Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics/Phonetics/Archive 1

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IPA phonetics codes

Wouldn't it be great if each article had its IPA phonetics code, as in Stockholm? Stern 17:33, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

They do now. I mean, each phoneme article now has its corresponding IPA number in it. Denelson83 04:29, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Example clips

I think this is the perfect example of why Wikipedia should have wav soundclips more prominent...perhaps restricted, but it should still be allowed. Even the most adept at language would be dumbfounded by some of the explanations given by these phonetic pages, giving altogether inanely (practically speaking...analysis-wise, I know it's important) specific information. With a simple sound clip of the 'sound' in action, it would render the explanation a lot more useful. The air stopping or turbulance could be equated, once the listener understood what the sound was.

Thoughts? Lockeownzj00 02:20, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Even the most adept at language would be dumbfounded by some of the explanations given by these phonetic pages - that's so true! I'm adept at languages, and I can pronounce foreign words much better than most people, but I find the phonetics info on Wikipedia incomprehensible.
I've been trying to figure out pronunciation of the Vietnamese language, among others. But the articles (including Vietnamese alphabet) don't help a normal person know what the language sounds like. There's IPA symbols, and words like labiodental... (I can tell that labiodental means lip and teeth, but that still doesn't help.) Sound clips would help, but descriptions for the non-specialist are also very important. (My suggestion is to have IPA in one column of a table, and descriptions for the non-specialist in another). Singkong2005 09:06, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
Well, what can I say? Phonetics can be very complicated, just like any other long-established scientific discipline. But what exactly do you mean by "non-specialist descriptions"? Why not just wikilink the phonetic jargon you don't understand? I don't think there's any articulatory gesture or feature that we don't have a separate article on right now.
Peter Isotalo 13:28, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Phonetic vs. Phonemic

There has been a disagreement at the Deseret alphabet talk page on the difference between phonetic an phonemic alphabets. I'd like to varify with someone else who knows this field just which word we should use. Thanks in advance, WurdBendur 14:19, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciation sound files

Hello! It's about time I joined a project here.

I've been working with Swedish wiki lately, but after I found out about the audio template, I got really excited. I've been recording a bunch of pronunciation sound files, including an almost complete (I think I'm missing a consonant somewhere) Standard Swedish phonology.

Check it out at Commons or Swedish language.

I've also pronounced a bunch of Russian, Standard Mandarin and a little Arabic Japanese, and one file in Portugese. Names of countries, famous people, languages and cities. All of them applied with the audio template. I would like to make it easier to use by linking to simple instructions on hoq to play .ogg files. I want it to link to it through the little speaker image, but I don't know how to do it.

Any volunteers? - karmosin 23:44, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

Standardized phonology tables

Wouldn't it be a good idea if we tried to work out some sort of standard for phonology articles? At least for the tables. I like the looks of the vowel tables at Vietnamese phonology, but I don't see how we would fit pronounciation files into one of those.

The tables I've made at Swedish phonology aren't all that pretty, but they allow for sound files and IPA of the pronounced words. Any suggestions? Peter Isotalo 13:46, Mar 17, 2005 (UTC)

It might be possible to use a template to control the look of phonology charts, but, due to the variety of content, we probably don't want anything too rigid. Template:IPA/Template:Unicode is useful, but doesn't always use the best fonts. The examples of IPA could be bigger: table text defaults quite small, and I find it hard to read IPA in Code2000. I'm sure a few agreed principles could be implemented to make the phonology tables look like they belong to a related set. Gareth Hughes 19:08, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking about something more in the lines of Wikipedia:WikiProject Language Template. Guidelines for how to write articles and examples tables.
Could we actually make useful templates that would fit all languages? Seems unlikely to me, but I'm open to suggestions. Peter Isotalo 21:09, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

Organizing project page

I applied the WikiProject template to our project page and added bunch of templates and useful links. I'm going to try to advertise some to maybe breathe some life into the project. Peter Isotalo 14:58, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

Diagrams?

A while ago I made a bunch of diagrams for the various places of articulation on ar: (eg bilabial). I was thinking these might be useful to add, but I'm not necessarily sure of their accuracy; what do you think? - Mustafaa 20:21, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The red and black make him a little scary! I think it would be good to use them. When you called them diagrammes I was expecting a line drawing. I suggest you add them (via commons): they are accurate enough for me. --Gareth Hughes 23:14, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Organizing the articles

Nohat and the others who have been active with making articles on various phonetic terms and particularly the individual articles on sounds have done a very good job so far. I suggest we try organizing the articles on the individual sounds to begin with. Most of them are fairly uniform right now, but they could use some improvement as well as more info.

