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This is such a complicated, counterintuitive system. Why not just use the IPA, which is sensible and easy to learn? --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 1 July 2005 09:49 (UTC)

Two good reasons:

1. It's easier than the IPA for most native speakers, at least in the US, where people have no idea what the IPA is. It's actually more intuitive, because naive native speakers have a hard time accepting that ch = [tʃ], or that oe = [ʌʊ], since they hear them as single sounds. The IPA is fundamentally more difficult in much the same way that an alphabet is counterintuitive compared to a syllabary: People exposed to the idea of writing will come up with logographies or syllabaries on their own, but have to be taught alphabetic writing, which isn't easy. Similarly, people have to be taught that some English phonemes are not single segments, and they also find that difficult. I've TA'd basic phonetics, and some people get extremely frustrated. And that's at a college level—we've also got to think of kids in middle school. You and I could probably read the entire article in IPA, but it's a real barrier for a lot of people.
2. Secondly, a spelling pronunciation like this can be cross-dialectal. With "ar as in car" and "aw as in caw", it doesn't matter whether you speak a rhotic dialect, or whether you merge your back vowels. That is, we can specify all the phonemic distinctions of all English dialects (or at least all the ones we care to), without people objecting that it isn't representative of how they speak, or making accusations of cultural imperialism, and without needing to list multiple pronunciations. Of course, we could use the IPA the same way, but it would be immediately reverted for not being phonetic. But no one expects English spelling to be phonetic or phonemic, so they don't object to having two or three conventions for the same sound (such as o, aw, aa, which are all the same for me, or aa, ar in RP). That is, in some ways it's a more practical system than the IPA (if only because IPA conventions are geared toward a different goal, one of precise phonetic rendition, which we want to avoid).

I've had this argument before; some people hate the idea of spelling pronunciations, but many others like it. I think we need both, because let's face it, (1) not everyone is going to bother learning the IPA, but (2) the IPA is clearly better for non-native speakers (and of course preferred by most native speakers who know it). And yes, I've read Wikipedia policy on pronunciation, but I'm more interested in making the articles accessible and easy to follow.

That said, if you notice phonemic distinctions that we're missing, or have ideas on how to make this ad hoc system more intuitive, please let me know. And thanks for not deleting my guides when you added the IPA, which I've just never got around to adding myself.

You also mentioned a disagreement about stress in the Megaclite talk page. We should probably have the discussion here.

Can you give me a minimal pair contrasting primary and secondary stress in naturalized English words? Ladefoged's of the opinion there aren't any, and he makes his claim for "English", not just General American English. There might be something in compound words (I'm not sure yet), but I haven't been able to find a contrast otherwise, at least in my dialect, which is pretty close to general American. (His point is that the obvious distinction is one of tonic stress, and only occurs in citation or at the end of a prosodic unit, but disappears otherwise. Other cases are due to vowel reduction, not to the degree of 'respiratory activity' (or whatever stress is).) —kwami 2005 July 1 20:13 (UTC)

P.S. Stress rules: the Romans changed the stress of Greek words, and in English we follow the Latin stress, not the classical Greek. If the penult in long, it's stressed; otherwise the antepenult is. Then you go back again: if the syllable two before that stress is long, it's also stressed; otherwise the one before it is (assuming the word's that long). "Long" means either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a closed syllable. Ess may or may not close a syllable, depending on the following consonant, and also convention. (Usually when there are alternate stress patterns, there's an ess involved; either that or someone didn't know that a vowel was long.) Long vowels are not always apparent in Greek script, which was defective (7 letters for 12 vowels), but are sometimes indicated by a macron in Latin. When there are two stressed syllables, the final one takes tonic ("primary") stress in citation. So Megaclite should be 2.4.1.3, not 1.4.2.3 (w/ numbers 1 to 4 representing primary to quaternary stress).

Point-by-point response:

It's easier than the IPA for most native speakers, at least in the US, where people have no idea what the IPA is.

