Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Phonetics

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IPA wikitable

Hi, if you add class="IPA wikitable" (or class="wikitable IPA") to a table, then all cells will be styled using IPA fonts (if you use MSIE6, or if you have custom styles for the .IPA class.)

The .IPA class is very useful, since it can be set on tables, table rows, table cells, paragraphs, divs, spans, and so on. If you have span.IPA in your user stylesheets, please switch to .IPA for the benefits. --Kjoonlee 09:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Shortcuts

Hi, now we can use WP:PHONETICS to link to the project page. I think something shorter like WP:PHO or WP:PHON might be good as well. What do you think? --Kjoonlee 06:30, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, sounds like a good idea. — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 07:56, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
So which ones should we choose? It seems to be "first come, first served." I have a slight aversion to hogging all the good shortcuts, but part of me says "what the heck, we're not that early ourselves, so probably nobody will mind." --Kjoonlee 09:21, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
WikiProject Photography has already bagged WP:PH, and there doesn't seem to be a WikiProject Telephones, so there's nothing stopping us from taking WP:PHON. —Angr 10:22, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
OK, PHON it is. (They've already got WP:TEL so they won't mind.) --Kjoonlee 13:01, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 311 articles are assigned to this project, of which 115, or 37.0%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 14 July 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. More than 150 projects and work groups have already subscribed, and adding a subscription for yours is easy - just place the following template on your project page:

{{User:WolterBot/Cleanup listing subscription}}

If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page; I'm not watching this page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:00, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

IPA help requested

Would someone who knows IPA please add a pronunciation to Rielle Hunter? According to sources it's pronounced "Riley". Thanks! Kelly hi! 16:07, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Help with a poorly named article

Hi, I'm a bit new to the editing of wikis/wiki projects, so I was wondering if someone could help me with the following pages: Alveolo-palatal fricative and Alveolo-palatal consonant. The page talking about the consonants is actually a page that only discusses the fricatives, while the page about fricatives is just a stub. I would be tempted to just edit the page for the consonants and leave it blank until someone rewrites it, and to copy over the information on the consonant page to the fricative page, but I'm not sure that that is how things are done. Please help. Vaaht (talk) 01:33, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I'd say we should make Alveolo-palatal fricative a disambiguation page like alveolar fricative is. I think that Alveolo-palatal consonant doesn't currently have information about alveolo-palatal sonorants by a lack of attention more than anything else. — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 03:38, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

IPA in Jaws

Michael found a possibly useful link, with advice on reading IPA or other Unicode characters in JAWS, by editing an .sbl file :Getting JAWS 6.1 to recognize "exotic" Unicode symbols.Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy Mabbett; Andy Mabbett's contributions 21:14, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

IPA help

Hi, can anyone please tell me what the IPA for "Evanescence" is? At the moment the Turkish Evanescence article is a featured article nominee, and as I'm probably the only native English speaker on that Wikipedia I think I'm the only person that's actually noticed that the pronunciation given in the article is wrong. Can someone please tell me what the IPA for Evanescence is? Thank you. Runningfridgesrule (talk) 15:46, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

[ˌɛvəˈnɛsəns] —Angr 16:03, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
Thank you :-)! Runningfridgesrule (talk) 00:01, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Phonologies section revamped

Okay, after 16 months I've decided that the new index is now doing well enuff to be unleashed. Sinitic, Italic, Oceanic and creoles & pidgins are still to be indexed to the full.

I've been working approximately genealogically; if anyone wants to alphabetize it, knock yourself out, tho I think my approach helps to highlight which areas need work the most (I'd say Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic look relativly under-covered). Maybe one or both could be on their own separate subpages?

Aside from marking seperate articles, I envision that some sort of color-coding could eventually be added to mark what phonological data is included; phoneme inventory? allophonics? phonotactics? dialectology? Likewise a list of families or subfamilies completely lacking coverage could be useful - I was initially compiling those too, but ran out of steam with that.

--Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 11:49, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Is there a way we can alter it so that there's not so much empty space? — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 04:44, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
You should have seen it before I added all those Template:Col-2 and Template:Col-3s! :) For a more whitespace-efficient version, I tried putting it all inside a single Template:Col-2, but that made editing a pain — no subsection edits possible! I wouldn't want to start chopping families into non-genetic units either… --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:57, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Next up: the phoneme table discussion

This is a topic that should've been raised a long time ago, frankly. I think the gist of it comes down to this: should phoneme tables be phonetic or phonological? I'm on the latter's side, because the actual IPA symbol typically conveys the leftover phonetic information. An user interested in these details may look them up hirself basing on that. I've for a while now been converting phoneme tables to a more phonological (condensed, systematic) form; merging POA and MOA categories where applicable. But clearly they were originally entered in a fairly phonetical form - is there perchance wider support to keep them that way insted? I noticed my rearrangement of Hadza was reverted back to the original form a while ago.

