronounced as either /@n/ (moun-tun) or /n=/ (moun-tn). The same can't be done for "simple", just try saying it! (sim-pul) Davilla

Northern English, Scots etc. has (sim-pul). I tried saying it and it was simple :-) We don't have the "dark L" sound of "pull", "well", "simple", etc. so much so that children often end up pronouncing "pull" as ("pul-l@"). As the dark L is dialectal and doesn't carry meaning, it possibly isn't worth the effort of distinguishing this from the clear form. Cf. comments at end of teaching pronunciation of dark L.

• Should we have a line for each pronunciation/regional/stressed variation and put AHD/IPA/SAMPA together on that line?

• Should we have a line for each of AHD/IPA/SAMPA and put region/stressed/unstressed together on that line?

• Is there another way to arrange them?

we could use a table, but it's not practical to edit those. So we should try to avoid it.Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hippietrail 01:45, 28 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Sorry for writing through your text Polyglot 22:50, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

copied from Wiktionary talk:Representing pronunciation

All dictionaries that I know of use /tr/ in the phonetical spelling of words such as "trash", "trail", and "true". I believe the actual pronunciation is with a ch sound or something similar. I'm wondering if the distinction in my ears might be a result of a slight accustomization to the Mandarin spoken around me. In other words, am I hearing something now that most English speakers cannot hear, or that they simply have not noticed? For most of these words, I find it particularly difficult and awkward to say them without turning the stop into an affricate. At least I think that's what's happening, as I've never studied linguistics formally. Can anyone confirm, deny, or otherwise shed light on this? Davilla 06:52, 22 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

It appears that what you're hearing is the incidental fricative between "t" and Americanized "r". If you wanted to document every single phase of the changing sound, it could be transcribed as "t-th-sh-ch-r", but that would be ridiculous :-) With trilled "r", there is no fricative: just "t" then "r". rfsmit

Putting the humor aside, sh=/ʃ/ is related to ch=/tʃ/ (and neither th sound is present). Really I'm asking if "trash" should really be /tʃræʃ/ instead of /træʃ/. Davilla 04:38, 10 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

The pronunciation /tʃræʃ/ is considered to be incorrect (and even illiterate) in standard English. Careful speakers still say /træʃ/. However, /tʃræʃ/ is standard in Cockney and some other accents and dialects.

It is possible that in the future, /tʃr/ will become the standard pronunciation of "tr", as has happened with with other combinations of sounds. For example, the pronunciation of "suit" as /sjuːt/ ("syoot") is now considered old-fashioned or "upper-class" in UK English, with most speakers using /suːt/ instead. Some UK speakers pronounce "new" as /nuː/ ("noo"), as is standard in the US, rather than /njuː/. The pronunciation without the /j/ is currently non-standard in Received Pronunciation, but the great influence of US English on UK English means that the /j/ following a consonant might one day be lost in UK English.

Another example of this sort of change is the pronunciation of "wh". The Received Pronunciation for this is /ʍ/ (an unvoiced /w/, pronounced like "w" without moving the vocal cords), sometimes transcribed as /hw/. This is still standard in Scottish English, but is now uncommon among most English speakers in England, who replace it with /w/. Thus "which" was once commonly pronounced /ʍɪtʃ/ but is now usually pronounced /wɪtʃ/, making it a homophone of "witch". — Paul G 18:45, 13 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

Sounds believable—in fact I've seen some of this before—although I think the /ʃ/ in /tʃr/ can often be weak, and usually weaker than "ch". What's difficult is eliminating it altogether. What would be more descriptive are audio files. In particular I'd like to hear what you think /tr/ sounds like... if it's possible to find someone who still uses that pronunciation without being conscious of it. Davilla 03:19, 14 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

"Correct", "incorrect", and "careful" has nothing to do with it. As rfsmit points out, a very brief fricative is practically unavoidable between a /t/ (not a regular , but one whose place of articulation has changed to match the following ) and an /r/. The resulting or is usually shorter than the fricative in /tʃ/, as Davilla notes, but it's also quite unlike the standard release burst and aspiration you'd get between a /t/ and a vowel. Some pre-school children spontaneously classify the whole ambiguous sequence as /tr/, others spontaneously classify it as /tʃr/, most probably don't bother classifying it at all until their grade school teachers start beating the /tr/ classification into their heads as part of teaching reading. But /tr/ is no more physically accurate than /tʃr/ (nor even more psychologically accurate for many people).

I'm not sure exactly what Paul G is picking up on in Cockney English -- it's quite probable that Cockney has an even longer fricative period here than other dialects of English. I've never myself noticed anything striking about /tr/ clusters in the times I've listened to Cockney speakers, but I've hardly been conditioned to pick up on every subtle difference between British accents.

Practically, for Wiktionary transcriptions, we should keep using /tr/, since 99% of speakers have had that classification beaten into their heads as children. /tʃr/ would just confuse them, and there's zero chance of getting everyone to use it consistently. But, hey, Davilla, don't think of your /tʃr/ intuitions as substandard English. Think of them as having excellent ears and the strength of character to resist years of indoctrination. :-) Keffy 04:07, 14 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

Not my ears, actually. Those of my Chinese students. And yes, I did correct them, initially. Davilla 14:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2005

This came up on an astronomy forum. You can see my comments at http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=394326#394326 .

The informal pronunciation given in Wikipedia doesn't match the that given by dictionaries, and doesn't follow what the "proper" pronunciation ought to be.

So, what should it be? I think astronomers have not said it much until last week, so an incorrect pronunciation is just the guess of who's reading the paper rather than a long-established practice.

—John

Well, if you, like me, believe firmly in etymology -- which is not always the best guide to modern use -- in the original Greek (and subsequent Latin) it's a long I, with the rest of the vowels short; as Latinate stress is usually given to borrowed Greek words, one would expect overall the best pronunciation to be /aɪˈæpɪtəs/ (or "eye-APP-it-us", for the IPA-impaired). I don't know what current or former practice of the word is though. —Muke Tever 18:22, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

—Muke Tever 18:25, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

How do you insert IPA symbols into a wiki? --Gelu Ignisque

Er, same way as you insert any Unicode characters into a document. The method will vary widely with the kind of operating system your computer is using. If you mean me, personally, I have a (slightly incomplete) IPA keyboard installed, which I supplement with judicious use of Windows Character Map. —Muke Tever 16:17, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2005

While writing the pronunciation for mandible, I came across a problem: I can't remember the notation for (or our policy on) a sonorant consonant (a consonant acting as a vowel/forming a syllable). I've used a schwa (ə) for the sound for the time being, but I'm not happy with it. Any help? --Wytukaze 11:58, 8 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

A syllabic consonant (which doesn't need to be a sonorant, though it usually is) is notated in IPA by a line underneath; U+0329, as, . In X-SAMPA (and SAMPA for English) it is the equals sign, as, . In "dictionary" notation it's either or just , depending on the dictionary. —Muke Tever 17:19, 8 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2005

I never knew why we have only a category for heteronyms and list homophones, quite for certain. From the definitions provided here on Wiktionary (conferring with Wikipedia) I came up with the little truth table that is now on heteronym, homonym, homograph and homophone.

Given the definitions we have for these terms, I'm not convinced that Category:English heteronyms is the correct category...or that that should be a sub category of Category:English homonyms? Would it be helpful to also break out Category:English homographs and Category:English homophones? Did I get the names right? Did I spell them right for once? Nitpickers, please nitpick these to correction!

--Connel MacKenzie 06:22, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

In the UK, the -shire ending for names of UK counties is pronounced "shuh" (shə, /ʃə/, /S@/). Is the correct US pronunciation of these really "shyr" (shīr, /ʃaɪr/, /SaIr/, to rhyme with "fire"), or is that pronunciation only used by Americans who are unaware of the "shuh" pronunciation? (This is not to denounce Americans as ignorant - I'm just looking for the correct US pronunciation.) See, for example, the pronunciation I've added to Gloucestershire. — Paul G 11:53, 26 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

Well, I'm a Swede and, while we learn in school to pronounce words the British way, I thought /ʃaɪr/ was the normal prounciation even in British English. /ʃə/ sounds snobbish to me, but perhaps I have seen too many American movies or that I just wasn't paying attention while in school. --Patrik Stridvall 13:23, 26 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

There's something peculiar about the idea of a "correct" American pronunciation. The state of New Hampshire is not usually pronounced to rhyme with "fire". Even in Britain I would expect that there could be some variation in how the final "r" is handled. This seems to justify my usual avoidance of pronunciation issues. Eclecticology 17:13, 26 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

The Scots always use 'shire' (=fire) almost rolling the r. Local accent/dialect plays a big part in how the ending is used in England and Wales. In the northeast of England 'shah' is shortened to 'sha' (with a hard 'a'). NW.

The RP is definitely "shuh", and so this is the pronunciation given in the entry. This applies to the pronunciation of "New Hampshire" as well. This pronunciation is not considered snobbish in the UK (at least, not in England). The word "shire" by itself rhymes with "fire", even when used to mean "those counties ending in -shire". — Paul G 18:18, 30 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

What is a "hard a"? — Paul G 18:18, 30 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

I've always said Gloucestershire like "fire" and don't recall hearing the "shuh" for any name besides New Hampshire. --Connel MacKenzie T C 07:28, 28 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

You were mistaken. It is Glosster-shuh, Har-ford-shuh, Oxford-shuh, Came-bridge-shuh, etc. But as stated, many Scots pronounce Scottish counties -shyr. Kittybrewster 00:00, 5 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

Is the IPA on that proper? It has a ♪ symbol, and a smiley. Looks like a joke to me.

The IPA, which is included, as IPA should be, between // slashes, is (though I probably incline more to pronouncing it with /ɑ/ rather than /ə/). The music note and the smiley are a comment added to the side, and are probably safely removable. —Muke Tever 17:55, 30 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

Pronunciation fixed and completed. — Paul G 18:28, 30 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

This one has one etymology but two different pronunciations for adjective and verb. I've formatted it with ===pron 1=== and ===pron 2===, or should I put the pronunciations after the PoS? — Vildricianus 14:20, 7 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

There is a single pronunciation section for such words (which are known as heteronyms). See absent for the format, and Category:English_heteronyms for a list of words marked as heteronyms in Wiktionary. — 193.203.81.129 16:00, 7 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

Hmm, I think my format of absent was more accurate, as it listed the pronunciations where they belonged, under the various etymology headers. — Vildricianus 16:42, 7 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

In the case of multiple etymologies, pronunciation sections are supposed to be subordinate to the etymology sections...as are all headings (except ==Language==, which the multiple etymologies are subordinate to.)

==Language==

===Etym 1===

====all other headers at this level====

===Etym 2===

etc.

I don't like that format myself, but that is what is done here. --Connel MacKenzie T C 21:19, 7 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

The issue is that there's only one etymology. — Vildricianus 21:27, 7 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

Ah. In that case, I'd prefer a single ===Pronunciation=== section with each pronunciation broken out (similar to the way translations are broken out) as Adjective then Verb. --Connel MacKenzie T C 16:23, 8 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

• I would do the same with the Pron sections as we do with the Etym sections: make more than one with all subordinate headings 1 level more than usual:

==Language==

===Etym===

===Pron===

====Noun====

=====Synonyms=====

=====Translations=====

===Pron===

====Verb====

=====Translations=====

===See also===

— Hippietrail 23:06, 8 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

That's exactly what I was thinking. Each pronunciation belongs near the POS it represents, even more so when there's only one POS with two different pronunciations (no example ready). — Vildricianus 09:01, 9 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

sinh has 3 pronunciations. How odd. Any other words have 3 pronunciations? See Talk:sinh and discuss there on editting formalities for multiple prons, i.e should it go:

Pronunciation

1. Like sinch
2. Like sinech
3. Sine H
4. shine

It maketh me scratch my metapohrical head anyway. --Expurgator t(c) 21:44, 12 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

Dear Peter Isolato, with regard to your criticism on my talk page about removing the English pronunciation key and instead setting up a "mini-portal" on this page, please note the following: Having an English pronunciation key on a page entitled "Wiktionary:Pronunciation" belies its name. There are so many more aspects of pronunciation we have to deal with. These include For users:

• How to use the pronunciation section in our entries, most importantly
  • How to read the pronunciation alphabets (IPA (Wiktionary:IPA), SAMPA, AHD; pronunciation keys for more intuitive understanding (Wiktionary:English pronunciation key, Wiktionary:IPA pronunciation key), where we need to consider that the interpretation of pronunciation alphabets may differ from language to language)
  • How to use the audio pronunciations (what are .ogg files, and how do I play them on my computer?)
  • How to request (audio) pronunciations (Wiktionary:Pronunciation file requests, Category:Pronunciation stub (why has Template:pronstub been deprecated without substitute?))