How about we choose single articles on manner of articulation, place of articulation, a certain article on a consonant and a vowel, and then try to work out some sort of standard for the rest of the articles?

There's also the need for sound samples that are GFDL and of decent quality. After talking to Nohat, I recorded a bunch of samples and replaced the old ones. Mostly fricatives, but some laterals as well. Feedback about the quality of these recordings is much appreciated. Peter Isotalo 16:26, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

I put up a list of the articles in Category:language phonologies. Most of them are fairly conmprehensive, though we should probably try to decide on a common name for the articles. XXX phonology seems to be a reasonable choice to me. Moving orhography to seperate articles might also be a good idea where this is needed.
Most of the articles are promising, though there are occasional nonstandard terms ("broad" and "slender" consonants in Irish phonology) and the tables in Hungarian phonology seem to be a bit too complex for the average reader. I really like Vietnamese phonology, though. Great work on that one, Ish. Most of the articles probably just need some rewrites and some proper tables to be very decent phonology articles. Peter Isotalo 23:17, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)
Hungarian phonology has redundant information (features in table) that should be removed that information is/should already be available in a more generic article about the phonemes. The IPA characters could be links to the appropriate articles. Exemples of words using those phonemes should be on different lines ---moyogo 02:10, 2005 Apr 16 (UTC)
What do you guys think of maybe making a Wikipedia:WikiProject Phonology Template that would be similar to Wikipedia:WikiProject Language Template? Peter Isotalo 11:29, Apr 16, 2005 (UTC)
A template would be good. We need to gather all the current Phonology pages, and see what's the best to have a template. ---moyogo 14:49, 2005 Apr 21 (UTC)
Ok, I started the template page. The various phonologies that we have are very diverse, so I just made a very rough first draft of what a template should include. Please join in at Wikipedia:WikiProject Phonology Template. Peter Isotalo 15:11, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

new cat

Category:Vowel

Category:Consonants

Category:Alveolar
Category:Fricative
Category:Trill

Category:Phonation

— ishwar  (SPEAK) 18:44, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

is this a bad idea? — ishwar  (SPEAK) 17:58, 2005 Jun 9 (UTC)

Swedish phonetics dispute

I would really, really, really appreciate some outside comments in Swedish phonology from people who know something about phonetics in general. Johan Magnus, Ruhrjung and Tuomas are questioning the use of even the most basic concepts of phonetics and favoring completely absurd non-standard or even downright incorrect terminology. It's everyhing from "let's use /å/ instead of /o/" to trying to assert their own views over linguistic literature and at half-dozen Swedish phonologies including the one featured in the IPA Handbook. Even when their own very scant source material is conflicting with their views they ignore it.

Inter is mediating, but it's just not enough as long the basics of phonetics and even the recommendations of the IPA itself are being ignored. Peter Isotalo 11:47, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

Re Phonology: phonotactics & syllable

I observe that there is very, very little info on phonotactics & syllable structure in the list of phonology page examples. Description cant be complete without this. peace — ishwar  (SPEAK) 15:47, 2005 Apr 21 (UTC)

Problem with Infobox IPA template

Last night I converted 49 articles to use Template:Infobox IPA. Unfortunately, there are another 45 that can't be converted to the template as it currently stands. The problem? The Infobox IPA template can only accept a single number, the UNICODE code point for a single character, and these remaining 45 pages all require a composite character for their IPA.

The only solution I could come up with would be to pass the template the full HTML for both the IPA and the HTML entity, rather than letting the template convert a naked code point into both.

Any thoughts? IceKarmaॐ 19:03, 2005 Apr 27 (UTC)

I made a new template Template:Infobox IPA base that allows full separate specification of the unicode and the entity, and remade Infobox IPA so that it just calls that template with the appropriate parameters. IPA characters that require multiple Unicode code points can call the base template directly. Nohat 19:47, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Getting into the project

Several things:

  • This is probably a stupid question, but what does one do to get into the project? Other than writing one's name down in the member list, I mean.
  • I stumbled across this and more or less fixed Russian phonology and Catalan phonology. Should we mark "fixed" items somehow?
  • Is it OK to discuss some guidelines for phonology articles? Here or in the project article page? I noted some things in Talk:Catalan phonology, but I'm not an admin so I'd like to see if this is OK with everybody. I mean things like when to use IPA, orthographic spelling, italics vs. quotes, etc.

