Talk:The Atlas of North American English

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Possible additional information?[edit]

The Atlas does not use standard IPA notation. So, could this article possibly provide a conversion from the Atlas's notation to standard IPA? If the answer is no, then the answer is no. Thank you.LakeKayak (talk) 16:54, 20 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea. Added. Nardog (talk) 07:31, 2 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, uh, I just deleted this section because I thought it was unencyclopedic. "What phonemic notation is used by this one specific book?" is not a question of major interest for an encyclopedia article describing the book and its significance. AJD (talk) 20:49, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Couldn't disagree more. First, the notation ANAE uses is not just some phonemic notation. It is diaphonemic and doesn't strictly follow the IPA's principles (as evident in the use of ⟨h⟩ and ⟨y⟩) to account for chain shifts easily. Second, it's not used by just "this one specific book". Not only is it seen in the co-authors' other works,[1][2] it's also been adopted by other authors.[3][4][5] Couldn't be more encyclopedic if you ask me. Nardog (talk) 02:51, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why not IPA?[edit]

From the article: "The following tables provide a comparison between ANAE's notation and Wikipedia's diaphonemic transcription system," and the corresponding column of the tables is headed WP rather than IPA.

But Wikipedia's diaphonemic transcription system is the same as IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), as far as I can tell, and IPA is far more widely known than "Wikipedia's diaphonemic transcription system." Why not just refer to IPA?

Omc (talk) 14:10, 16 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Because there is no such thing as the IPA transcription system for English. There are competing IPA-based schemes for transcription of English (especially American English), so there is no neutral system to compare ANAE's with aside from the one that is widely used across Wikipedia. Nardog (talk) 14:29, 16 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Notation section[edit]

I don't understand why there's a huge section on this page about the notation ANAE uses. The notation used in any given research work isn't a particularly important fact about the work in the way that, say, its findings and its intellectual impact and influence are. The formant normalization methodology used in ANAE, for example, is of greater relevance for understanding the book's significance, and we don't spend a third of this article explaining that. Using that much space on explicating the notation doesn't help the reader get a clearer understanding of what ANAE is and why it's important. If there's an article on the varieties of notation used for expressing English phonemes, this could go there, since it is interesting and influential as an example of a phonemic notation system. But it's not that important a fact about ANAE. AJD (talk) 06:06, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

We've discussed this right above. If you're advocating for relegating the section below the findings, I can get behind that (so I just did it), but removing it altogether makes little sense. The notation is not only influential (how is that not an important fact about ANAE?!) but designed specifically to allow for systematic comparison between accents, which helps illustrate the aim of the volume. That's a weird beef you have. Nardog (talk) 10:35, 4 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, maybe I'm getting too worked up about this; I spend a lot of time on WP:FANCRUFT-filled TV episode and character articles, where I'm like, no, Wikipedia does not need a comprehensive list of all of Toph Beifong's ancestors or whatever, and this felt like kind of the same thing to me. I don't think ANAE's phonemic transcriptions are all that influential, honestly—15 years later and they're not really very widely used, unlike ANAE's empirical and theoretical results. And devoting fully a third of the article about ANAE to something (i.e., an explanation of the phonemic notation) that makes up roughly 2% of ANAE's actual content, and doesn't appear to be highlighted as especially important in reliable sources about ANAE (though it is sometimes mentioned), seems like giving it WP:UNDUE weight, compared to the one third of this article that summarizes ANAE's 250 pages of dialectological results. AJD (talk) 17:42, 4 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then expand the article. WP:UNDUE is part of the NPOV policy. One can't possibly give the book due or undue weight by describing its notation system. Nardog (talk) 14:30, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]