Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Help:Pronunciation

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was Keep RxS (talk) 00:03, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

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)

Not ad hominem -- just an observation. I can easily tell someone who has graduate-level training in phonology from someone whose sole contact with phonology is through the distant and distorted medium of dictionary pronunciation keys. Nor do I have a "way" that I'm trying to get -- I'm saying that this is not a proper Help page, and that it is attempting to do something that Wikipedia should not do.

• 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)

Yes, IPA is really well-established. It is used e. g. in dictionaries by Longman Group, Oxford University Press or Cambridge University Press. I think Webster's dictionaries use it too. As far as I know, European universities (I have little info about U. S. universities) use it in their phonology courses too. Unfortunately, when I studied such a course 11 years ago, they failed to inform us that the system we were learning and using was invented by Wikipedia editors :-) Jan.Kamenicek (talk) 23:40, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, Jan, RC isn't objecting to the IPA (he uses it too); he's objecting to how we use it. kwami (talk) 00:36, 6 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.

So now it's admitted that you're picking and choosing which dialects of English are "really" English. So much for internationalism.RandomCritic (talk) 02:43, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

"Now"? It's always been admitted. If you can do better, great. However, the more dialects we include, the more abstract (or 'wrong', in your terminology) the result will become. kwami (talk) 03:23, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

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)

It's your obligation to provide sourcing for any such system, not to establish one on your own -- and then insist on foisting it on those who know better. By the way, popular dictionaries like "Random House" are not the first place to go for reliable information on English pronunciation. The gold standard for phoneticians is the LPD.

By all means contribute with Longman if you wish. If you wish us to alter the chart to conform with the LPD, bring it up on the talk page. kwami (talk) 03:23, 4 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)

It's sufficient to point out that the page is unsourced. It is also quite clear that the Kwami-system is a Wikipedia-unique invention, therefore OR. RandomCritic (talk) 02:43, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Once again (since you repeatedly ignore anything you don't like), this is not my system. I don't even like it very much. It's true that since the MOS group working on it came to its consensus (after two years of on-and-off discussion!), I've probably been the primary person pushing for standardization across Wikipedia. However, that doesn't give me ownership. kwami (talk) 03:23, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

This page is not an article. You don't see sources or citations in policy pages, because the citation requirements are looser for Wikipedia project pages. That's not a convincing argument. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 20:54, 4 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)

(1) It's not "my own dialect". (2) You were using an irrelevant and inappropriate template.RandomCritic (talk) 02:43, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. This is a very useful help page and as it's not in the article space I don't see what the problem is with regards to sources. Since English spelling is not phonetic, a pronunciation guide is needed for some names or words where the pronunciation would be ambiguous due to spelling; where a user unfamiliar with a name or word may get the pronunciation wrong through the spelling alone, so a pronunciation guide helps solve this problem. Wikipedia is an international encyclopaedia, and therefore as an international encyclopaedia it requires an international pronunciation guide to go with it. Since most, if not all, pronunciation guides are region specific, I don't think the dedicated editors of Wikipedia had any other choice, then to adopt a unifying standard, which is mainly a compromise between rhotic and non-rhotic dialects based on well known and respected dictionaries; otherwise the situation would result in a confusion of regional pronunciations for various regional names or words, which is not good for an encyclopaedia — which is about conveying easily understood information for general knowledge purposes. 203.220.170.133 (talk) 12:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