For editors:

• How to format the pronunciation section (WT:ELE#Pronunciation)
• How to upload pronunciations (Help:Audio pronunciations)

Having a pronunciation portal seems a very good solution. It's incomprehensible to me why you think it's a bad move. Of course, the page needs to be expanded and have some explanatory text rather than just being a list of links. My setting-up of this portal was prompted by a string of recent posts by users who were seeking information on pronunciation and seemed lost/unable to find the relevant pages. I remember and were able to find these: Help_talk:Contents (on 17/03 by 12.208.123.186) and WT:BP#Pronunciation Guide/Audio Files - A single location to discuss? (on 16/03 by 66.114.145.238). Ncik 14:09, 20 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

I'm confused, becuase I've seen "an" used before "historic" sometimes instead of "a". The historic entry doesn't say anything about why this would be, and the dictionary.com example shows "a historic". Isn't "an" used only before vowel sounds? -- Creidieki 07:40, 26 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Some people pronounce the H, some don't, and a/an would be appropriate depending. Davilla 17:05, 26 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Some people also pronounce the H and still use "an". This has always sounded wrong to me but often this is done by the kind of people who correct others' English. — Hippietrail 19:07, 26 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Careful, Hippietrail. You might make me want to follow you around correcting your grammar, and I'll bring a couple of countries along with me to help. It's one of those British-tends-more, American-tends-less things. For almost everyone who uses an before H, the syllabe with the H must be unstressed. So "an hisTORical" is fine, "an HIStory" would be weird. H is a pretty wimpy consonant at the best of times, and in an unstressed syllable it's often too wimpy to keep the N from popping up. -- Keffy 19:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Now that you mention it it does feel "British" to me though I'm pretty certain I've heard it discussed that some Americans do it too and I've definitely known many many British people, especially of a younger generation, who do not do it. In Australia there was a "proper" way of talking which has almost died out. It was the people who used this mode of speech in Australia that tended to say "An historical ...". — Hippietrail 19:41, 26 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Okay, I wasn't really sure what to say about this in the historic article. I noted the existence of the issue, which I think is an improvement over no mention. I wasn't sure how to format it. -- Creidieki 20:51, 26 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

The French consider H to be a vowel and some users of RP will do the same. I have noticed BBC newsreaders do this kind of thing. It always seems pretentious to me. MGSpiller 01:04, 27 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

It does seem pretentious now, but it used to be incorrect to do otherwise than use "an" before H+vowel. Nowadays it only seems to crop up with phrases like "an historic occasion" which politicians and newsreaders like. I would describe it as formal, or maybe even formal passing into archaic. Also, pace MGSpiller, consonantal H does exist in French, eg la hache (not l'hache). Widsith 02:35, 27 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Fair enough, my French is rather sketchy. Indeed I'm not entirely sure what you mean by pace, I would expect en passant from the context. MGSpiller 12:38, 27 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Erk, it has another definition which isn't on here yet. It's a Latin term which you add before a person's name as a gesture of respect when you're about to correct them, roughly meaning "with all due respect to...". Quite often it's used ironically, though it wasn't by me! Actually, it's probably just as pretentious as "an historic"... Widsith 08:21, 28 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

The letter h is indeed a consonant in French, just as in English. It is always silent at the beginning of words, but this does not make it a vowel (just as the silent h in English words such as "hour" and "honest" is not a vowel).

There are two varieties of h in French: "h muet" ("silent h") and h aspiré ("aspirate h"). Neither is pronounced in modern French, but words beginning with h muet cause certain preceding words to undergo elision or liaison, while this does not happen with those beginning with h aspiré. Elision means the contraction of certain words (such as "le", "la" and "de"); liaison means the pronunciation of the final, usually silent, consonant of the preceding word.

For example, "homme" ("man") begins with an h muet, so we have:

• l'homme ("the man"): elision of "le" ("the")
• des hommes ("some men"), which is pronounced /dɛzɔm/ rather than /dɛ ɔm/): liaison (the "s" of "des" is pronounced, which, usually, it is not)

In contrast, "hibou" ("owl") begins with an h aspiré", so we have:

• le hibou ("the owl"): no elision
• des hiboux ("some owls"), which is pronounced /dɛ ibu/: no liaison

Some words beginning with h come from French and were once pronounced similarly to how they are pronounced in French. Most of these words have ended up with the h being pronounced but a few haven't (such as "honest"). "Hotel" is one example - you'll still hear some older people pronounce it with a silent h (and I'm not talking about dropping the h - they would never pronounce it). Hence they it is quite correct for them to say "an hotel".

As Keffy says, the stress must be on a syllable other than the first for "an" to be used. Saying "an historic..." is popular with BBC newsreaders (and they seem to be among the few people in the country who use "an" instead of "a" here) but it is not really standard UK English any more (in that pretty much everyone says "a historic...").

I would agree with Widsmith that it sounds pretentious but would prefer to mark it as "old-fashioned" or "dated" rather than "archaic", as many older people (and the BBC) still use it. — Paul G 15:28, 27 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Yes that sounds better. By the way it's Widsith (Old English "far-traveller") not Widsmith (maker of wids). Widsith 08:21, 28 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Oops. I was concentrating on what I was writing and overlooked the correct spelling of your name. Sorry. — Paul G 09:35, 28 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

For this old British wrinkly, "an (h)istoric" seems to run together easily, whereas "a Historic" seems to have a little judder of a pause before the H, and seems a little unnatural. SemperBlotto 09:54, 28 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

From this British whippersnapper, I agree with SemperBlotto: "a historic" sounds jarred and unnatural. It's somewhere inbetween "an hour" (universal) and "an horse" (wrong). Because the "h" is unstressed, it tends to be left out and you end up saying "istoric", in which case you'd say "an" but, if you were to deliberately make yourself say the "h", then you would use "a". Or at least, that's my understanding of it. Celestianpower 09:44, 4 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

Another note: although, as mentioned above, words beginning with H generally took ‘an’ only if they were stressed on a syllable other than the first, that rule is relatively recent. Chaucer for example could write ‘an hill’. Widsith 06:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2007/January

Should a link to {{audio|{{{5|en-us-{{{1}}}}}}.ogg}} be added? Could having an audio file be made a criteria for WOTDs? --Connel MacKenzie T C 17:49, 27 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

I think Dvortygirl has been very good about adding pronunciations for each of these. Is there any opinion, one way or another, regarding audio on Main Page/here? --Connel MacKenzie T C 16:57, 27 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

AOTD? Included somewhere in this template? Yes please! I think there is enough audio to cover a couple of years, so this shouldn't be a problem. —Vildricianus 19:31, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Done. --Connel MacKenzie T C 05:18, 30 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm afraid we'll have to make it more complicated and not show an audio link when there's no such file. June 7 has a redlink. — Vildricianus 09:45, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I've added #IFEXIST to {{wotd}} but we'll see in a few hours if it works correctly, across to commons files. --Connel MacKenzie T C 13:54, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

We need two tricks for audio.

1. In general, the loudspeaker image should be clickable, bringing the clicker to the audio file or file description page, instead of to the image. Can be fixed using either CSS or {{click}}. See w:Template:Audio.

   In the interest of consistency, e.g. {{wiktionarysister}}, I think {{click}} is the better of those two options. --Connel MacKenzie T C 19:21, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

   Perhaps. It uses bad tricks, though, being not very compatible. Perhaps CSS hacks will be useful here after all. — Vildricianus 19:34, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

2. In the WOTD, I suggest there be only the loudspeaker icon, clickable then. It's best to get rid of the "Listen".

— Vildricianus 11:40, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I've conditionally removed "file" in {{audio}}, stopping short of linking the icon as you say. Perhaps a separate {{wotdAudio}} or something? --Connel MacKenzie T C 13:54, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm removing it completely from the template for now. Perhaps back later today. — Vildricianus 19:34, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

#ifexist: can't check Commons files. We may need to force a fourth parameter for the audio. — Vildricianus 20:49, 7 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Or procedurally ensure that only English words are submitted for WOTD for the next couple months, until it does? Has anyone searched buzilla for the relevant request yet? It's probably on my "votes" list, but obviously could use more votes. --Connel MacKenzie T C 04:40, 9 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I haven't even logged on to bugzilla. The one option here is that both the WOTD volunteer(s) and the audio volunteer(s) have to maximize communication and make sure not a single day is missed. — Vildricianus 23:22, 9 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Up. — Vildricianus 21:06, 13 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

Unless, of course, one is going for only the British pronunciation of "Wiktionary," one should be sure to include the SAE transcription of the word, with the IPA epsilon between the "n" and the "r." In addition, for IPA purposes, the final I in the word should be lower case, as it is the tense form. If this has already been addressed, or I am completely off base, I do sincerely apologize. Cheers. Sunny.

If you are referring to the image at the top lefthand corner of the page, then yes, this has come up many times before. This is just one UK pronunciation. When you say "epsilon", do you mean /ɛ/ or schwa (/ə/), the vowel in the first and second syllables of "second", respectively? One UK pronunciation has a schwa between the n and r, while US pronunciation has /ɛ/ there.

I think we are stuck with the image as no one has ever come forward to say they will change it. If Sunny's question isn't already in the FAQ, it's probably time we added it. — Paul G 15:53, 24 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

Actually you yourself added it to WT:FAQ back in January. :x) —Muke Tever 22:42, 24 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

Ah, thanks for that, Muke. I'll update it with anything else I've said here, and then we can refer users to it the next time the question comes up. — Paul G 08:44, 27 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

Regarding the final vowel, RP has /ɪ/ (as in "bit") in that position, while most English speakers tend to use /i/ these days, in common with US speakers. Some dictionaries (eg, dictionary.com) use ē (equivalent to IPA /iː/) here as they lack a symbol for the shorter /i/. — Paul G 15:57, 24 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

This issue of discussion is purely stupid since Rolls-Royce is obviously not a trademark, it is a car, and the manufacturer of the Engines of Boeings.

copied from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2007/January

Can someone come up with a 'bot to move all rhymes: entries back to Rhymes: ? I spotted a few, moved them manually, but then checked Special:Allpages and saw there are hundreds of them. If we ever want Rhymes: to be a real namespace, these will need to be re-capitalized. Great! I would have posted at Connel's talk page but this is the place to do so, actually. —Vildricianus 13:23, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

I think there are cases like these when we can ask a dev to do a server-side script for us. This is how they did the uppercase/lowercase split for instance. It would also be a lot easier if one of us learned how to make such scripts and then we would only have to request they run it, rather than requesting they develop it too. — Hippietrail 19:15, 28 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm wondering what happens when a new namespace is made. Perhaps it's not necessary at all to move the rhymes: pages around, because they may be automatically capitalized (template:see = Template:see). —Vildricianus 13:11, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Right, it could be rHyMeS: and still find it, once it is a namespace. Perhaps we should revive the "wanted" namespaces discussion from years gone by? --Connel MacKenzie T C 18:55, 29 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

Absolutely. Wikisaurus to begin with, once we settle on the name (discussion still ongoing at BP). Then, Index:, Appendix:, Rhymes: and Concordance:. (Transwiki:? WT:?) —Vildricianus 19:54, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure that "WT:" would have as much support as the others. Transwiki:, absolutely! In fact, Transwiki: is possibly the highest priority. --Connel MacKenzie T C 01:09, 30 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

The benefits of having a true namespace have come slowly to me, and I think they've not come at all to most users. Only yesterday did I discover the option to have random page generation for every true namespace. I'm sure there are still advantages I've not discovered. Can anyone sum them up? We'll surely need them if we want to convince people of the necessity to have these namespaces. It looks like the WikiSaurus debate is kind of stuck. —Vildricianus 20:27, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Serious? That one looks to me to have resolved to Thesaurus: with only one objection. Davilla 14:06, 3 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

On first sight, yes. Looking twice, one sees the main Wikisaurus contributors giving a different and quite valid opinion. I don't mind, I think Wikisaurus is equally fine. It's the technical aspect that bothers me now, as looks like it will take some time ere it is solved.