--Pablo D. Flores 14:48, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I started a project template to discuss standardization of articles. I made a very basic first draft for how an article would be structured there and you're very welcome to make suggestions by editing the template or discussing at the talkpage. As for participation, I think it's nothing but a question of participating in discussions here and making improvements to any articles that have to do with phonetics.
Welcome aboard! Peter Isotalo 11:21, May 1, 2005 (UTC)

Discuss Template:IPA

At Template talk:IPA#Links, we are discussing possible changes to the Template:IPA (this is the template used to mark the use of the IPA, e.g. {{IPA|/aɪm ə sæmpl/}} which produces /aɪm ə sæmpl/). Please join there. J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 09:58, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Character templates

Following a suggestion I once encountered in Wikipedia (but I can't remember where), I've created a few templates to be used when entering IPA. Instead of HTML entities or numeric references, you can insert for example {{IPA:eng}} to get "ŋ" ("eng"), instead of having to remember or look up the Unicode for the eng. I have done this for a few very common characters, but I'd like some feedback and consensus before going on. Is this going to be useful/used? What kind of names should I use? Which characters should have templates? See my small list of templates. --Pablo D. Flores 21:25, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

hi. I think that the best (but probably most demanding of editors & developers) solution is to have wikipedia more "unicodified". I noticed that the wiki dictionary & other language wikipedias allow direct input of unicode text in these editing modules (or whatever you call them). Then, editors can create new keyboard layouts with any desired character (which is what I have done but of course I cant use them here) or use some other kind of input program.
but, I dont know any thing about the development (or non-development) of this. So, yes, your solution has the potential to make editing much speedier.
one thing that i dont know about but I think that I read somewhere is that using templates drains the web server (in some way I dont understand but essentially I think it creates too much communication between different areas in the server network). I think that something like this was discussed on one of the IPA templates, where some suggested that style sheets be used instead of the {{IPA|xxxx}}. Anyway, I hardly understand all of this.
If your templates (I'm going to call them "quik-chars") become popular, then I do have one suggestion: Make them even shorter. So, right now, engma is mapped to {{IPA:eng}} which has 11 symbols including 8 shift-key letters giving a total of 19 keystrokes (but really 18 since the letter "I" is automatically capitalized). The shift key strokes involving { and } are obligatory, I think, so you cant change this. But, I think you can omit some characters & shift key strokes. So perhaps: {{pa-ng}} or {{pa.ng}} or {{p.ng}}, which has 13 or 12 keystrokes ("pa" = "phonetic alphabet" or "p" = phonetics). A similar suggestion can be made for {{IPA:flap-r}}. There are many different r-letters, but if you choose the alveolar flap/tap as the most common one, then you simply have this: {{p.r}}. A retroflex could be: {{p.rr}}; approximant: {{p.ar}}; uvular trill: {{p.R}}; uvular glide: {{p.RR}}, etc. So, the benefit would be less keystroke = saved editor effort/time; disadvantage = more opaque/abstract, harder to learn (?).
maybe this isnt helpful. peace — ishwar  (SPEAK) 23:13, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)
Every suggestion is helpful; that's why I asked over here. There are several problems:
  1. The template namespace is already quite cluttered; that's why I employed a short prefix IPA:. Maybe pa. or p. or something like could be better. In any case, &#<whatever>; is much worse than any of the alternatives.
  2. The names for the templates are to be considered carefully. Alternatives:
    • Use something based on the Unicode name ("short O", "small I")
    • Use a contrastive phonemic description ("lax O", "flapped R")
    • Use SAMPA or something close to it
Using idiosyncratic combinations like rr or ar might be problematic, since they are not obvious at all to the writer or the editor. They might be easier to memorize than Unicode character codes, but unless there's a simple rule to figure out what they mean, they will turn into an added level of confusion.
Maybe abbreviating things a bit more could do the trick. I can live with ng and sh instead of eng and esh, but what do we call a lax E?
SAMPA doesn't cut it for me. I know the basics and instinctively associate uppercase vowels with laxness (laxitude?), so the lax E thing is not a problem for me, but SAMPA is not that good -- /A/ is not lax, and there are also such terrifying beauties as /2/ and /9/ (mid rounded front vowels, don't ask me which is which), and /5/ (lambda?).
The server draining thing is probably true. My intention was to have the templates ready for more or less casual IPA transcription (single words here and there, not too many IPA-specific non-Latin-1 characters), and certainly not to have a template for each IPA symbol.
I will sleep on this and try to come up with something more readable for tomorrow. Oyasuminasai! --Pablo D. Flores 01:47, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Just a side note on SAMPA [2 9]: I also thought they were terrible until someone told me that [2] is the vowel of French deux 'two' and [9] is the vowel of French neuf 'nine'. Since then, I think it's really an elegant solution, and the IPA vowels are based on French vowels anyway. -- j. 'mach' wust ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x 01:01, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