This isn't a Help page at all. Help pages are supposed to provide just that: help with Wikipedia features. They aren't intended to establish policy, much less provide an excuse for forcing somebody's personal pseudo-research down Wikipedia editors' throats. Wikipedia is not a dictionary and doesn't really need pronunciation guides (most encyclopedias don't have them); and it already has articles on IPA. The claim that "Wikipedia requires an international pronunciation guide" is bogus. There are no grounds for Wikipedian editors to invent a new, unique pronunciation guide which has no suppport anywhere outside of Wikipedia. If we are to refer to dictionaries, it's worth pointing out that there are just about as many different ways of representing English pronunciation as there are dictionaries, and there's no reason for Wikipedia to endorse one, though, as I've pointed out, that has not been done in this case.RandomCritic (talk) 02:43, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Before this was established, people had been complaining for years that they couldn't follow the IPA. Following a dozen conflicting dictionary standards is simply ridiculous. Your opposition is based in philosophy, not linguistics. And my disagreement with you is hardly vandalism, as you keep claiming in your edits. kwami (talk) 03:23, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Kwami is referring to his attempts to rewrite the pronunciations of Greek and Latin words in his personal system. Since he doesn't understand the basis for the pronunciations, he makes repeated howlers like deciding that the x in Thelxinoe is pronounced [z] (I hope he has not reverted to that) and introduces all other sorts of errors. At present, his practice of looking for any article in which I have contributed pronunciation notes and substituting grotesque mispronunciations appears to be motivated by no other purpose than harassment as part of a personal vendetta. I was unconcerned with whatever private game is being played on Help:Pronunciation until Mr. Kagami decided that his word was law and that he was entitled to force his errors on other pages as well. RandomCritic (talk) 04:07, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

RC, you've pointed out some important errors I've made, such as Thelxinoe and maybe half a dozen others, but that was two years ago. Of course, you know full well I haven't reverted them. But your "all sorts of other errors" appear to mostly be my following our IPA conventions and nothing more. I've asked you multiple times to show me where I've made "all sorts of errors", but since those first few helpful cases, you've refused. It's hard to take you seriously if you don't distinguish actual errors in pronunciation, like Thelxinoe, with our philosophical differences on transcription. Show me where I'm wrong and I'll be happy to go along.

As for following you, when I find someone damaging articles by mass deleting pronunciations or converting to an unsupported transcription, which many of our readers will not be able to follow, I check on what else they've done. I don't do this just with you, but with everyone who I notice doing this. I do the same thing with people who set out on a crusade to convert CE to AD (or vice versa) or metric to imperial: I check which other articles they've attacked, and put them on my watch list. Since this isn't my IPA system, I fail to see how enforcing it makes "my" word law. If you want to change our English transcription system, bring it up at help:pronunciation or at MOS. Convince the people there, and I'll help you standardize Wikipedia to the new format. But I suppose it's easier to attack me than to attack everyone who's worked on this, since you don't appear to be interested in convincing people by reasoning with them.

Anyway, this debate belongs on one of those pages, not here. kwami (talk) 07:33, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. This help page is linked to by {{pronEng}} and helps anyone unfamiliar with the IPA understand how to pronounce the transcriptions of English words given on Wikipedia. I've also found it a great place to go to copy and paste the characters I need to give the pronunciation of a word. Specific objections to the particular transcription system used in practice on Wikipedia certainly shouldn't mean deletion of the help page; modifications can be proposed on the talk page. Ntsimp (talk) 23:04, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. I do not think that a help page should be deleted because somebody considers it a policy page by mistake. I believe that explaining the difference to them should be enough. Lots of people fail to distinguish between guidelines and policies. Hopefully, we won't delete the guidelines. Jan.Kamenicek (talk) 22:40, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Goodness, IPA is the invention of Wikipedia? The phoneticians of the International Phonetic Association who have been working on IPA for the last 120 years must be turning in their graves (not that they are all dead, though)..--Slp1 (talk) 23:01, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Per my comment above, RC isn't objecting to using the IPA (he uses it too); he's objecting to how we use it. kwami (talk) 00:48, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. I disagree with RandomCritic that this key represents original research in the sense of WP:NOR. While the scheme devised may not be identical to that of any other source, it is merely a medium through which a pronunciation from a reliable source may be represented. Provided that that source's own pronunciation scheme does not conflate phonemic distinctions made by this one, it is a trivial matter to transcribe such a pronunciation into that used by Wikipedia. The charge of original research could only be aptly applied if the pronunciations given in articles diverged from that of the sources, not if the means of representing those pronunciations superficially differed. Thylacoleo (talk) 03:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.