On the same topic: does someone have the technical know-how to read and more or less understand Help:Custom namespaces? One thing that bothers me is this note:

Any existing pages whose titles start with the letters "Foo:" or "Foo talk:" will become unavailable, so you'd better rename them first. (Where Foo: is the desired custom namespace).

This sounds like we can't make a namespace where there are already pages that exist in it. In other words, will we need to move, for instance, all Appendix: entries temporarily to another space, then set the namespace, and move them back? If that is the case, we'll certainly need developer help for this, if not already. — Vildricianus 14:18, 3 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

If that's the case, it sounds like we should certainly leave them at "rhymes:" for now (unless the caselessness of namespaces means that the existence of a true "Rhymes:" namespace will make any existing pages whose titles start with the letters "Rhymes:" or "rhymes:" unavailable, in which case we'll have to temporarily rename all of them anyway.) —scs 12:17, 16 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2007/January

Here's an idea for somebody ambitious using toolserver. The scripts that some languages use don't yet have good support in all or some Operating systems. Burmese, Sinhala, and Khmer all spring to mind. Tibetan is also pretty poor in many cases.

What we could do is to provide graphical images for these languages. At least if pango and at least one good font can be found for each case and toolserver can run pango. A request could be sent off to the toolserver to generate an image that we then display.

A non-toolserver solution would be that we include images of such words just like normal images, but each one would have to be contributed by somebody capable of making them. — Hippietrail 22:06, 29 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

Exotic scripts like IPA you mean? Davilla 15:57, 31 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

Exactly! It's surely the one we need most, and wouldn't need a pango back-end, just 30 or so .png files. — Hippietrail 17:09, 31 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

So, you could handwrite them on a piece of paper, scan it, then post the 30 images to commons, right? When better ones come along, they replace them... Or did I just completely miss what you were getting at? --Connel MacKenzie T C 05:59, 9 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

I've been mucking around at rhymes:English:-ʊə(r) and rhymes:English:-ɔː(r), and now I'm confused. The suggestion there is that moor rhymes with floor and store, and is therefore a homophone for more. And I'm sure that for some speakers it is, but me, I've always pronounced moor to rhyme with pure and the surname Muir. Does anyone else, or am I the only one? —scs 15:12, 25 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Surely both are possible. — Vildricianus 17:29, 25 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

PS: Are you American? — Vildricianus 17:30, 25 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

For a while I was having fun keeping Connel guessing, but: yes. —scs 17:47, 25 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Sorry if I gave the impression I was wondering.  :-)

(no prob. :-) —s)

The way I pronounce them, moor does not rhyme with floor, nor store, nor pure, nor Muir. --Connel MacKenzie T C 05:04, 27 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

But is it close to pure without the /y/ sound, i.e. to poor? (Paul claims that the vowels in pure and poor are the same, or close enough for Wiktionary rhyme page work. See his talk page and also mine for far more than you want to know on this subject.) —scs 23:59, 27 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

The vowels in "poor" and "pure" are clearly different for me. Jooge 02:32, 28 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I (and I think most people in SE England, where there are no moors) pronounce it like more or store. In N England and Scotland (where there are) I think it's usually pronounced like poor. Throughout most of UK we pronounce pure and Muir as pyoor/myoor. --Enginear 00:05, 29 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Now all we gotta do is get someone to weigh in from south west England! (Anyone from Dartmoor?) —scs 15:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Well, I know the area pretty well. The locals pronounce the "moor" of "Dartmoor" rather like "myrrh", ie to rhyme with purr, so rolling the first r more than the second and stressing the first syllable,Dartmoor becomes Darrrtmyrrh". Since Plymouth is less than 20 miles to the south of the centre of Dartmoor, it is not surprising if some East Coast US pronunciations are similar (see next post). In fact the minor-stressed moor in Bodmin Moor (30 miles NW of Plymouth) is pronounced exactly as described below, somewhere between poor and purr. --Enginear 10:26, 14 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm from America, and frankly, I think that poor rhymes with more and store and pure without the /y/ sound would sound a little like purr. Also, my opinion is that moor is pronounced like poor, more, and store. I'm sorry if I confused anyone.

Here's my two cents worth. Moor, floor, more, poor, store, pour, pore, paw, law, for, etc. all rhyme for me. They don't rhyme with pure. Pure rhymes with Muir, fewer, tour, cure, etc. Neither pure nor poor rhyme with purr. Jimp 02:36, 7 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

What's with the pronunciation for argh? It seems to be smileys, and not IPA. But I don't know IPA so well. Anyone know? --86.134.24.90 16:41, 25 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

That’s the work of User:Strabismus. He does funny things with letters and spellings. You can just pronounce argh as 'aaaaaah, pronounced as though you just learned that your house burned down and you lost your job at the same moment. A sort of angry, frustrated, desperate scream. —Stephen 16:58, 25 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

You can add {{rfap}}/{{rfp}} for entries like that. I usually pronounce the "R" and "guh" when I say it, but that is mainly, only on Halloween when wearing a pirate costume. --Connel MacKenzie 19:48, 26 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

In words such as deism, deist, pandeism, panendeism, etc., should the "e" be pronounced like a long "a" - my research indicates that "deus", which is the root for all of these, is pronounced like DAY-us, and that these words should be pronounced like DAY-ism, DAY-ist, pan-DAY-ism, pan-en-DAY-ism, etc. Dictionary.com offers the long "e" and long "a" as alternate possibilities, but I believe only the long "a" should be considered correct based on the root (contra theism and variations, derived from θεός, pronounced "THEE-os"). bd2412 T 22:43, 30 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

Either /eɪ/ or /i:/ is fine for this vowel. You're right that the /eɪ/ is closer to the Latin, but still not exactly the same – Latin used the ‘pure’ /e/, so deus = /d̪eus/. I'm not sure what your point about Greek is – the e-vowel sound there was identical (θεός = Classical /tʰeos/). I'm not sure why we have developed two pronunciations, but they're certainly both well-established and both pretty common in my experience. Widsith 08:42, 31 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

I was under the impression that θεός was pronounced with a long "e". My point was that many people, I think, pronounce deism as though it rhymes with theism, deist as though it rhymes with theist, pandeist as though it rhymes with pantheist, and so forth, because the words have similar appearances and are within the same realm of study (especially once you get into hair-splitting differences between, e.g. pantheism, panentheism, and panendeism). I'll go with /eɪ/, then. Cheers! bd2412 T 16:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm no expert, but I believe Greek ε was always a short vowel. Long-e was represented by η (/ɛ:/) or ει (Classical /e:/, later moving towards /i:/). See w:Phonology of ancient Greek for more. Widsith 07:31, 1 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Information desk

How do I add the IPA pronunciation?

Choose IPA from the Templates menu in the edit screen and add symbols as necessary. A guide to what the symbols represent can be found here. By the way, please sign what you write on talk pages and in other discussion fora with four tildes (4×~). Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 15:50, 1 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2006/October

I posted a concern about the WOTD mainpage template a while ago, but still have received no reply. The issue was the lack of a link to license information for the audio files on the mainpage. I would love to fix the template myself, but I'm simply not that good with wikicode to figure it out.

Peter ^Isotalo 08:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

Is this entirely necessary? The license should be in the audio file information. DAVilla 17:56, 16 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2006/October

When I click on the "sound" icon next to word of the day, it first says I must be a member to "upload" files (which does not make sense) and then (after I joined :-) ) it says I must be a "Sysop" to perform the action! I think that the link to the "play sound" icon must be incorrect folks! — This unsigned comment was added by Craisin (talk • contribs).

I've not been able to reproduce this problem. Anyone else? --Connel MacKenzie 17:51, 23 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

I had this happen to me once, but not since. I never did figure out what might be the cause. --EncycloPetey 02:24, 24 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

I need help transcribing the following sentence using IPA

The apricot tree.

I would greatly appricate it if someone would help me, my e-mail is [email protected]

Thanks a million,

Rachelle

Er.. in what accent? In south England, it's roughly . Widsith 15:42, 18 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

For roughly the same accent, I'd say feels more natural (ignoring aspiration). --Wytukaze 16:29, 18 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

Is there a Welsh word with a Silent W

The Welsh ‘w’ is not a semivowel/semiconsonant as it is in English, but a full-fledged vowel. Therefore there are many words where the ‘w’ may have the appearance of being silent. For example, rywbryd (once), pronounced /'rubrɨd/; or meddwl (thinking), pronounced /'mɛðʊl/. —Stephen 14:03, 28 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Information desk

The phonetic transcription under the title "Wiktionary" uses the rightside-up "r," which in the International Phonetic Alphabet really refers to an alveolar trill, like in the Spanish word "perro." According to good IPA standards, it really ought to be an upside-down "r" to represent the sound in English, which is an approximant and not a trill. The Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.orghttps://dictious.com/en/International_phonetic_alphabet itself attests to this fact.

See WT:FAQ#The pronunciation of "Wiktionary" in the logo, WT:BP#meta:Wiktionary.2Flogo and m:Wiktionary/logo. --Connel MacKenzie 00:13, 27 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I understand that the transcription uses the British rather than the American pronunciation, but no dialect of English uses a trill in place of the alveolar approximant "r" (except Scottish English, which uses it sometimes as an allophone). Somebody really ought to change that, since the logo is the first thing one sees when logging onto the site.

• There is a principle of "romanicness" used in phonemic/broad transcriptions which means that the most "roman looking" characters will be used for the most common phonemes rather than the most accurate. Look in almost any print dictionary which uses IPA and you will see only "r" for English pronunciations. — Hippietrail 23:06, 1 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Information desk

I've been studying Korean, on and off, for over 20 years. I've seen dozens of textbooks try to deal with the fact that the Korean alphabet (Hangul) has many sounds with no exact counterpart in English or other European languages. Often these books offer a 'transliteration' which provides a one-to-one mapping between a Korean letter and an "English-looking" romanization.

But this system is not usable for pronunciation. While romanization does allow a native Korean (or advanced Westerner) to reconstruct the original spelling of the word, it does nothing for readers who:

• do not want to learn the Korean alphabet, but
• want to pronounce a particular word correctly

A romanization like seonsaeng can be converted back to Hangul easily: 선생

But a reader trying to pronounce it is more likely to say SEE-AHN-SAH-EHNG (which a Korean would have a hard time interpreting) than SUHN-SAY'NG.

So I propose we either:

1. drop romanization for Korean words, and just supply a pronunciation (either in the style I'm using here or IPA or both);
2. keep romanization but also supply pronunciation

What do others think of this?

All entries should eventually have both romanisation and IPA pronunciation information. See a Chinese / Japanese page like 愛人 for what we're after. Widsith 21:30, 11 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room/2006

Previously uploaded pronunciations included pee-seez and pai-siz. Are these correct? And could we categorize these by regional use? DAVilla 20:10, 13 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

The spelling /ˈpaɪ.sis/ Sounds like "pie-seas", and is the pronunciation I normally hear. (Notice the ɪ, which represents a "short" i sound). The one that I deleted (/ˈpee.seez/) would be pronounced "pay-ay-say-ayz", which isn't even remotely correct. I see you've added /ˈpɪsiz/, which would sound like "piss-ease". I've not heard that one before. --EncycloPetey 21:50, 13 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

For the one you deleted, the user who added it doesn't know IPA, clearly, which is why I didn't claim it was IPA above. If you understand that intention, then it's not far from pi-seez (yes, "piss ease"), the one I added, which came out of a dictionary I used to double-check him. But if only one of them is right, who's to say the dictionary is more correct? Just because someone doesn't know IPA doesn't mean they don't know what they're saying. DAVilla 21:58, 13 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

I usually hear pie-sees in London. There is also a pronunciation piss-Kay's, ie pronouncing the word as if in Latin. I often absent-mindedly use the latter myself, but I'm not sure it's widespread enough to add as an English usage (particularly as it may not be "correct" English usage). --Enginear 09:47, 14 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

Copied from discussion in Wiktionary:Beer parlour archive/November 06

There are extensive charts about IPA and SAMPA rerpresentation of English and other sounds, but what is the guideline about stress symbols (ˈ) and syllable breaks: (.)? Most French entries seem to have syllable breaks, but no stress symbols. English entries seem to have stress symbols but no syllable breaks. Is there a consensus about this, which should be included? henne 12:00, 23 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Stress is less important in French than in English: in French, syllables are generally evenly stressed, except the last syllable is stressed at the end of a group of words. I don't believe that the syllable break symbol is used much, at least not in my French-English dictionary. Poccil 22:17, 24 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Adding syllable breaks to English words isn't easy. Consonants at the end of a word tend to be tied into the next word, e.g. red ink is pronounced "re-dink" which is pretty much impossible to convince to an English-only speaker. Hence the confusion between "read-i-ly" or "rea-di-ly" or "rea-dil-y". I'm no authority but I believe the middle one would be British English, well-enunciated, and the last American, employing a dark L. But I wouldn't be surprised if most dictionaries listed the first. DAVilla 23:48, 24 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

So if I understand correctly, you are saying: you can add both, but it is difficult. I do not really agree French has no stress. Less explicit perhaps, but it is there. For example, in avancer, obviously the last syllable is stressed, whereas in avance, it is the second. This is the last in both cases, but I am unsure whether this is a rule. henne 17:55, 25 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Stress in French is not phonemic, and in practice it is almost even anyway. avancer is certainly not stressed on the final syllable. French often sounds like it has final-syllable stress to English-speakers (I don't know whether you are one or not) because its equal stress pattern sounds strange when you're used to the penultimate stress of most English words. That's why when French words are adopted into English they often take final stress, especially in America (e.g. cliché, passé etc.). Widsith 14:48, 27 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

This is new for me. You could have looked on my user page to see that I am Dutch speaking, French being, along with English, secondary languages. Ah, I wished everybody used the {{Babel}} template on their user page. Connel, maybe this is something to include in your standard welcome talk?