OK, I have the following idea. The template prefix would be ph-. The rest would be as brief as possible. A hyphen after the name means "rotated 180 degrees" (there are many symbols that are derived from others like this). A hyphen before means "barred" (that is, crossed with a horizontal bar). Suggestions?

Template Symbol
ph-schwa schwa
ph-a alpha
ph-a- rotated alpha
ph-e open E
ph-o open O
ph-i lax I (small capital I)
ph-u lax U (lowercase upsilon)
ph--i barred i
ph--u barred u
ph-m- rotated m (unrounded high back vowel)
ph-sh esh
ph-zh ezh
ph-ng eng
ph-ny palatal nasal (Spanish eñe)
ph-r flapped R
ph-v- rotated v (as in English cut)
ph-h- rotated h (rounded palatal approximant, as in French huit)
ph-y- rotated y (lateral palatal approximant, non-yeísta Spanish ll)
ph--j barred dotless j (voiced palatal stop)
Sounds like an interesting solution, but how do we differentiate things like the various fricatives that are reminiscent of "esh" or "ezh"? There are at least six to choose from; alveolo-palatal, postalveolar and retroflex.
Peter Isotalo 10:27, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
I'd go for X-SAMPA. It's short and unambiguous and already in use. Other solutions wouldn't be but yet another ASCII clone of the IPA. Though I'd rather wait until en.wikipedia.org finally converts to Unicode. -- j. 'mach' wust ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x 16:17, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Obsoleted. I have already put all of the non-typable IPA symbols into the "character palette" below the edit box you get when you click on "edit this page".  Denelson83  07:36, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Help improve vowel

The article on vowels needs work as per a nomination to remove from from FA-status. Any help is appreciated.

Peter Isotalo 22:33, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Phonotactics of "nucular" — opinions?

At Talk:Nucular, I've exposed a possible phonotactical motivation for the emergence of the word nucular. Now before I write it in the article, I'd like the opinion of an English language linguist, since I'm not entirely sure whether the exposed idea is acceptable. So could anybody have a look at it? -- j. 'mach' wust ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x 14:44, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

where does historical sound change stuff go?

I've been doing a lot of work recently in WP regarding sound changes. However, I'm not sure where to put them or what to name the appropriate section (historical sound changes? historical sound development? ...). Currently, the English sound changes are in "History of the English Language", the German stuff is in "German Phonology", the Hebrew stuff is divided between "Biblical Hebrew" (changes up through then) and "Modern Hebrew" (changes from then to now). So the questions:

  • where do we put the section?
  • what do we call it?
  • when there are multiple periods, do we separate them (like for Hebrew) or combine? and how do we separate? e.g. sound change from PIE to Proto-Germanic is separate, but Proto-Germanic to Modern English is combined. However, the latter could be broken in various ways, e.g. the early stuff up through West Germanic is common to all the West Germanic languages; and there is an 'Old English' page so conceivably the stuff through Old English could go there.

And what about "development from ..." pages? E.g. in "PIE language" there should be a section showing how the sounds developed into the major branches. what should it be called, where placed, etc.?

Benwing 09:40, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

How about adding some sort of history section to whatever phonology article is relevant? Start writing and see how it looks.
Peter Isotalo 19:10, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Could I get some more comments? I'm interested in making the various languages consistent but I'm reluctant to just move stuff around in the absence of consensus. At the very least: does sound-change history go in the X Phonology or History of X Language article? Benwing 22:47, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

I think you should have a section called "Historical development" or something like that in any relevant page (for example, for phonological changer over time, have a historical section in the X Phonology page). Consistency is important, but you'll have to deal with it on a case by case basis, since for some languages you may very well have enough material to create a separate page, while in others you'll only have some notes on historical development.
I suggest first getting the content into a section, and then look for consensus to move it to a separate article. --Pablo D. Flores 01:56, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