That's a matter of opinion. Some of the transcriptions may be easier for U.S. speakers, but some of them (aa for /ɑː/, dh for /ð/) aren't. And even though most Americans who haven't studied linguistics don't know the IPA, it's really easy to learn. I've taught introductory phonetics and phonology too, and no one has ever had difficulty learning to passively read IPA transcriptions (learning to actively transcribe things into IPA is definitely harder). I think anyone intelligent enough to use Wikipedia--including middle school kids--can learn the IPA chart for English for passive recognition in less than an hour. Also, of course, not everyone using English Wikipedia is American.

a spelling pronunciation like this can be cross-dialectal

As it stands, it's cross-dialectal between General American and RP, but it still blurs distinctions found in other accents, like Scottish English (where pairs like earn/urn and horse/hoarse are distinct)

not everyone is going to bother learning the IPA

Again, I don't believe learning the IPA is more difficult or time-consuming than learning the system presented here.

thanks for not deleting my guides when you added the IPA

You're welcome. I have to admit I was tempted, but I figured it would just get reverted if I did, so why bother?

Can you give me a minimal pair contrasting primary and secondary stress in naturalized English words?

A pure minimal pair? No, but what about Tènnesée vs. chíckadèe? They're both monomorphemic and both consist of two light syllables followed by a heavy syllable, but one goes secondary-primary and one goes primary-secondary. Thanks for clearing up Megaclite; of course I know how it would be stressed in Latin, but English doesn't always follow Latin stress in Greco-Latin words (for example, hélicòpter not hèlicópter). --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 2 July 2005 12:08 (UTC)

I don't like the aa either. We had ah, but then had a British user who insisted that in Britain, ah represents IPA [ax], and kept removing all the "aspiration". But even so, learning a couple new digraphs is easier than a bunch of new IPA symbols (especially [j]). And of course not all of our readers are Usonian, which is why we need the IPA too.

As for other dialects, I'd love to include Scotts. I'm just not capable of doing it myself. It doesn't look like your IPA conventions make those distinctions either, but if you include them, I'll happily add them to the spelling pronunciation. (Some Usonian dialects make those distinctions too; I just don't control them.)

As for your stress examples, they're not so convincing in context. I'd transcribe them as /ˈtɛn.ə.ˈsiː/ and /ˈtʃɪk.ə.diː/. What you're hearing as primary stress in the first is tonic stress, not lexical; it disappears as soon as you say something like 'Tennessee is next to Kentucky' (unless of course you emphasize 'Tennessee' - but you could give either the 'ten' or the 'see' syllable a little extra stress when emphasizing the word, so the distinction's not lexical). What you're hearing as secondary stress on 'chickadee' I believe is tertiary - that is, an unstressed but full vowel. Take out the reduced vowel in the middle, and the stress is similar to 'party' or 'wacky', which we wouldn't argue have two stressed syllables. 'Helicopter' is /ˈhɛl.ə.kɑp.tɹ/ (ignoring the nature of the reduced vowel). Using traditional stress level numbers, 'Tennessee' is 2.4.1, 'chickadee' is 1.4.3, and 'helicopter' is 1.4.3.4. Ladefoged believes that the full/reduced vowel distinction is not stress, which is different articulatorily (this covers the distinction between 3 and 4); and that tonic/prosodic stress is irrelevant when speaking of lexical stress (which covers 1 vs. 2). If you put words in a frame where the primary/secondary distinction disappears, what you're left with is stressed vowel, full vowel, reduced vowel.

I agree 'helicopter' is a little weird. I'm sure it was /ˈhɛl.ə.ˈkɑp.tɹ/ (that is, 2.4.1.4 like 'Megaclite') when people first started using it in English. 'Megaclite' might do the same thing if for some odd reason it were to become a household word for a few decades; usually vowel reduction (and presumably stress loss, though I don't know if any studies have been done) are proportional to frequency, such as 'mammary' (3 vowels) vs. 'emery' (2 vowels + syllabic ar) vs. memory' (often 2 syllables). I think it's a pretty safe bet that all of the moons and asteroids will be secondary-primary.