Anyway, Ok, so French has no stress you claim. Then indeed, marking syllables makes sense, but is it useful? Should syllables always be marked? I often add pronunciation for Dutch entries, which has primary stress, but no secondary. Should I add it there? Should I add syllable markers for non-stressed syllables? henne 12:33, 30 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Although I use {{welcome}}, {{pediawelcome}} and {{welcomeip}}, I try to let other people play around with the wording. Whenever I mess with them I get too many complaints. Please be bold! --Connel MacKenzie 23:40, 30 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I had thought French does have stress (in comparison to Japanese for instance) but that it wasn't part of the pronunciation of the word since the stress pattern can change without changing the meaning of the word. As you say, it's not phonemic. I remember a French friend saying some simple sentence that none of us got because of this, and we laughed at ourselves when we figured out why.

That doesn't mean avancer and avance, when said alone, aren't stressed at the end. Of course, not speaking French, I really wouldn't know. I've never even been able to figure out if the final R is pronounced or not. DAVilla 14:11, 30 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Some linguists treat the . as its own phoneme, since it can affect the meaning of a word in some cases. This makes it important. However, for most non-linguists it's difficult to properly locate that phoneme correctly in spoken English, and that's why I generally don't mark them when I add IPA to English entries. For Latin, however, I routinely include them. For English, stress is much easier for a native speaker to hear, so I add those in English (as well as Latin), though there are cases where it's difficult to decide whetehr there is secondary stress or not, particularly in compound words were there is even stress on two different syllables. --EncycloPetey 00:09, 28 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

This would lead me to not include them, unless necessary, e.g. in Czech syllable-forming r or l (I can’t think of a word now)? henne 12:33, 30 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2006/December

I've been away for a while, but has something changed with {{IPA}}? It's outputting in a different font from before, which is fine, but it seems to have trouble displaying some accented characters, e.g. ɛ̃. Widsith 11:19, 2 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

I acted on a request from a sysop from another Wiktionary (pl.wikt:, I think it was) who had a much nicer layout for IPA on their Wiktionary. I doubt the extra 10% is the problem, more likely my change (no, I don't see what the problem is, offhand) at: {{IPA fonts}}. Perhaps I was too bold, with what looked like a tried and true fix? --Connel MacKenzie 22:43, 2 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Well, if I'm not the only person now seeing boxes where there used to be characters, it would probably be better to revert whatever font changes you made, at least temporarily. The size is fine, obviously. Widsith 16:07, 3 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Are you not? Well, rollback done, +10% kept. --Connel MacKenzie 22:04, 3 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Ah – that's better! Thanks. Widsith 10:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room

What is the correct way to pronounce the name of the artist Vincent van Gogh. I know we are all told that the correct form is van Go, but I heard an artist interviewed and he claimed that is only an American way of saying it. I thought that was a bit odd, but names do vary around the world. I was brought up saying van Goff, but that might not be right either. --Dmol 23:24, 7 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

The final consonant is pronounced exactly like the ch in Bach or Scottish loch. In fact, in Dutch, I believe the first G of Gogh is the same, so they pronounce it as /vɑn xɔx/. I think van goff is fine; van go sounds weird to me, but it's the usual pronunciation in the States. Widsith 11:36, 8 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm pretty sure that only Americans pronouce it Van Go. In England it is usually pronounced Van Goff, as the correct Dutch pronunciation is rather difficult. SemperBlotto 12:04, 8 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Dutch v is half-voiced, meaning that it sounds halfway between English f and v, and the a is a bit darker than what one would expect in English. The closest in English is the word fawn, which sounds pretty much like Dutch van, as long as you clip the vowel (like the British) instead of dragging it out (like we Americans do). In any case, Van Gogh lived in France for much of his career, so it probably wasn't pronunced the Dutch way much of the time. --EncycloPetey 03:06, 9 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Tea room

Are imminent and immanent homophones? Just wondering, seems it is possible to pronounce them the same. bd2412 T 17:40, 15 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

I move my mouth differently to say them, but I'm not sure the sound that comes out is noticably different. --Enginear 20:25, 15 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

I merge the second syllable vowels as , and I suspect some American accents would merge them as . See w:Phonological history of the high front vowels#Weak vowel merger. --Ptcamn 20:31, 15 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Strange... I thought I read somewhere that there actually was no distinction, that is, in fast speech for some words (like the ones listed), they come out as sounding the same regardless of who's speaking, even if there is a supposed distinction in the speaker's mind. But certainly -in and -on endings are pronounced differently in the UK, e.g. Erin and Arron. DAVilla 22:41, 15 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

I say them differently, but as Enginear and Davilla pointed out, they may not always sound distinctly different. --Connel MacKenzie 17:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

There might be a UK/US distinction. UK English usually pronounces unstressed "i" as /ɪ/, while US English often pronounces it as /ə/. The OED gives /ˈɪmɪnənt/ as the RP, but, in my experience, UK speakers tend to use /ˈɪmənənt/. As "immanent" is quite rare (at least, compared to "imminent"), distinguishing the pronounciations does not usually matter very much. I can't comment on US pronunciation. — Paul G 08:59, 17 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Information desk

If aɪ is the sound of the I as in the word I, shouldn't it be ai? I don't know, but to me, "ah ee" sounds a lot more like I than "ah ih". Why is it decided that I should be aɪ and not ai? Thanks! —Soliloquial 22:55, 27 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

We're following the standards agreed upon by the linguists. If you look around, you can find books (especially older ones) that use /ai/ rather than /aɪ/. Think of it this way: I is closer to /aɪ/ while ayee! is closer to /ai/ --EncycloPetey 23:15, 27 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:IPA Characters

Romanized IPA is not an international standard. We use AHD and the English-version SAMPA for broad transcriptions in English. Similar systems can be applied for other languages, but otherwise the correct IPA (or X-SAMPA) would be encouraged. Because IPA is more precise, we should use it with narrow transcriptions as they apply to regional accents. From now on, IPA would only be actively applied to audio pronunciations. As our inventory of audio files grows, we could tackle the tougher chore of thoroughness. Thus the problem of standardizing our choice of characters in IPA is avoided, applying it instead as a tool when regional variations are finally considered. Davilla 05:57, 10 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary:Information desk

Hello, I'm a n00b looking for a way to prounce , found here. The IPA chart doesn't seem to have anything for the upside down a and the symbol before it. Please help! --JDitto 04:43, 7 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

The vowel occurs in "cut" , "sofa" in some Brittish dialect, "manual" , in Portuguese, it's not quite fully open, central unrounded vowel. ―Gliorszio 04:51, 7 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

No, that's incorrect. The sound does not occur in English. You're thinking of in "cut" and in "sofa". Neither of these sounds is quite the same as , though they're close. --EncycloPetey 05:54, 7 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

Anyone know what happened to the audio links we had (on one of the IPA pages) last year? I do remember seeing at least one IPA table that had audio for all the symbols, but I can't find it now. --Connel MacKenzie 05:47, 7 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

The Swedish one does - Wiktionary:About Swedish/Pronunciation. Remember, we do have a page entitled Wiktionary:Pronunciation that has lots of useful links. --EncycloPetey 05:54, 7 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

Thank you, EncycloPetey, for the final answer, but back to the question: once I've found the page, how do I pronounce it? All the examples are already in German. Wow, this getting to be quite difficult for a two letter German word... --JDitto 04:37, 9 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

If you can play .ogg sound files (such as with QuickTime), there is a

recording:

(file)

available on the Wikipedia page for the w:Near-open_central_vowel (technical description of this sound). I have linked the file here as well for your convenience. Note that in German it's an r that thinks it's a vowel, and that should help you understand what you're hearing. It's pronounced lower in the mouth and a bit further back than the u in "up" or the a in sofa. For the whole word, there is a sound file on the German Wiktionary; the file is

here:

(file)

. --EncycloPetey 04:57, 9 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

Thank you so much!! Have a great day! --JDitto 01:57, 10 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

I am increasingly uncomfortable with the use of RP as a "standard" UK accent. The problem is that RP is now so old-fashioned that we are effectively giving people misleading information. For example, the vowel in man is routinely marked as /æ/ even though almost everyone in Britain including the Queen and BBC newsreaders, now uses /a/, and /æ/ sounds like some kind of incredibly old-fashioned 50s pronunciation. I personally think Wiktionary should mark (UK) rather than (RP), and take as the standard something a bit more like w:Estuary English. Specifically I suggest:

1. /æ/ changes to /a/ (I notice the OED have already made this change)
2. /r/ changes to /ɹ/ (this has de facto already happened with a lot of editors)
3. /aɪ/ changes to /ʌɪ/ (again this is in keeping with the OED)

Those are the three most obvious ones that spring to mind. I am aware that this may be constituted as original research but I think the current situation is unhelpful to our users. Widsith 10:16, 8 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I agree with you, RP is never used anymore, except for the humour :). There are, I assume - knowing nothing about how pronunciation is transcribed, accents within UK English that should have different pronunciation sections for some words, maybe it would be acceptable to have a UK label for the cases where the pronounciation is similar from everyone, and more specific labels (including RP) for other pronunciation if there is a need for it. I don't think that Estuary English has any more claim to be `the accent` than any of the other regions - there are to my ear accents that sound more neutral. Conrad.Irwin 13:16, 8 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, obviously there are lots of accents in any country, but there is still a "standard" which is useful for foreign learners. In the UK that's a kind of London/south-east accent, which is what I want to represent. But if you can think of more neutral accents then please suggest some! Widsith 13:48, 8 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Let's put as many regional accents in the pronunciation section as possible. There's no use in removing RP pronunciations just because they're RP. However, tagging something with "UK" should link to the neutral pronunciation, maybe in an appendix or to the Wikipedia page w:Estuary English. Slightly off topic, maybe we could experiment with one page (why not hinder?) and add as many regional pronunciations as possible to that page. I don't think there's any accent more neutral than Estuary English. --Keene 13:55, 8 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I agree that we can and should accommodate lots of regional accents. But my concern is over how we define the most neutral "standard" for the UK. I agree with you that it's probably a kind of Estuary English. Widsith 14:04, 8 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Certainly a step in the right direction. How now brown cow an'all that has pretty much disappeared, innit. I've always been accutely aware that more than 50% of the UK population speak with one of the many "northern" accents. Not to mention, the alarming number of L2 learners who visit UK for the first time, and think they've landed in the wrong country !! - Algrif 14:17, 8 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I agree with Keene (13:55, 8 January 2008 (UTC)) to the extent that we should have as many accents as possible, including RP. And, although I don't know Ukogbanian accents, I agree that if RP is not a common UK accent, then a RP pronunciation should be supplemented with a more common UK accent, which should be UK, with the RP accent marked RP, not UK. But I think that if the only UK pronunciation we have for a word is RP, then it can be marked UK (or RP), inasmuch as it is a UK accent.—msh210℠ 17:39, 8 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Good idea, I like that solution. Widsith 08:52, 9 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

A few observations: Firstly, I (not to suggest that I am alone) still use /æ/ - although in that specific word, it's /æː/, and there is a significant enough number of people and accents with the bad-lad split in the UK for it to be relevant, I think. And this leads me to my second observation: Which Estuary English? I speak with an Estuary English accent, but there is so much variation and, as yet, little standardisation - especially as far as phonemic transcription is concerned - that I'm rather uncomfortable with it being our default. RP is outmoded, sure, but the proposed changes are not significant enough (and nobody for a minute, I hope, proposes transcribing glottal stops or vocalised Ls as phonemes) for it to merit dropping RP as our standard. I can be convinced elsewise on that, mind. That said, I'd really like Estuary English to be included in our pronunciation sections (not to mention numerous other regional accents, like the rest of you), especially with audio, which is where it really makes the difference, I think.

