Wikipedia:Stress marks in East Slavic words
This is an essay on East Slavic (Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian) orthography and romanization. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This page in a nutshell: Stress marks don't belong in any Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian word and should be removed. |
Stress marks are used in Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian-language elementary-school primers, readers, and in headwords of dictionaries and encyclopedias, to indicate syllabic stress. They also appear in references on Old East Slavic and Ruthenian languages.
But they almost never occur in most texts, except for very special cases.
They made their way into the modern Russian Wikipedia, which, however, never had a consensus to put these stress marks. So we have a lot of terms imported from elsewhere or entered with these syllabificátion marks.
While a native reader can at least sort this out, in English Wikipedia they are utterly misleading: that's not how the words are really spelled, and definitely not how they are spelled in reliable sources.
Our suggestion is to eliminate the stress marks; they belong in these languages no more than they do in English, and should be removed on sight.
The correct way to show the pronunciation in any language, including the stresses, is International Phonetic Alphabet which is already present in most of the articles that need it (a stress mark goes just before the stressed syllable). The tools to implement this include the {{IPA}} template, and the {{lang-rus}} template with its |p=
parameter.
Such stress marks are foreign to English, and must not be used in romanized (Latin-alphabet) Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian words, either.
This is not to say that all Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian terms and names should have the IPA. Even if there's none, it's still preferable to show a clean and correct spelling first.