I would say descriptions on sound changes should go into an article on the History of the Foo language. If there are several steps, between Proto-Foo and Modern Foo, then ideally every intermediate step should have an article too, and I would say the sound changes getting from n-1 to n (where n is the level under discussion) should be included. For example, my vision for the sound changes between Proto-Indo-European and Modern Irish is this:

Of course, not all these articles are written yet, and the ones that are written don't include all the historical info yet, but ideally someday we should reach that point. --Angr/tɔk tə mi 12:47, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm with Angr on this one, though I think that really important sound changes might just as well be mentioned in the history section of the main article. Angr's chronology is pretty much identical to how I did it in Swedish language#History. I don't believe in having separate sections in general language history articles that focus only on phonology unless there's a very good reason for it.
Peter Isotalo 13:18, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Simplified length and stress notation

I've had some minor disputes about avoiding the proper IPA characters for length marks and to some exent primary stress. I know there are a few languages were the regular length mark would actually be needed to differentiate overlong vowels from long vowels which would use the half-length mark, but as far as I know these languages are very rare (Estonian is the only one I know of). When using Firefox on my iBook, these length marks have extremely long spaces after them and are quite disruptive to the transcriptions. Using an apostrophe when only primary stress needs to be indicated is also an option, but that could occasionally make the transcriptions look too iconsistent. Does anyone see any problem with using these regular characters instead of the actual Unicode character when there could be no source of confusion? Please don't tell me to simply switch fonts, though. This is most likely a problem to a lot of other users besides me, which is why I'm bringing it up. Another benefit would be to make it a bit easier to make transcriptions.

Peter Isotalo 17:04, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I too have had some trouble with the appearance of suprasegmentals, but usually it looks fine. I think it's mostly a font issue. Instead of hacking around it on Wikipedia, we should pressure the developers of Firefox and the text rendering system of OS X to make phonetic notation which is correctly transcribed into Unicode appear correctly! :-) Using the incorrect characters is like using <font> tags—unnecessarily intermingling content and presentation. The {{IPA}} template specifies a CSS class for spans containing IPA. You might try putting some different font specifiers in your custom CSS file (User:Karmosin/monobook.css). Try installing Gentium and adding this to your custom CSS file and see if that makes IPA look better for you: .IPA { font-family: Gentium }. I've had some trouble getting custom CSS files to reload properly, so you may want to add some other change to your CSS file to make sure that you're viewing with the right stylesheet. Nohat 17:55, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
*gurgle* Like I know anything about CSS. Thanks for the pointers, though. I'll try to fiddle with it when I feel brave enough.
Peter Isotalo 08:25, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Standardizing

The articles on individual sounds, both vowels and consonants, would look a lot better if we could agree on a unified layout. Proper leads are definetly needed, for example. Right now it's too much about just articulation and the physical properties of the sound, but few good summaries of how common it is in the world's languages, what sounds it tends to be contrasted with and all that. The "In English"-sections aren't what I'd call ideal either. Prevelance in English should be focused on, but not if the sound really doesn't exist.

I don't feel we need an actual template page for this, but please give some feedback on stucture and layout right here.

Peter Isotalo 08:13, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree. I think that, for one, we could give the consonants a single occurs in section (like in the vowel pages) rather than an in english section and an in other languages section (or a section for each language). I'll start changing them myself if nobody disagrees. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 00:19, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

UPA draft

I have a draft up on User:Cassowary/Uralic phonetic alphabet about the Uralic phonetic alphabet, to replace Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and Finno-Ugric transcription. I don’t know much about it though, and would appreciate any help. If you can, please dive in. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 11:14, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

I think I've got fairly good Unicode coverage, but I find there are a lot of UPA characters that do not display properly for me. If you can find a selection of fonts that generally do provide good coverage of UPA characters you might want to create something like template:IPA which incorporates them, and post a message saying which fonts (as long as they are free to download) are needed to view the alphabet. The article looks good otherwise. Gareth Hughes 11:33, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I'm currently using User:Cassowary/UPA as a template, which is based on template:IPA, but (a) strips it down to Code 2000 which is the only Unicode font I know of that has these characters and (b) puts it into italics. It also uses the class UPA for personal customisations. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 11:53, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

BTW: In the table, there's some words in German that I don’t know what they mean. I haven’t looked through everything I have on it yet, so they might be explained elsewhere, but if anyone can translate them (‘Schnaltz­laue’, ‘Dentipalatal (mouillierte)’, ‘Präpalatale (mouillierte, bezw. anteriores)’), I’d me most gratful! —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 11:59, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