Miscellaneous other: I don't use except before l, the elsewhere-phone is instead more like , and this is again common in EE - do we want to transcribe /ʉ/ for EE? And as for /ɹ/.. May we please, please use this for all (relevant) English dialects? It's fine for a monolingual dictionary to use /r/, but in our multilingual one, it doesn't make sense to conflate it unnecessarily with Spanish <rr> and the like. --Wytukaze 20:07, 15 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Do you really use ? I'd be amazed, but anyway the solution above means that we will not lose RP so it will still be there - I certainly don't think it can be called a common phone anymore, although I noticed the Queen still uses it in her speech. The bad-lad split is a separate issue – that is to do with short versus long vowels (received pronunciation /bæːd/ and /læd/ compared to modern , ). I don't think anyone has suggested using so I'm not quite sure what you're saying there. Widsith 09:36, 16 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I really do. Common for EE from where I grew up (north of London, Bedford-Milton Keynes area) although the short is also sometimes - the long doesn't appear as . (Incidentally, I don't think RP traditionally underwent the split.) In any case, I'm fine with using /a/ (and /aː/ too) for the EE phoneme, I just wanted to note that it's not dead yet. As for , has anyone suggested not using it? That's what I'm getting at. It's not my default phone, and I'm wondering if that's common enough. A lot of EE speakers do have a central equivalent of RP , as do a lot of Australians, so, as is the norm, shouldn't we express the phoneme using the elsewhere-phone?

My reservations to do with the lack of a transcription standard for EE remain. Do we transcribe <think> as /fɪŋk/ (I don't use this, but it's popular among modern EE speakers)? Do we note yod-coalescence phonemically (/ʧʉːzdɛɪ/)? It's not entirely universal among EE forms, but I'd say it's pretty much a given. And diphthongs! We have issues here. /aʊ/ is most commonly , I've seen preferred to because the latter is equivalent to RP for a huge amount of speakers (and my /ɛɪ/, another EE pronunciation variant, in the 'Tuesday' above). And L-dropping, while not necessarily phonemic itself, causes some interesting mergers and splits for many of us, some of them probably minimally phonemic - <wholly> or similar (and <wholly> might get a geminate L () here, distinguishing it with <holey> as well, but this is unlikely except in very careful speech) vs holy , and <bald> and <bold> both as something like (/bəʊld/? /bʌʊld/?). More London-based speakers might make <fail> and <mile> , merging them with the reflex of /æl/ and (perhaps) /ɑːl/ - <canal> and <marl> . There's a pretty definite split of <coolly> and <truly> for speakers all over the place - vs . Then there's RP /ʊə/, which is hardly ever not merged with /ɔː/ nowadays - except in certain positions and certain words; <jury> is not often . I'm not especially attached to keeping RP - other than for the fact it is still taught and used - but prefer it to moving to EE as our default British dialect. If I'm wrong, and there is in fact a standard - a commonly accepted and used standard - for transcribing EE phonemically, do tell, I'd be very interested. --Wytukaze 19:45, 22 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't know the answers to these questions! You're right of course that there's a whole load more potential changes we could make, but that's why I only picked the three mentioned above, which I thought were the most pressing and least controversial. Widsith 09:38, 23 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, see, that's my point; we need to sort out this sorta thing out before we employ it as our UK standard. And, to be frank (not that I haven't been being frank before - sorry about that), those changes are probably the least pressing - they mean transcribing everything exactly as RP, but using different symbols. Laudable, perhaps, for their increased accuracy, but surely where it counts is where the two forms diverge markedly - splits (like /ɒʊ/ from /əʊ/), mergers (like /ʊə/ with /ɔː/, arguably /θ/ with /f/ (and /ð/ with /d/?), arguably /tj/ with /ʧ/ and /dj/ with /ʤ/) and different forms (like /ɪn/ for /ɪŋ/, that is, <-ing> in <run-n-ing>, but, again, this isn't universal, but it's probably got the upper hand at the mo). Some input from others who might know EE (or, hell, anyone with an opinion - this is a wiki, after all) would be great, actually; I don't want it to be as if I'm berating you, Widsith, that ain't my aim. You're right enough that Estuary needs a presence here (and it needs to be adopted, eventually, by British dictionaries for pronunciation keys), I'm just uncomfortable with us striking out in the dark here. I'd rather transcribe UK (RP) and UK (EE) than ever have UK alone (and RP as a transcription standard is gonna have more people, more contributors, familiar with it). But we need to make ourselves a guide, preferably based on published - and freely available - research, rather than just slapping in what are basically the same pronunciations with a new name and a lack of clarification. So yeah, someone else weigh in. --Wytukaze 00:46, 24 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yep. Just on the point of published research and otehr dictionaries, the OED as of last year has adopted two of the changes as noted above, and they also regularly transcribe both /tj/ and /tʃ/ where both are still common. Widsith 09:02, 24 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

It's not especially obvious that they're transcribing for EE, though. --Wytukaze 00:42, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, no - we're calling it that but the point is just that a mild form of EE is de facto becoming the new UK standard. Widsith 09:42, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I weigh in with this (which somebody may have already asked): Why Estuary English? That is totally unrepresentitive of the middle-upper class, East Anglia, the Midlands, the North and the Far North as well as Wales, Scotland and N.I. It should not have supremacy over other dialects of English just because it is around the capital. I doubt very much that is fairly represents the speech the majority of British people. Harris Morgan 01:06, 25 January 2008 (UTC).Reply

Basically just as Conrad Irwin said in the first response, and I'd like to disagree that foreigners are taught EE nowadays. RP is ALWAYS stated as the common standard for English teaching abroad and I give you links: . Harris Morgan 01:16, 25 January 2008 (UTC).Reply

That's exactly the problem. As your first link points out, "Today 'marked RP' is spoken only by members of the royal family and others from the upper classes. It is considered over-the-top by most people...". A mild form of Estuary English is de facto becoming the new UK standard as these sites themselves make clear. Widsith 09:40, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I suppose. But Estuary English definitely reflects Southern accents (miwk, bāth etc.) that is why I think it is unsuitable to represent the whole of the UK. Harris Morgan 12:54, 25 January 2008 (UTC).Reply

← A good point. I mean, yeah, EE is a southern dialect (as was/is RP before it), but as the quickly emerging new standard, it is having a significant influence on dialects across the UK, especially in metropolitan areas (again, as with RP before it). Ever heard of 'Jockney'? It's the term certain media outlets like to use to describe the t-dropping and th-fronting and various other EE/Cockney developments appearing in Scottish English speech. T-dropping (or glottalisation, if you prefer) is very common in pretty much every city and large town I can think of across England. These are all EE's doing. However! (There's always a however.) You're right. It doesn't represent the whole UK. Neither does RP. GenAm doesn't represent the whole US (although it comes a damn sight closer than anything we've got, I'll warrant). So, we shouldn't be giving a transcription with just the country name, we should include the dialect as well. I'd recommend UK-RP, UK-EE, US-GA, etc. Incidentally, anyone mind if I give Wiktionary:English pronunciation key a revamp? Just a bit of a reformat and cleanup, for now, in preparation for adding EE and more descriptive sections, and /ɹ/ should this big BP debate get resolved that way. I'd also like to move it to Wiktionary:English pronunciation, but I'll talk about all those changes on the BP in a little bit. And Widsith, I've had a think about this; is it okay if I draw up a quick proposal (perhaps on a subpage of my userpage) for transcribing EE and then work with you and everyone else from there? --Wytukaze 14:51, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sounds good, the whole reason I brought this up was so we could revamp our Pronunciation guidelines. By all means make a start! Widsith 14:55, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Good idea. Harris Morgan 15:01, 25 January 2008 (UTC).Reply

Me has been wearing a technical thinking cap for a bit... How easy/accurate would it be to automatically convert between different dialects, are the differences between dialects always the same for the same sounds? would it be possible using some javascript to convert between dialects, or would that present too many problems? Conrad.Irwin 17:21, 26 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I can't tell you if it could work technically - but assuming that all dialects come from several vowel changes (and allowing room for the irregular ones with a "template pipe trick" ({{Xɵʊ|Xɵɑ}}) I suppose it would be linguistically (as long as there is that variable for the irregular forms). The template that handles Ancient Greek, Some other Greek and Byzantine Greek already does something similar. Harris Morgan 17:45, 26 January 2008 (UTC).Reply

Please note that for accents between which pronunciation differences can be automated, the different pronunciations are probably phonetic only, not phonemic. So, for any such set of accents, there would be just one phonemic transcription (given between slashes) and multiple phonetic transcriptions (given between square brackets). Rod (A. Smith) 21:10, 26 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Aye, we run into a lot of trouble with phonemic splits and mergers. No single dialect can be used to convert from, since every dialect will have a distinction another (or all of the others) do not have, and enPR is unsuitable for this purpose. The token system used for the Greek template would work for a lot of circumstances, with a lot of effort put into to disambiguating absolutely everything, but it can't work for situations where the pronunciation does not differ in a systematic way or where there are pronunciation variants within a dialect. Our solder, while horribly formatted and unclear, is a good example of this - most Brits would pronounce an /l/ but most Americans wouldn't, and then we have the choice between /ɒ/ and /əʊ/ within RP (or Estuary, come to mention it). Of course, we could just give the token-template a bunch of pronunciations and specify which dialects we want it to convert to... but then I think it'd be much more economical to just keep the system we've got (and let contributors use the lookup tables if they want to enter pronunciations outside their own dialect; I haven't forgotten about the tables, by the way (I've been busy)). --Wytukaze 19:50, 29 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

← I had a question about correlating wiktionary w wikipedia. Currently English IPA links direct the reader to w:IPA chart for English, so any changes in how pronunciations are transcribed here, such as <æ> to <a>, need to be coordinated with that page. However, that link is used even for "phonemic" (meaning inter-dialectal) transcriptions, which cannot be deduced from it, since in such cases there is no defined dialect to follow. There's another English IPA chart on 'pedia, w:Help:Pronunciation, which is designed to be dialect neutral; it's basically an IPA version of wiktionary:English Phonemic Representation and SAMPA, which are also not dialect specific in the way they're being used here. Is a redirect in order, depending on the style of transcription? If so, does w:Help:Pronunciation need to be modified for 'pedia and wiktionary to find common ground? Kwamikagami 01:51, 3 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

We don't need to correlate. If we find that the Wikipedia page is not in line with our conventions, we can write our own.—msh210℠ 15:59, 3 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

← We are on potentially dangerous ground here. I'm not sure whether this has been mentioned yet, but /a/ is the sound of Spanish/Italian "a" (as in "casa" in both those languages), and is very different from /æ/, which is the sound in English "cat" (as spoken in the south of England). It is false to say that the Queen and the BBC use /a/. This sound is used instead of /æ/ in some northern English accents and Scottish English. The Queen's (outdated) pronunciation of the vowel in "man" was closer to /e/. Changing /æ/ to /a/ would therefore be a big mistake, unless we want to adopt northern/Scottish English as our standard for UK English, because the pronunciation would end up being wrong. My understanding, although I could be wrong, is that the OED has changed /æ/ to /a/ because it no longer uses /a/ in /aɪ/ (the RP pronunciation of the word "eye") but now renders this diphthong as /ʌɪ/ (the Esturary English pronunciation of "eye"), so /a/ is now free to stand for whatever sound they say it does. However, we reserve (or rather, IPA does) /a/ for Spanish "a", so if we change /æ/ to /a/, that will make "cat" sound more like "cut" or "cart" (without the "r" pronounced), which will be incorrect. For the same reason, we need to distinguish between /r/ and /ɹ/ because the former is a Scottish/Spanish "r" (a trill or flap).

