Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Help:Pronunciation

Help:Pronunciation

This page propounds a representation of pronunciation which is the invention of its editors and therefore qualifies as OR. Although labelled a Help page, it is being appealed to as if it were an established policy page. There is simply no reason -- nor is it feasible -- for Wikipedia to set up its own, idiosyncratic, pronunciation scheme which is recognized nowhere else in the world. RandomCritic (talk) 14:25, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

• Keep, the IPA is not Wikipedia's "own idiosyncratic pronunciation scheme"; rather, it is recognized throughout the world (the I of IPA standing for International). —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 16:15, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
• Speedy keep per Angr. Will ^(talk) 17:03, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. What the nominator is objecting to is not the IPA per se, but to not choosing a specific English dialect as its basis. He transcribes what appears to be his personal pronunciation in his articles, and rejects being tagged for violating neutrality. However, he also rejects choosing the dictionary pronunciation that would allow you to predict dialectical variation so that all national dialects are covered, claiming that "is impossible" (which it clearly is not) and "does violence to English". kwami (talk) 18:12, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and to avoid the problem, the nominator removed the IPA altogether and wrote the entries with acute accents to indicate stress.[1] While I'm not opposed to that, I don't see how changing English orthography is less OR than chosing an IPA standard. kwami (talk) 18:20, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Nobody "changed English orthography"! First of all, the words aren't English -- they're Latin and Greek. Second, the use of diacritic accent marks to represent the accent -- which is the essential point in determining the pronunciation, which Kwami continually mangles in his attempts to re-write pronunciations whose principles he doesn't understand -- is a really well established type of transcription when dealing with classical names (Smith, William (1867). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.). I can cite usage of this system. Can User:Kwamikagami cite where his system is used outside of Wikipedia? RandomCritic (talk) 02:52, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Kwami is falsely claiming that *his* preferred pronunciation is a "dictionary pronunciation". It is not. If it were so, he could easily deal with the OR problem by citing the dictionary the usage he is touting is based on. But there is no such thing; it is something that he, personally, has made up for use solely on Wikipedia. That is totally inappropriate.

By the way, what I said was impossible was providing an underlying, phonemic scheme that is the same for all dialects of English (even "all national dialects", though I doubt that Kwamikagami is including, say, Jamaican English). Kwamikagami isn't a phonologist, and doesn't appear to understand what "phonemic" means, so it's not surprising that he's confused. The issues are really much more complex than he'd like to believe.

RandomCritic (talk) 02:27, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

• Keep WP:NOR and WP:NPOV are not reasons to delete. I find it suspicious that the nom has brought up these same issues in the talk page and has met with resistance. Rather than continue to discuss it or concede that he's not getting his way, he's decided we should delete the page. Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. Even if it's agreed that a pan-dialectal representation is unbecoming, Help:Pronunciation would be the place to set up policy on pronunciation in accordance with WP:MOS#National varieties of English. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:57, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

If we're talking about WP:POINT, then what shall we say about going around to hundreds of Wikipedia articles and changing pronunciations to conform to a contrived scheme that has no following outside Wikipedia, and was invented by a tiny number of Wikipedia editors, none of whom has any training in phonology? Who elevated a Help: page to a policy page anyway? RandomCritic (talk) 02:32, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Kwami has acted in good faith. You, on the other hand, are nominating Help:Pronunciation for deletion because you haven't gotten your way. This and your unwarranted ad hominem attack on users who obviously have plenty of "training in phonoloigy", are in poor form and unbecoming of a Wikipedia editor. Shame on you. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 06:44, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

• Delete per nom. Libcub (talk) 19:43, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. A standardised way of showing pronunciation is certainly a required feature for wikipedia. This key serves that purpose as a good broad phonemic representation of English. In the majority of cases where dialects differ in pronunciation (especially rhotic vowels), both versions can be systematically derived from the forms specified. It is based on well established choices for using the internationally recognised IPA. −Woodstone (talk) 20:23, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

"Well established"? Then where are the citations showing what usage that is "well established" outside of Wikipedia is being followed? This is an attempt to use Wikipedia to "establish" a pronunciation system that has no reality in the real world.RandomCritic (talk) 02:32, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

• Keep, no real reason to delete, as the nominator's reasoning is just an unsustained assertion. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 02:04, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

What is unsustained is any point of reference showing that this scheme -- not IPA but this specific application of IPA to English -- has any following outside of Wikipedia. RandomCritic (talk) 02:25, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Do you have any evidence that a different IPA subset is used more prevalently? Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 02:39, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

There are several different methods of transliterating English into IPA, depending both on the dialect and the phonetician responsible. It's up to you to provide evidence not only that this scheme is used "prevalently", but that it is used at all. If not, it constitutes OR. RandomCritic (talk) 02:56, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

As usual, you ignore any falsification of your claims. As I said earlier, we could switch over to the Random House IPA transcription system (the one used at dictionary.com), and the only phonemic change would be the loss of a distinction between /ɪ/ and high schwa, something I think we all could live with. Somehow, though, I doubt that would satisfy you, because I don't think your true objection is that we don't follow a specific dictionary. Also, and I repeat for what must be the dozenth time, I have never made the claim that all the English dialects we're covering are phonemically identical. (And no, that doesn't include Jamaican, or Scots, as clearly stated at the top of the help page.) However, for the purposes of a key (not a theoretical description) the differences may be subsumed under a single transcription, just as they are in many dictionaries which use in-house systems.

If we were to follow Random House, and when there were regional variants, picked the one which allowed you to predict the others (such as transcribing pen as /ˈpɛn/ even though in Texas it's predictably pronounced /ˈpɪn/), would that satisfy you? It would be, after all, referenceable, even though there would be no substantive change from what we have now. Or do you really want us to have to spell out, "pronounced /ˈpɛn/ in most dialects, but /ˈpɪn/ in parts of the southern United States"? Are our readers that stupid, that they can't follow the help key? kwami (talk) 07:21, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm sorry, but you are the one who wants the status of this 6-month-old page to change, from viewable to the public to deleted. It's up to you to provide the evidence to justify that change, and it's also up to you to explain why and how this page goes against prevalent guidelines in the transliteration industry. You haven't done so, you've just repeated yourself that the page is OR, without providing substantial evidence to back your claim. Until you accomplish that, I stand by my position. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 07:23, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

P.S. RC, when you reverted an article to your own dialect, I tagged it as being regional. You then deleted the tag as being "template abuse".[2] You can't eat your cake and still have it. kwami (talk) 07:33, 2 March 2008 (UTC)