Just checked the OED to see what they did with 'helicopter'. I thought they might have an alternate stress pattern, but they don't: they don't give it any secondary stress at all, unlike e.g. 'heliocentric'. (With 'chickadee' they have only primary stress as well, put place it on the ultima, which I've never heard.) —kwami 2005 July 3 01:57 (UTC)

I'd never give a non-compound word more than one primary stress, so /ˈtɛn.ə.ˈsiː/ is impossible for me. I also don't believe in more than three levels of stress at the lexical level in English: primary, secondary, and unstressed. (There are languages that seem to have tertiary stress at the lexical level, but English isn't one of them.) In the version of metrical phonology I believe (the one developed by Hayes), syllables are grouped into trochaic feet, and if a phonological word has more than one foot, then only one of those feet gets to be the head of the p-word. So my interpretation of Tennessee and chickadee is:

(      x)           ( x      ) Word level
(x  .)(x)           ( x  .)(x) Foot level
Tennessee           chicka dee

and you only get more levels in a sentence like

(                        x   ) Utterance level
(      x)(               x   ) Intonational phrase level
(      x)(    x) (       x   ) Phonological phrase level
(      x)    (x)     (   x   ) Word level
(x  .)(x) .  (x)   .  . (x  .) Foot level
Tennessee is next to Kentucky

So the secondary stress on "tenn" doesn't disappear exactly, but it gets overshadowed by the stronger stresses on "see", "next", and "tuck".

I'm also not convinced that chickadee is utterly without stress on the final syllable, though, because for me at least there's a difference between the stress pattern of chíckadèe and that of Kénnedy:

( x      )          (x     )
( x  .)(x)          (x  .).
chicka dee          Kennedy

So the only way to represent the three-way difference is /ˌtɛnəˈsi/, /ˈtʃɪkəˌdi/, /ˈkɛnədi/. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 3 July 2005 15:01 (UTC)

For me, Kennedy and chickadee have the same stress pattern, except for a slight distinction in the first syllable caused by the different consonants. (I assume chickadee is different in RP, and this is reflected in the OED.) I'm also not claiming English has tertiary stress, when I don't believe it even has secondary! I'm comfortable with Ladefoged's conclusions that the primary/secondary distinction in English is prosodic. Hayes is distinguishing a lot of subphonemic detail—actually, a lot of theoretical detail, which (as far as I can tell) is justified by the theory itself more than by laboratory measurements. We could debate this all day, but in the end, such details are not necessary for a phonemic pronunciation guide. If you tell English speakers which syllables take stress and which don't, as a binary distinction, and which vowels are full and which are reduced, they have all the information they need to pronounce the word correctly. Clause-finally, the primary-secondary distinction will emerge automatically. (A phonetic guide for the non-native speaker is a different matter, of course.) kwami 2005 July 3 20:43 (UTC)

Well, I still think a distinction between primary and secondary stress is not always predictable should be indicated. There's a reason that virtually every dictionary indicates a difference between them (and does not indicate truly subphonemic information like aspiration, nasalization, and flapping). And my intuitions as a native English speaker did not help me decide between Mégaclìte and Mègaclíte; they both sound like plausible pronunciations. Or consider the British pronunciation wèekénd vs. the American pronunciation wéekènd; British and American English have virtually the same rules for the placement of sentence stress, so it can't be that. It must be lexical. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 3 July 2005 20:56 (UTC)

I'm certainly not qualified to settle a debate between Ladefoged and Hayes. As for dictionaries, sure, but for a long time it was assumed that the primary-secondary distinction was lexical (and this is certainly the intuition of native speakers when given a word in citation form, which is what dictionaries primarily deal with). According to Ladefoged, this assumption was because most phoneticians considered words in isolation, or at best in made-up sentences, and didn't notice the role that prosody played.