The bad-lad split is for /æ/ and /æː/ (a "short" sound versus a lengthened one), not for /æ/ and /aː/. It is common in southern British English but not heard in northern British English, Scottish English or American English (in most accents, at a guess).

There is no such thing as dialect/accent neutrality, by the way — everyone has an accent. RP, Estuary English, BBC English, etc, are all non-neutral. We should aim provide a standard (RP is the one usually adopted) but cannot provide a neutral accent.

Furthermore, most print dictionaries use RP, so this makes transcribing pronunciations into Wiktionary simpler.

Another point: we already have some concessions to EE over RP: final unstressed -y (as in "funny" and "slowly") is pronounced /ɪ/ in RP — again, imagine the Queen saying these words with a clipped "i" sound at the end — but sounds very quaint to modern ears. Almost all English speakers and US English use /i/ here (a shortened form of the "ee" sound in "me"); similarly, final unstressed /iː/ (as in "coffee") is usually pronounced shorter than this (as /i/ again) in contemporary English. Our IPA and SAMPA pronunciations take these changes into consideration.

Keene says "Let's put as many regional accents in the pronunciation section as possible." This has been proposed before in the past, but is a bad idea for space considerations (even though Wiktionary is not paper). The typical user is not interested in knowing how a word is pronounced in hundreds of regions of the UK, US, Australia, Canada, etc. They just want to know how the word is pronounced. We already give (or intend to give) standard pronunciations for each country. Regional variations can almost always be given in the form of a table on a separate page designed to explain how to "convert" one regional accent into another, and I have proposed this in the past. I don't know whether one has ever been set up. — Paul G 15:19, 30 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

• I disagree with your analysis. Yes, of course /a/ and /æ/ are different sounds. But what the OED is asserting is that this difference is precisely what makes UK-English man sound different from AmE man. (They transcribe the two as /man/ and /mæn/ respectively.) sounds bizarre to my ears (I'm from the South-East - prime "neutral accent" territory you might think). To me, the a-sound in Britain sounds far closer to the a-sound in Continental languages than it does to American English. Ƿidsiþ 16:40, 30 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Fair enough, but then how are we to explain the pronunciation guide used by the online Oxford Dictionary of English, which uses /a/ for three distinct sounds, namely the "short" a in "man" (IPA /æ/), the first vowel of the diphthong /aʊ/ (as per standard IPA) and the "long" a in "lah" (they have /aː/; standard IPA is /ɑː/). This looks to me like a simplification so that only one symbol is needed rather than three, as these three sounds are different in most dialects of English.

One way to clear this up would be to write to the Oxford University Press to enquire about the changes to the IPA transcription they use. (the online ODE's "Contact Us" page doesn't have an email address for queries about the dictionary.) My feeling is that the merging of the "a" sounds is for phonemic or typographical reasons, while the change from /aɪ/ to /ʌɪ/ reflects an actual change in pronunciation.

In any case, isn't this discussion academic, as the pronunciations we give are phonemic, not phonetic? The symbol "æ" can be made to stand for whatever sound we like; the vowel in "man" in UK and US English is different, but we can safely use "æ" to stand for both because there are no minimal pairs that would cause one or other these to be mispronounced. — Paul G 09:06, 1 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think that we are in danger of over emphasising Estuary English in this discussion, regardless of how common it is (and outside the south east of England it isn't at all) it is still perceived as non-standard by the majority of English speakers. My speech is primarily a mixture of northern England and the Westcountry, where such features of EE as th fronting (/ɵ/ to /f/) are completely unrepresentative.

In terms of the three changes proposed /æ/ to /a/, /aɪ/ to /ʌɪ/, and /r/ to /ɹ/, the final one is already happening and (other than in rhymes templates, which are a separate issue) I and others are changing /r/ to /ɹ/).

/æ/ to /a/ is representative of modern British English speech than /æ/ is, and I support the change, however I have not been changing it (and indeed changing /a/ back to /æ/ as there is not consensus for it yet and /a/ does not appear in our or wikipedia's pronunciation charts as a phone used in English - this is an absolute prerequisite before using it in transcriptions.

/aɪ/ to /ʌɪ/ I don't agree with, as it's not something I hear in the majority of English speech either in London or the Westcountry. Perhaps it is a feature of EE, but as I said above I oppose making that the standard. Thryduulf 12:16, 2 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

• OK. I wish I'd never mentioned Estuary English...it was misleading. I never wanted EE to become standard, I only meant that the "standard" (whatever that is) is already using some EE features. It is also using some northern features -- /a/ for /ɑ:/ is much more common than it used to be. Anyway, that's beside the point. My only concern was that we should find some more modern alternative to RP, which is not a very useful guide to how English people speak, in my opinion. To answer Paul's point – I suppose you could say that this notation is more phonetic, but as I said somewhere else, transcription is not a binary system, it's a sliding scale. There are different levels of "narrowness". It's true that there are no minimal pairs between /a/ and /æ/, but that would only be an issue (to my mind) if we used both symbols within a given country's phonemic range. But we don't -- we would only use /a/ for UK and /æ/ for US. Compare /ɒ/ and /ɑ/. There are no minimal pairs between them either, but we still use both because it's helpful for users to see this basic feature of transatlantic difference. Ƿidsiþ 15:36, 2 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

See also the archived discussion Wiktionary:Beer_parlour_archive/2007/April#Homophones_as_a_L4_header

I have started a vote (Wiktionary:Votes/2008-01/Homophones section) to establish Homophones as a distinct L4 subheader and section under ===Pronunciation===. Please note that this disucssion is independent of that vote. The vote is simply on whether or not to have the new L4 header; this discussion concerns possible layout should the proposal be approved. We would still need a final wording, and an additional vote on that wording, before any recommended format is added to WT:ELE.

Based on previous discussion (linked above), I propose the following format, should the new subheader be approved:

• For simple cases, where homophones are pronounced the same regardless of dialect, a single-line bulleted item with the homophones in alphabetical order will suffice.

For rite, the entry and homophones have no significant variation in how they are pronounced:

====Homophones====
* ], ], ]

• For complex cases, where homophones are dependent upon dialect, region, or the particular pronunication of the entry word, a bulleted list will identify the entry pronunciation, then the homphone entries, each with a gloss as needed.

For sere, there are several pronunciations, and the homophones are dependent upon pronunciation the entry and region of the potential homophone.

====Homophones====
*{{IPAchar|/ˈsɪə/}}: ] (UK), ] (UK)
*{{IPAchar|/siːr/}}: ] (US)
*{{IPAchar|/ˈsiːɚ/}}: ], ] (US)

Thoughts? --EncycloPetey 19:49, 27 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

• • At the moment, this is covered by saying whether the homophone is for rhotic or non-rhotic accents; I think saying as much covers all of the above and makes it unnecessary. By the way, "seer" is not necessarily a homophone for "sear" in UK English - it can be pronounced /siːə/. — Paul G 15:31, 30 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

I've added a hyphenation section, following what I understand to be common usage, and discussion at Talk:ELE; how does it look?

Nbarth (email) (talk) 17:45, 17 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for taking the initiative to get this started! I have edited the content a bit for clarity and have included a specific example to show how syllabification differs from hyphenation. I've also taken the liberty of moving the Hyphenation explanation to the end of the "other sections". Since this is the one item included in the Pronunciation section that is not actually about pronunciation, I feel it ought to be listed last in the section. --EncycloPetey 18:31, 17 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

Pronunciations appear to be given in the order enPR, IPA, SAMPA (from looking around). I've written this into the draft policy; it makes sense to me, via the logic:

• enPR is most intuitive and least scary, so it goes first
• IPA next, as it is important
• SAMPA last, and immediately following IPA, as it is auxiliary to IPA

Is this general consensus?

Nbarth (email) (talk) 22:39, 7 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, yes, but part of the reason for this is simply that the order is alphabetical. --EncycloPetey 23:07, 7 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

I've argued about this before many years ago but now that I'm trying to learn another language I'm just going to register my complaint again: I'm fed up of having to constantly refer to IPA tables and charts to find out how to pronounce a word. Sure, SAMPA might be more ambiguous, but I'd rather take ambiguity than the ridiculous amount of time and effort it takes otherwise. I wouldn't mind if you allowed SAMPA along with IPA but the fact that you're actively removing SAMPA just boggles the mind. It just seems to completely defy the site's accessibility. The bottomline is: it's finally got on my nerves too much, so I'm going to use the billion other internet dictionaries that do have SAMPA. I just can't help but notice that wiktionary is losing out to the competition here on this particular aspect. Something i thought it should never do. 172.188.50.44 08:24, 12 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Huh? We do allow SAMPA along with IPA; they frequently occur side-by-side in our Pronunciation sections. SAMPA is not more ambiguous, and never will be, because it in fact shows the same information as IPA does. SAMPA, done properly, is simply the IPA written with ASCII characters. The difference is only is which symbol gets used for each sound.

Could you please name some of the internet disctionaries that have SAMPA; I've not seen it in use on any major dictionary. And by the way, you might want to look up ad hoc because you don't seem to know what it means. SAMPA is not an "ad hoc" pronunciation scheme. --EncycloPetey 14:15, 12 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think it more likely that the anonymous editor doesn't know quite what SAMPA is. However, it's worth noting that SAMPA is arguably more ambiguous than IPA, since each dialect of SAMPA applies only to a specific language and makes only phonemic distinctions, so that whereas an IPA transcription of English can distinguish from , a SAMPA transcription cannot. (I'm not sure if you're confusing SAMPA with X-SAMPA, or if you simply don't consider that relevant, since our IPA is generally an attempt at phonemic transcription anyway; but if the anonymous editor disagrees, then his or her comment makes a bit more sense. However, I'd agree with you that correct SAMPA is no more ad-hoc than correct IPA.) —Ruakh_TALK 17:54, 12 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

Why is Estuary English not here? I thought in the discussion higher up on this page, it was concluded that Estuary English was to be included. Nwspel 23:27, 20 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

The discussion further up the page didn't really come to a final conclusion. However, as this is a wiki you can add Estuary English pronunciation to that table (I'd encourage you to add it to the w:SAMPA chart for English also). Don't replace RP, but add a new column as EE doesn't represent the majority of UK accents any more than RP does. Thryduulf 08:51, 21 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

Since SAMPA is an obsolescent pre-Unicode computer hack, and not likely to be known by anyone who does not also know the IPA, should its use no longer be advocated by the pronunciation guideline? —Kwamikagami 10:51, 24 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

It is permitted. We actually use X-SAMPA rather than the strict older SAMPA, so it is an ASCII version of the IPA. It is still useful because a number of browsers and operating systems can't cope with displaying IPA characters. I can personally attest that the public-use computers at the UC Berkeley library cannot display some common IPA characters, and instead substitute the dreaded empty rectangle. --EncycloPetey 23:16, 24 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

Still? Wow. That's pathetic. Guess it's best to keep it for now then. (I didn't mean that it shouldn't be permitted, just that I doubted it was still necessary. Guess I was wrong.) Kwamikagami 09:37, 25 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

Has a reader ever tried to use X-SAMPA on Wiktionary? —Michael Z. 2013-09-22 18:18 z

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

The description of non-rhotic "better" as phonemically /ˈbɛtə(ɹ)/ is incorrect. It is phonemically /ˈbɛtəɹ/, the same as in rhotic dialects. The difference—dropping the ar except before a vowel—is predictable and therefore not phonemic. Phonemic differences are those which are not predictable, such as the lack of an in "bird". —Kwamikagami 10:51, 24 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

Since there's been no objection, I've corrected better and added bird as an example of a word that truly is phonemically distinct. kwami 06:31, 12 July 2009 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