"Schnalzlaute" means clicks and "mouilliert" means "softened" (as in "palatalized"). Things would be easier to read if you didn't put the symbols in italics. --Angr/tɔk tə mi 12:34, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Und ‘bezw.’? Thanks. You're probably right about the italics too... —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 13:01, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Usually abbreviated "bzw.", it's short for beziehungsweise. "X bzw. Y" can be translated "X and Y, respectively" or "X or Y, as the case may be" or "X and/or Y", depending on context. Bad translators often translate it "X resp. Y", mistakenly thinking that "respectively" can be used as a conjunction in English and can be abbreviated "resp.". --Angr/tɔk tə mi 14:04, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
Thanks. Interestingly, I saw that bad translation (X resp. Y) just today... Suspected it was foreign language interference, had no idea what the source was :) —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 15:34, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project

Hi, I'm a member of the Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing using these criteria, and we are looking for A-Class and good B-Class articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Can you recommend any suitable articles on phonetics? To my non-expert eye Swedish phonology looks like a possible A-class article, what do you think? Are there featured articles in this area?. Please post your suggestions and comments here. Cheers, Walkerma 05:02, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Complicated phoneme tables

I'm not terribly happy about how the phoneme tables are handled in sopme main language articles, particularly Russian language#Consonants. There's a tendency to be super accurate in defining the exact realization of individual phonemes. I think diacritics should be dispensed with completely in the tables unless they represent distinguishing features within the specific language. Keeping the diacritics in the tables can be a problem because of systems not capable of reading the characters and, more importantly, because it's a potential breeding ground for in-fighting over which dialects should or should not be represented among the phonemes. Since phonemes are abstract and generalized concepts anyway, I think the finer points of phonetic gestures should be made in prose and in the sepearate phonologies, not in the main tables.

Peter Isotalo 14:09, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Insufficient consonant data

The articles for the following IPA sounds need data on their linguistic usage and extent, such as examples of words that use those sounds and the languages they are found in, along with whether they are allophonic or phonemic in those words:

[ɖ], [ʡ], [ʂ], [ʑ], [ʐ], [ʝ], [ħ], [ʜ], [ʢ], [ɦ], [ɻ], [ɽ], [ɭ], & [ʟ].

If such information is not provided, I may have to submit these articles for deletion. --  Denelson83  07:34, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I've done what I've can with various Swedish and Norwegian examples, but I feel that especially the Swedish is showing up a bit too often. Please don't hesitate to replace any Swedish allophones or assimilations with phonemes from other languages. Deletion due to lack of context sounds a bit drastic, though...
Peter Isotalo 06:08, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Note that lack of context is one of the criteria for speedy deletion (A1), although these would be considered broad examples.  Denelson83  07:42, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
All the above-mentioned articles now include examples of languages where the respective consonant is used. —Angr 19:05, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Bulgarian conflict

A user at Bulgarian language is refusing to recognize vowel charts and analyses taken from the IPA handbook as valid. Some outside views and comments would be nice.

Peter Isotalo 17:13, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

AFD

I have nominated Linguolabial trill for deletion. Please participate in the discussion. Angr (talk • contribs) 06:13, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

hi y'all

question for my phonetics people: if "*Lisp" is spoken "Star-Lisp", is it pronounced as such? I'm sure it doesn't matter terribly, but my mind gets stuck on such things. see talk:connection Machine#pronouncing * "star". I was also thinking of asking at talk:pronunciation. kzz* 18:28, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Icelandic þ and ð

There are now several places on wikipedia which claim that Icelandic ð does not correspond to IPA: [ð] but rather a voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative (and correspondingly for þ). See [1] and [2]. I am a bit sceptical about this and would appreciate if there was a source provided. Unfortunately, User:Kwamikagami who added this is away so I am asking here. Thanks for any help. Stefán Ingi 19:04, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for the lack of refs. This was a while ago, and I'm out of the country, but I believe the source was Ladefoged's Sounds of the World's Languages. kwami 17:13, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for replying, I realise that you are away, in the end I found the first reference for this, see Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language#Icelandic þ and ð (repost with more info). Now the question is whether it is necessary to use the subscripts [ð̠] and [θ̠] in IPA transcriptions of Icelandic words on Wikipedia or whether simple [ð] and [θ] can be considered close enough. Stefán Ingi 17:23, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I'd say simple [ð] and [θ] are enough in broad transcription, and even in narrow transcription unless the precise articulation of the sounds is the topic under discussion. User:Angr 17:53, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
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