As for weekend, I'm sure the distinction is lexical, but that doesn't require secondary stress. I don't know RP, but it could either be a compounding difference, much like a blackbird vs. a black bird, or it may be that the stress is simply on a different syllable, much like the US vs. RP pronunciations of chickadee. Again, I have yet to see a case where the stress pattern of a word cannot be explained in terms of one degree of stress, plus prosody and full vs. reduced vowels. Not saying there aren't any, just that none of the illustrations of secondary stress I've seen are the least bit convincing. (I had also assumed the primary-secondary distinction was robust, because it fit my speaker intuitions, until I came across Ladefoged's counter arguments.)

Anyway, the two possibilities for Megaclite I'd represent as meg'-a-klye-tee (as 'helicopter' is transcribed in the OED) vs. meg'-a-klye'-tee. kwami 2005 July 3 22:31 (UTC)

well, this is unprofessional. why do we need a pronunciation scheme just for asteroids? We'll end up with Car models pronunciation key, Dog breeds pronunciation key, Football players' names pronunciation key, or Pokemon characters pronunciation key. Just give IPA, or, if you must, SAMPA, and be done. 83.79.181.171 20:30, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

We don't. That is simply what it was created for. Please feel free to use it for all the car medel, dog breed, football player, and Pokemon character articles, if you feel that that is a good use of your time. We can then move this to "pronunciation key".

The IPA has serious practical problems, not the least of which is the fact that people can't agree on an IPA transcription of English words. Anything you propose will be attacked as cultural imperialism. A spelling-pronunciation system is much more practical for native English speakers. For non-native speakers, we should have the IPA as well. Someone started this; please feel free to pick up where they left off.

However, if you are able to come up with an IPA transcription system that is regionally neutral, I'd love to hear about it, and I would support changing over to your system. kwami 23:54, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

You could probably translate this system into an IPA-based system, but it wouldn't be either truly phonetic (there's far too much variety in English sounds for that) or truly phonemic for any dialect. British dictionaries mostly give RP-ish phonemic transcriptions in IPA, but they're pretty useless once you get more than about 100 miles from London.--JHJ 18:23, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Charon and other comments

I was looking at the pages about the new satellites of Pluto, and found the bit of the Charon page about pronunciation potentially confusing. The pronunciation I'm familiar with is (in the OED's IPA-based transcription) /ˈkɛːrən/, with the same first vowel as Mary. This would be the kair'-un pronunciation, I take it. So I'd take the alternative pronunciation shair'-un to represent /ˈʃɛːrən/. However, we're then told that it sounds like Sharon, which I pronounce as /ˈʃarən/, with the vowel of marry. I presume this is caused by the North American tendency to merge the vowels of marry, merry and Mary. So I looked at the Pronunciation of asteroid names page to see how other examples which I would say with /ar/ were treated, and they seem to have the same problem: for example Arizona, shown with air. Similarly Erika is shown with air, but in Britain (and presumably the parts of North America without the merger) I think it would have /ɛ/ and not /ɛː/. Miriam with eer is another problem along the same lines.

Some other comments:

• I make the for/four distinction referred to. I don't really think it's necessary to devise a separate symbol (though oar would be the one I'd suggest); the spelling is generally a good enough guide that a comment that for some or indicates two different vowels should be enough.
• This probably isn't a problem for asteroids, but there's no way of indicating an /ɪə/ (as in non-rhotic near) which doesn't arise from loss of /r/. Words like idea and theatre are commonly pronounced like this.
• When I see that u represents the vowel in us, I'm left wondering whether this means the weak pronunciation of us (with /ə/) or the strong one (with /ʌ/). It seems that the answer is "both": this doesn't seem right to me. I don't think of intonation as ending like shun. I would suggest using the IPA ə symbol, as some dictionaries do, and avoiding words with weak pronunciations as examples. (Example of a near-minimal pair: Ms with /ə/, buzz with /ʌ/; this is my own speech, but both pronunciations are given by the OED.)