I don't know if this has been talked about before, but I'd like to propose that audio files be put with the pronunciation transcriptions on the corresponding accent line. Not that this is against policy per se, but most entries, WT:ELE, and this page, list audio files with separate bullet points. Listing them together would provide better coherence compared to the current system that sometimes put the accent type in the display text of the audio link, but often doesn't. Sometimes an accent line is long (cf Wednesday which has, for a single accent, multiple pronunciations transcribed in 3 systems), but even in these cases I think it's more clear to list the audio files with the correct accent line. Sometimes there are two audio files for the same accent/pronunciation. In this case we could maybe modify {{audio}} to be able to show more than one file more cleanly. When there is no transcription for a given audio pronunciation, it might also be nice, for consistency, to note the accent with {{a}} rather than just in the audio file link text file. Thoughts? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 21:52, 19 February 2009 (UTC)Reply

I forgot that I have such a short memory. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 17:20, 20 February 2009 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

often: /OF-tuhn/. Similar words with a silent -t- are "chasten," "fasten," "hasten," "listen," "soften," and "whistle" per Garner's newsletter. I think I have heard all of these except "listen" and "whistle" with audibly detectable "t". Is that my reading mind interfering with my hearing? Or is it actually pronounced that way by some, especially US? DCDuring TALK 16:10, 2 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've heard often with a t, but don't recall hearing the others. Here's a thread on often which also touches on the other words, for your reading pleasure.​—msh210℠ 18:31, 2 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. I noted that we don't seem to have an entry for spelling pronunciation (“spelling pronunciation”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.). DCDuring TALK 19:00, 2 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

We do now; I just created it. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:39, 19 January 2014 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

how about something like this in addition to IPA/SAMPA:

• DOSS-EE-AY ; 'do' as in dot, 'ss' as in hiss, 'ee' as in wee, 'ay' as in day: DOt,hiSS-wEE-dAY; DOSS-EE-AY
  

I wanted to know whether dossier was pronounced 'dossier' or 'dossiay'. IPA and SAMPA are presumably superior if you know them, but for the other 99.9% of the population who don't, it's pretty equivalent to saying "it's pronounced dfs98*(&fs09".

we need an additional system that's:

• easy to learn
• easy to use
• easy to understand without having to learn
  • because it's for people who don't know a phonetic system; if they've got to learn something, they may as well learn IPA
• reasonably accurate
  • being a little off-pronunciation is fine, as long as it can be used.
    

DOSS-EE-AY ; 'do' as in dot, 'ss' as in hiss, 'ee' as in wee, 'ay' as in day: DOt,hiSS,wEE,dAY; DOSS-EE-AY

breaking it down:

• DOSS-EE-AY
  • pretty easy to guess how this is pronounced. only a little thought is needed to avoid confusion (DOH-SEE-AY, for example, the DOH could be pronounced as in DOt or DOnut).
• 'do' as in dot, 'ss' as in hiss, 'ee' as in wee, 'ay' as in day
  • elaboration, just to make sure they're pronouncing it correctly
  • word-choice could be improved piecemeal as we go along (wiki method)
• DOt,hiSS-wEE-dAY
  • should be reasonably intuitive what we're doing here -- you read the capitals, the lower-case letters just form words that contain the sound
  • if you don't figure this out, you read a string that rhymes with the pronunciation
  • if you figure this out, you can get the pronunciation by just reading this bit
• DOSS-EE-AY
  • re-enforcing the pronunciation makes the system less confusing on first encounter
  • reading after the dot-hiss-wee-day should hopefully force correct pronunciation
    

EMPHASIS

• contest
  • konTEST <-- verb
  • kon-test <-- noun
    

ACCENTS

just have different sections for UK, USA, etc.

easy (to understand)!

what'd you guys think? any problems? --Arkelweis 03:01, 22 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

We have such a secondary system on Wikipedia. The 'eye' vowel is a real mess; the common convention of 'y' gets into problems in words like kryps, tyts, fyndz etc., but if we use 'ye', then there are problems with words like vyess; also siecle and cycle would both be written syekl despite having different vowels. Dict.com uses 'ahy' to get around this: krahyps, tahyts, fahynds, vahyss, etc, but that really isn't much of an improvement. It's also hard to distinguish between the foot and food vowels in a way that is clip&paste friendly; the BBC uses 'uu' vs 'oo': fuut, food, which is easier than the IPA, but still a little weird.—kwami 11:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

I'd say CRYPS; 'cry' as in 'crying', 'p' as in 'pan', 's' as in 'is'; CRY,Pan,iS; CRYPS

for tights: TeyeTS; 'teye' as in 'time', 'ts' as in 'bits'; TIme,biTS; TeyeTS. And yes, you have to take care not to end up with TITS, as 'ti' as in 'time' would be more intuitive :D

FINDS; 'fi' as in 'fire', 'nds' as in 'ends'; FIre,eNDS; FINDS

food is easy, but foot has me a bit stumped. but, just find another common word that has the 'uh' sound in it --Arkelweis 19:27, 10 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

The real problem, however, is that no matter which conventions we choose, there will be syllables which people will misread, because they will be homographs to common words with different pronunciations. —kwami 11:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

With care, it should be possible to find a relatively short and common word with universal pronunciation for each common (short) combination of phonemes? Then, we could get a computer script to auto-generate the intuative pronounciation guide from the IPA; in the dossier example, it could check the database for the first sylable dɒs, find nothing, check for dɒ and see dɒ=DOt, check s and see s=hiSS, and auto-generate it from there. --Arkelweis 19:27, 10 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

For your very first gloss, 'o' as in dot, for example, there are already problems: 'cobalt' would be written KOH-bolt, but most people would read that as "co-bolt".—kwami 11:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

It was 'do' as in DOt btw. And, I might be mispronouncing cobalt (i'm english, if it helps) but: CO-BALT; 'co' as in 'co-op', 'bal' as in 'bald', 't' as in 'time'; CO-op,BALd,Time; CO-BALT. 'course, we'd have to check that co-op, bald, and time actually have universal pronunciations. --Arkelweis 19:27, 10 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

Where in England? It isn't KOH-BALT in RP, it's KOH-BOLT, but people reading that would tend to rhyme it with bolt. That's the problem with any respelling system. kwami 09:52, 31 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

Hampshire (or 'amshAAARRR', as we say here). you've lost me on KOH-BOLT btw... CO-BALT seems to be right, given the pronunciation clues given (wouldn't rhyme with bolt, for example: would sound similar to the beginning of the country BALTimore, and rhyme with fault)? --Arkelweis 02:37, 5 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

But A isn't the vowel in 'Baltimore', it's the vowel in 'Alice'. So CO-balt would be completely wrong. (I can hardly even say it.) In our scheme, it's written O as in 'hot', so the proper respelling would be KOH-bolt. But because the English word 'bolt' isn't pronounced with the O vowel, but with the OH vowel, most people would misread KOH-bolt /ˈkoʊbɒlt/ as KOH-bohlt /ˈkoʊboʊlt/. That's the problem with respelling systems: there will always be interference from English words which mismatch the system, no matter what you come up with. Thus there will always be words we can't respell. So we'll end up with a system that only works some of the time. kwami 07:15, 8 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

is this how you're pronouncing it? CO-BALT; co as in co-operate, bal as in bald, t as in time; CO-operate,BALd,Time; CO-BALT --Arkelweis 14:22, 11 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

You and kwami are talking at cross-purposes. He is assuming that any desirable representation scheme would be consistent; for example, if the letter "a" represents the vowel in "Alice", then it can't also represent the vowel in "bald", and if "o" represents the vowel in "dot", then it must also represent the second vowel in "cobalt". In particular, I don't think he's recognized that you're proposing long explanations like "DOSS-EE-AY ; 'do' as in dot, 'ss' as in hiss, 'ee' as in wee, 'ay' as in day: DOt,hiSS-wEE-dAY; DOSS-EE-AY". That took me a while to understand; I, for one, thought you were proposing just "DOSS-EE-AY", and the rest of the explanation was just for readers at Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation. But on the other hand, you write below that "the actual implimentation could be done by a computer based on the IPA transcript", which is not true for a complex, inconsistent system like you describe, one where (as you admit above) "a little thought is needed to avoid confusion." —Ruakh_TALK 20:50, 11 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

Ah, cheers if that's what's happening. Yes, the long-explanation is part of what the user'd see. I think I'll write up a clearer 'spec' in a bit. however, when I said it could be computer generated: for dossier, if someone's put the IPA in (dɒs.i.eɪ) then a script could look up 'dɒs', maybe fail to find it, then look up 'dɒ' and 's' seperately; as long as the database contains dɒ as in DOt and s as in hiSS then it'd be trivial to have it auto-generate DOSS-****; 'do' as in DOt, SS as in hiSS****** DOt,hiSS****; DOSS-****. The IPA for the 'o' in cobalt would be different, hence the easy-to-understand explanation of how to pronounce it would be different.

one problem with this is that, as said above, tights could easily end up as TITS; maybe just run through a swear-filter, and if it matches mark it down for manual creation? there should only be a few?

that just leaves us having to write the script and database, and do a few manually, for an intuitive easy-to-understand-without-learning-it system for use alongside IPA and SAMPA --Arkelweis 15:01, 20 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

Even worse, what in the world would you do with David Bowie? The dispreferred pronunciation is BOW-ee, but many people would read that as the preferred pronunciation BOH-ee, so it would be difficult to distinguish them.

BO-EE; 'Bo' as in bow and arrow, 'ee' as in 'bee'; BOw and arrow,bEE; BO-EE --Arkelweis 19:27, 10 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

So how would you write the 2nd pronunciation? kwami 09:52, 31 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

how is BOW-ee pronounced? if you want to use IPA in your examples, i'll slog through till i know how to pronounce it --Arkelweis 02:37, 5 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

BOW-ee would be /ˈbaʊ.iː/, as in take a bow. But it looks like /ˈboʊ.iː/, as in tie a bow, which would be written BOH-ee. kwami 07:15, 8 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

"which would be written BOH-ee" under which system? if it's bow as in 'take a bow', it'd be BOW-EE; BOW as in 'take a bow', 'ee' as in 'bee'; BOW-bEE; BOW-EE --Arkelweis 14:22, 11 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

The consequence of this is that there will always be a substantial fraction of words which cannot be adequately transcribed in a respelling system. See the quote at fauxnetic. —kwami 11:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

First, WT:ELE does say "it is not wrong to use an arbitrary representation if that’s all you know and there is an important point to be made. For the word reject, one could have /RE-ject/ and /re-JECT/ to make the important distinction between the pronunciations of the noun and verb forms. It may not be standard, but neither is it wrong. Whenever possible, however, such ad hoc pronunciations should be replaced with one in an unambiguous system, such as IPA". So if you can add ad-hoc pronunciation to an entry that has no pronunciation, please do! But that doesn't really address you question, which is what we should use by default, for usability. IPA has the advantages of being relatively accurate, relatively unambiguous, common, relatively easy to learn by laymen (as easy as any other system AFAICT). But for laymen who don't want to learn IPA we do have another system in place, for English entries only. We call it enPR (for "English Phonemic Representation"). See .​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:58, 25 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

I don't think wikipedia's re-spelling or enPR are particularly intuitive; for a start, they have non-standard symbols, and it should be relatively clear that non-standard symbols will not have an intuitive pronunciation. If they're easier than IPA, then lets include them aswell, but we still need one intuitive, no-learning-required system alongside the IPA etc.

You know, an alternative might be simply to have a program auto-generate and include an audio clip of the pronunciation based off of any IPA/SAMPA that's present. Or both?