--JHJ 18:23, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Somewhere on the talk pages I state that I speak a rhotic dialect and merge Mary merry marry and for four, and therefore that the system needs to be expanded and verified by someone who makes these distinctions. Sorry, I'm pretty useless myself. Also, if we had these words in the IPA, there would be an unjustified aura of precision about them. kwami 19:44, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Some suggestions for the vowels before /r/:

• arr as in marry (same as air in much of North America)
• err as in merry (same as air in much of North America)
• irr as in mirror (same as eer in much of North America)
• orr as in orange (same as or in much of North America)
• urr as in hurry (same as ur in much of North America)

What do you think?

I also think schwas in closed syllables should be distinguished from u, for the reasons given above, but if you don't like the idea of using the IPA ə symbol (which is how Chambers dictionary's non-IPA system solves the problem) I don't know what to suggest. Une possibility would be to use a diacritic, but the system doesn't use any at the moment.

--JHJ 12:47, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't have objections to any of those, except perhaps that I think that the arr spelling should be reserved for one of less common sounds in Greco-Latin words. (Actually, I don't know that these all even occur in Greco-Latin words.) The real problem is figuring out which vowels to use. As far as I can remember, none of my refs made these distinctions.

Do you think using or as in for and our as in four might confuse people?

kwami 20:40, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

To your first paragraph, I chose arr for that one based on the spelling of marry and because it fits in well with the pattern of the other suggestions. As for working out the distinctions, it depends. I would think that any British source would make all of them (except for urr/ur, which is complicated, I'm not aware of any of these mergers occurring in UK accents at all), but I can believe that an American source might not. In some cases the spelling will give a strong hint, e.g. I think i and y essentially never represent the eer vowel unless the pronunciation is consciously "foreign", but that won't be good at distinguishing arr from air. In some cases British dictionaries give a clue, e.g. the fact that OED2 shows Arizonite with /æ/ strongly suggests arr for Arizona (which is indeed how I pronounce the name of the US state). But in some cases, e.g. Arethusa, I don't know how to find out. My intuition says arr, but my intuition is often wrong when guessing pronunciation from spelling, especially with this sort of name.

To your second paragraph, yes, because our is one of the most ambiguous spelling combinations in the language (in my dialect it can be pronounced in at least 7 different ways: hour, tour, four, flourish, courier, journey, colour). If you or anybody else feels that this scheme really needs to make this distinction, then I'd suggest oar, but I make this distinction, find or reasonable for both, and can't find a single example on Pronunciation of asteroid names where the choice between them isn't obvious based on the spelling (or is generally like four before a vowel, and like for before a consonant, with a handful of exceptions, mostly after a /p/, which I think are almost all listed on horse-hoarse merger.--JHJ 17:46, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I've made some edits, but there may be several that I've missed, and when I had no basis other than unreliable spelling-based intuition (such as Arethusa) I left them as they were.--JHJ 18:29, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I would think that Greco-Latin borrowings would be fairly set - stressed ar in one word should be similar to stressed ar in another.

Thanks for the IPA table. That should help out a lot. kwami 11:18, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

If anyone can help out with the Scottish, I'd think that [ʌɹ, ɛɹ, ɪɹ] for GA [ɹ] could be distinguished as ur, er, ir (as in fur err fir?). I can't do this myself. kwami 23:29, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Look at you guys!

In case anybody needed proof that a phonemic transcription would be better than this "spelling-pronunciation", look back at all of the to-ing and fro-ing this insanely labour-intensive workaround has created! Why not just use IPA, for pity's sake?... (I'm not talking about a narrow phonetic transcription, mind you, just a sensible, flexible phonemic one.) QuartierLatin1968 21:19, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Have you been able to come up with one that works? No one else on Wikipedia has. kwami 00:16, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Really? I haven't seen too many IPA transcriptions that have seemed contentious to me, although I haven't made a systematic study of it. I mean, most of the correspondences between G.Am. and RP are so regular that you can 'translate' them readily in your head – except where they're irregular, in which case you can surely just write out both. Is there someplace I should go ("WP:IPA coordination" or something) to make some positive sort of contribution? QuartierLatin1968 19:16, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Remember that most British people, for example, don't speak RP. IPA transcriptions of British English tend to be very biased towards RP, using symbols like [əʊ] which are not appropriate for the sounds found in many other British accents. Using a cross-dialectal non-IPA transcription like this one (where oe is the vowel in goat, regardless of whether you say [gəʊt] or [goːt] or [gɑʊt] or [goət] or whatever) seems to me to be better at representing a wider range of English accents than IPA-based transcriptions. (It's not so bad if you use phonemic rather than phonetic IPA transcriptions, but even there there are problems, like distinctions that RP has lost but other dialects have retained, and you also get into debates about what style of phonemic transcriptions to use.)--JHJ 20:49, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

The IPA for English article, which unofficially sets the norm for Wikipedia, has different conventions for different dialects. I've seen heated arguments over 'cultural imperialism' in several articles when the IPA is used for English pronunciation — usually a disagreement over GA vs RP, but sometimes Oz or NZ. People haven't gotten upset over the use of the IPA in the astronomy articles, and my guess is that's because the pronunciation respelling accommodates their dialect, and they see the IPA as being for non-native speakers or for people linguistically sophisticated enough to move between dialects. It's no real effort to add the pronunciation respelling, it seems to avoid arguments, and it accommodates a wider audience. The only negative I can see is a possible lack of standardization, but that's what this key is meant to settle. kwami 20:13, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

....

for/fore: If a distinction for horse/hoarse is desired why not or/ohr? Oh! is an exclamation readily understood and provides the right sound for that group of words. Or or/ore; or/oar would also work. As someone who does in fact make this distinction I would find it useful. After all, your goal appears to be as inclusive as possible, not exclusive, and a good thing too. I would in that respect question an earlier comment that the use of "ah" to represent the sound of "father" is unsuitable because of some vague linguistic quibble. Is that important? Is it possible to misunderstand Ah! in any re-spelling scheme in which simple words are relied upon for direction? I do not wish to be provocative and upset cherished notions but one could (for the sake of consistency) continue this line of reasoning by suggesting "uh" for the sound found in "cup" and similar words, thus providing some measure of regulated variety: ah/oh/uh, all common utterances. And, why not "ær" for the vowel sound (for many people) of marry? This would distinguish Mary/merry/marry as a/e/æ. Yes, the letter "æ" is not a standard letter, but does that matter? If the keyboard has it why not use it? Merely a suggestion. -regards, dshep/10aug/2006 ....

title?

Perhaps the name of this article should be more in line with Pronunciation respelling for English? kwami 17:20, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Since there have been no comments, I'm moving it to "Pronunciation spelling key".

This article should not exist

It conflicts with Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation) and it is full of self-references. —Keenan Pepper 21:55, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Print encyclopedias have keys: the EB, Columbia, World Book all do, so there's nothing wrong with a guide for wikipedia. The ban on self-refs is for, say, mentioning the talk page in an article or other unprofessional practices, not for professional practices such as defining terms and usage! kwami 20:40, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. It also appears to be unverifiable original research lacking any citations. —Michael Z. 2006-03-20 17:32 Z

What are you talking about? It's a pronunciation key. It doesn't need citations any more than a table of contents does. kwami 20:40, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

I must agree, yes, the self-refs are OK and citations are unneccessary. This doesn't consist of research original or otherwise. There's nothing to varify. It is a key. Nothing wrong with keys ... no, nothing at all. However the key which has been chosen for Wikipedia is not what you find on this page but the IPA which is, of course, by far the best choice with its being the only one with acceptance beyond this encyclopedia or that. No, this "help" page should not exist. Jimp 05:16, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

IPA is the best choice for transcribing actual sounds, no doubt about it. But that's not what we're trying to do in the contexts that this scheme was intended for. The trouble with IPA for those is that it can really only represent one dialect at a time, whereas schemes like this one (I don't claim that this one is perfect, but it's not bad) can make a reasonable attempt at transcribing several at once. The phonetic (as opposed to phonemic) transcriptions preferred by some Wikipedia editors are particularly dialect-specific - I really don't like the style of List of words of disputed pronunciation, for example. --JHJ 08:11, 29 August 2006 (UTC)