--Arkelweis 19:27, 10 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

• Rather than spending time trying to work out the details of yet another system, why don't you just spend ten minutes learning how IPA works? It's not as complicated as you seem to think it is. And it was actually designed specifically to solve the problems that you're talking about. Ƿidsiþ 06:58, 11 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • because it takes more than 10 minutes to learn.
  • because even if it didn't, IPA's still no use for the majority of people, who haven't spent that 10 minutes learning it (so it doesn't do a very good job if it's trying to solve the same problems i'm talking about).
  • because 100% of the effort for this way could be done at system creation: rendering into the format could be auto-generate from the IPA, and people will be able to use it with no learning (bearing in mind that the vast majority of people haven't/won't/don't want to learn a system like IPA).
  • so: because i'm trying to fix the problem in general, not just for me --Arkelweis 19:46, 28 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
    • Regarding computer-generating sound files from IPA: I believe there's a program that does this. But any such sound file will not completely accurately represent pronunciation unless the IPA is very narrow, which is hard to write accurately. (And not even then, I'd guess.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:04, 29 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

You're right; the IPA does take more than 10 minutes to learn. It takes (in my experience of teaching it to people) about 45 minutes to learn (passively, i.e. to recognize the symbols used for one's own native language - learning it actively, to generate transcriptions oneself, takes a few hours). But the problem with your solution is the same as every attempt to find a "more intuitive" alternative to the IPA: when you actually get down to the details of implementing one, it's always either terribly ambiguous or at least as complicated as the IPA itself. —Angr 10:18, 25 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

complicated is ok, as long as it doesn't require the reader to learn the system; I feel the above could achieve that. As for ambiguous, I don't see that it needs to be. Bear in mind that 'succinct' or 'efficient to use once learned' aren't objectives, giving us some leeway that other IPA replacements don't have

specifically, rather than trying to represent each sound with one glyph (requiring more than 26, i.e. some 'alien' glyphs, to be used, thus requiring the system to be learned) we'll use pre-existing glyphs or glyph clusters, with a common word used to indicate which of the many possible pronounciations is meant; this is what makes it intuative and possible to read without learning the system, whilst not being ambiguous, BUT it's also what makes it long-winded and cumbersome.

to clarify, if you're going to be involved in linguistics a lot, IPA will remain better than this system; BUT, if you just very occasionally want to look up the pronunciation, this system'd be better as it requires zero learning (BTW, I'd suggest we have IPA and SAMPA and this system: people who know IPA can use IPA, people who know SAMPA can use SAMPA, people who know both can use their favorite, and people who know neither, who're currently stuffed, can use this system.) --Arkelweis 02:37, 5 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

The problem is, this system doesn't require "zero learning". It may seem like it at first, but once you start implementing it, you'll find it requires almost as much learning as enPR. These ad hoc systems are never really as intuitive as they seem at first blush. —Angr 07:51, 8 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

care to give an example of what'd have to be learned in order to read this system? the actual implimentation could be done by a computer based on the IPA transcript, so no need to learn to write it, just as long as it's intuative to read --Arkelweis 14:22, 11 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

This system seems completely useless

• a) for people who are not already familiar with English pronunciation rules, and
• b) for words from other languages than English

-- 80.171.132.206 21:35, 20 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

people who aren't familiar with English pronunciation can read their own, native wiktionary (after all, this wiktionary's descriptions are in English); failing that, the minority who can read, but not pronounce, English, can use the IPA or SAMPA. /some/ Words from languages other than English can be expressed by this system, and for all others you can either give the naturalized English pronunciation or a close approximation:

• watashi; WA-TA-SHE* ; 'wa' as in wank, 'ta' as in tampon, 'she' as in sheet* ; WAnk,TAmpon,SHEet*; WA-TA-SHE* (SHE is approximation of し, which has no exact pronunciation; see し or IPA ɕi for exact sound)

having said that, if there's no English equivalent, then I'm doubtful that English speakers will be able to learn to pronounce it from text, regardless of which system's used. --Arkelweis 02:37, 5 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

By writing "WAnk" as example, do you mean /wæŋk/ or /weɪŋk/ (wank)? In other words, the proposed system is inaccurate even for English speakers. Unless you specify the pronounciation for almost every word you use as example (using what? IPA, SAMPA, more words in English?) 161.24.47.103 18:45, 20 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yes, the proposal assumes our readers are illiterate . A more consistent respelling system can be found at WP-en.

And no, we can't use it for other languages . You said with watashi that the SH wasn't quite right , but the W, A, T, E weren't quite right either . kwami (talk) 05:10, 21 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

I’d be in favour of using such transcriptions to make pronunciation more accessible. But let’s do it right. For goodness’ sake, let’s not create another novel, proprietary system! If there are any standardized systems, let’s choose the best one. Failing that, let’s use Wikipedia’s. —Michael Z. 2013-09-22 18:29 z

If anyone has doubts about the value of this: at least one study showed that both linguists and non-linguists using a non-phonemic respelling (like noc-tiv-i-gant for noctivigant) took less time and made fewer pronunciation errors than those using a phonemic respelling (nok-tiv-ə-gənt), who bettered those using IPA (/nɒkˈtɪvəgənt/).

• Helen Fraser (1997), “Dictionary Pronunciation Guides for English”, in International Journal of Lexicography, v 10, n 3, pp 181–208.

 —Michael Z. 2013-09-22 19:11 z

Yeah, wikipedia's seems ok (except for the ə )... I'm not even sure you'd neccesarily have to differentiate between ə (About) and a (trAp)? for those who like IPA, note that WP's system seems to be IPA with different (more intuative) symbols; i.e., there's a more-or-less one-to-one mapping from WP's repelling system to IPA. Tho note the comments from above (copied below)

We have such a secondary system on Wikipedia. The 'eye' vowel is a real mess; the common convention of 'y' gets into problems in words like kryps, tyts, fyndz etc., but if we use 'ye', then there are problems with words like vyess; also siecle and cycle would both be written syekl despite having different vowels. Dict.com uses 'ahy' to get around this: krahyps, tahyts, fahynds, vahyss, etc, but that really isn't much of an improvement. It's also hard to distinguish between the foot and food vowels in a way that is clip&paste friendly; the BBC uses 'uu' vs 'oo': fuut, food, which is easier than the IPA, but still a little weird.(—kwami 11:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC))Reply

you know, using WP's system and table of examples with my approach, you'd get:

dos-ee-ay; 'do' as in odd+lot, 'ss' as in see, 'ee' as in fleece, 'ay' as in face: oDD,lOt,See -- flEEce -- fAce ; dos-ee-ay

or possibly

dos-ee-ay; 'do' as in dot, 's' as in see, 'ee' as in see, ay as in face ; dot,see--see--face ; dos-ee-ay

which seems workable:

• ++ end result is as, or only just less, phonetic as IPA/SAMPA
• ++ end result is more intuitivly readable: dos-ee-ay vs. /ˈdɒs.i.eɪ/ or /"dQs.I.eI/ (or dossier, for that matter)
• ++ can be automatically translated from IPA by script
• -- requires writing of a table of common sounds and common, universally-pronounced example-words (not just odd,lot, but d+o = dot)
• -- contains 'ə'
• -- kwami's comments above

--Arkelweis (talk) 03:53, 31 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

Is there any linguistic consensus where English words are broken into spoken syllables? Here is the example inexorably /ɪˈnɛks.ər.ə.bli/. To me as a non-native English speaker, this looks very random, without any logic, but with influence of the hyphenation rule in·ex·o·ra·bly. But why /ər.ə/ and not /ə.rə/? Merriam-Webster gives /ɪˈnɛk.sə.rə.bəl/, /-ə.bli/ in probably, and /bɛ.tər/ for better, this is also what I would consider phonetically straightforward (though why ɛk.sə but not əb.li?). I think the most important rule in hyphenation is that stressed short syllables must keep one consonant at the end, but that is mostly an orthographic or morphemic rule, not a phonetic one, and is not followed at Merriam-Webster. --Androl (talk) 10:48, 14 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

No, there really isn't. The rules for splitting a word across a line break don't have much to do with phonological syllables anyway, but even phonologically there isn't much consensus on where syllable breaks are. There is some evidence that single consonants after stressed lax vowels in English belong to both the previous syllable and the following syllable, e.g. the /p/ in happy belongs to both the first and the second syllables. This is why I'm reluctant to add syllable boundaries to phonetic transcriptions of English, because it often isn't clear where the syllable boundary is. Both /hæ.pi/ and /hæp.i/ fail to capture ambisyllabicity, and no one would understand "/hæṗi/". And /hæp.pi/ would be misinterpreted as implying that the consonant is long. As for ɛk.sə vs. ə.bli, keep in mind that /bl/ is a possible onset cluster in English while /ks/ isn't. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:01, 14 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

• Actually, although Angr is right that syllable breaks are quite debatable in English, in practice there is a convention when it comes to transcription: the so-called Maximal Onset Principle, whereby consonants (or consonant clusters) are loaded into the onset where possible. Hence the /n/ in "inexorable" (and the /p/ in "happy") prefers to start the following consonant rather than end the previous one; similarly the /b/ and /l/ of "-ably" can happily pile into the same onset, but /k.s/ falls across the syllable boundary because /ks/ is not allowable as an initial cluster in English. I believe this principle had real phonological implications in for instance early Romance languages, but in the case of English it doesn't really make much practical difference – it's just how most linguists choose to syllabify in broad notations. Ƿidsiþ 07:55, 5 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • But there is also a convention that stressed checked vowels should be followed by a consonant wherever possible, so that the /p/ of "happy" should be put in the first syllable. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 11:05, 5 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
• Right. The thinking is that, because these vowels cannot appear at the end of words (barring a couple of interjections like meh), then they should not be considered to appear at the end of syllables either, though not all analysts accept this reasoning. Like I say, I don't think it really matters much, my point was only that when it comes to lexicography, most authorities seem to have gone for the maximal onset principle – that's certainly how the OED and Collins syllabify. Ƿidsiþ 12:13, 5 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • I think American dictionaries are more likely to use the "maximal stressed syllable principle"; the AHD for example transcribes happy as "hăpʹē" and petal as "pĕtʹl". (I can't figure out Merriam-Webster's pattern, as they write "ˈha-pē" for happy but "ˈpet-ᵊl" for petal. Syllable breaks at the ends of lines definitely follow the "maximal stressed syllable principle", e.g. pet·al. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:23, 5 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

In November 2015, Wikipedia decided to start using the ᵻ and ᵿ symbols in phonemic transcriptions, as described in w:Help:IPA for English. These symbols are currently rejected by Template:IPA since they are nonstandard. Since Wiktionary:Pronunciation links to w:Help:IPA for English as an example of a consistent set of IPA symbols, I was wondering whether we should make these symbols eligible for use on Wiktionary or if there are other symbols that I should use in their places. Germyb (talk) 07:01, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

MediaWiki_talk:Edittools#⟨ᵻ⟩ and ⟨ᵿ⟩ might be of interest. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:02, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. That answers my question about what is currently being done. If we're going to point to w:Help:IPA for English as a reference, it seems like this difference is something we should mention in the documentation for the sake of new users. But that's just my opinion. Germyb (talk) 23:35, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

I personally think they're a very good idea, especially for UK English, but other editors have been removing them from entries. It's one of many issues that are not really resolved in our pronunciation policy. Ƿidsiþ 07:04, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Would it be appropriate to use {{a|non-merged vowel}} and {{a|merged vowel}} similarly to how Wiktionary:Pronunciation suggests handling the rhoticity distinction? From what I can tell, that only applies to ᵻ. I don't know if there is a similar approach for ᵿ. Germyb (talk) 09:08, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

My opinion of these symbols remains the same as it was last December, as expressed in the link Suzukaze provided above. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:24, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

Fwiw, if we're going treat IPA as the default across entries and as the real and more trustworthy pronunciation, shouldn't it precede the enPR versions even if it's slightly scarier to Americans? — LlywelynII 17:32, 22 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Yes, IMO, just as metric will generally precede Imperial. kwami (talk) 06:27, 23 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Discussion moved to Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2022/July#deleting_stress_marks.

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

I have found very usefull this search structure:

• https://en.wiktionary.orghttps://dictious.com/en/separated#Pronunciation (for the word "separated", for example). We can generalize *https://en.wiktionary.orghttps://dictious.com/en/wordsearched#Pronunciation (for the word you are looking for).

It can be used by a WM or Wiktionary search machine, to find pronunciations of the word searched. BoldLuis (talk) 12:16, 15 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

How should remarks/comments or warnings about particularities be indicated? For example, in creature, that the last letters aren't pronounced, that the "t" is not pronounced as in "create", and that "ea" is not pronounced as in "create". Chealer (talk) 20:23, 22 May 2023 (UTC)Reply

You can put a ====Usage notes==== section inside a ===Pronunciation=== section, but in the case of creature I wouldn't. The information on how the word is pronounced is provided; we don't need to add information on how it isn't pronounced. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:47, 23 May 2023 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

https://www.wordreference.com/ BoldLuis (talk) 16:19, 4 July 2023 (UTC)Reply

copied from Wiktionary talk:Pronunciation

At

Phonetic transcriptions are given within square brackets

say

Phonetic transcriptions are given within square brackets, ,

At

By contrast, phonemic transcriptions, given within slashes,

say

By contrast, phonemic transcriptions, given within slashes, / /,

Jidanni (talk) 07:16, 14 September 2023 (UTC)Reply