These are some of the specific issues, mostly with consonants:

--Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 19:12, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

I've been doing a bit of table simplification myself, and I think I've had a similar goal as yourself.
I'd like to point out that Tanacross and the Amerind languages don't group all sibilants together, it simply distinguishes between alveolar sibilants and laterals since there may be several lateral affricates. When I can, I actually try to group laterals and approximants.
I agree about labials.
Typically, if I merge plosives and affricates I call the row(s) "stop". This technically would include nasal stops, but don't tell anyone.
There's already a bit of confusion between postalveolar and palatal because people like to merge them. I'm somewhat resistant to merging postalveolar and palatal columns unless there's a note or the column itself is titled "postalveolar and palatal." I suppose, though, that phonologically postalveolars may be indistinguishable from palatals (I believe there are processes that occur only with alveolo-palatals and /j/ in Polish)
/w/ is weird because, for many languages, there are competing phonological reasons for putting it in either velar or labial. Generally, I move it to a velar column though if editors have reasons to undo this I don't really fight them. When there is already a separate labiovelar column (that is, there other labio-velar consonants) then that's where /w/ ought to go, but I wouldn't make a separate column just for /w/ and I wouldn't put it in both labial and velar (blech!) — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 05:00, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Vowel Featured Article Review

Vowel has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.)

Two questions

Following advice, I repose the following two questions here:

1. I wonder whether you have any opinion on the usage or non-usage of the terms "contoid" and "vocoid" in modern linguistics?

More generally, how does modern phonetics distinguish e.g. a "consonant" in the sense of a sound with a certain kind of articulation, and a "consonant" in the more etymological sense "with-sounding", i.e., "not forming the 'nucleus' of a syllable". How is e.g. r in Brno classified (not to mention more irregular interjections et cetera, such as m in English "Hmph!"). Apart from the contoid/consonant separation (which I found out about in the Swedish Nationalencyklopedin), i've not found any clear terminological distinction between "consonant sound from articulation point of view" and "consonant sound from syllable forming point of view".

2. I also wonder whether in general the various voiceless vowel sounds in e.g. English (or Swedish) denoted by the letter h are classified as "consonants from articulation point of view". With "various sounds" I only refer to pronounced "stand-alone" h, noting that it then normally is articulated essentially as the voiceless or "whispered" variant of the succeeding vowel sound; possibly but not necessarily accompanied by a very minor "partial closure of the upper vocal tract". In a sentence like "He as been housed in a hard hot hell", the h_sounde are rather differently articulated, as regards rounding et cetera; each /hV/ is pronounced identical or fairly close to "whispered /V/" + "voiced /V/" (where /V/ stands for the respective vowel sound), as may be noted when you whisper the sentence.

I'm happy for either direct answers, or directions to where answers may be found, or directions to more appropriate places to put the questions. My primary concrete application would be in sv:konsonant and similar svwp articles, where of course Swedish usage is of primary interest; but I assume that Swedish linguists do not solve these problems in a fundamentally different manner from other linguists... JoergenB (talk) 20:32, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

While I'm not sure about question one, my understanding of /h/ cross-linguistically is that when it isn't a true fricative it is a voiceless version of the preceding sonorant (not just vowel). I believe the voiceless sonorant is considered part of the syllable onset but then we get into the complicated stuff of question 1 that I don't really have an answer for. — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 04:09, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
Which, in case of /h/ in English and Swedish (neither of which TTBOMK allow /h/ before a non-vowel) would basically mean that it's phonetically a (voiceless, whispered etc.) semivowel. Whether that solves anything, I'm not sure.
BTW, damn, contoid currently redirects to consonant, an article which doesn't even mention the term. We still have a long way to go here before things are up-to-date around here. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 10:13, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
I think the terminology goes back to Kenneth L. Pike. In his book Phonemics - A Technique for Reducing Languages to Writing (Ann Arbor 1947, p. 5) he introduces the term Vocoid and Non-Vocoid, which he also refers to as Contoid. I'm not sure you would call this modern linguistics more than 60 years later. Anyway, I think it was a very good idea to keep the terminology of phonetic and phonological units straight, but it has not been picked up widely. I remember that this was still in the German SIL curriculum some 20 years ago, when I went through these courses, but it was later dropped because it was not used anywhere in mainstream linguistics. But since there are some published sources using this distinction, it wouldn't hurt creating proper articles for these. Landroving Linguist (talk) 09:20, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Notability of sounds?

When is a sound notable enough to warrant its own article? I mean the question broadly, but I'm also interested in particular in the case of the near-close central unrounded, and near-close central rounded, vowels — they've had their own symbols in X-SAMPA for years. I've also heard there was a discussion about this general question a while back, but I haven't been able to locate it; if anyone can point me toward an archive of such a discussion, I'd appreciate it. Pi zero (talk) 11:43, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I believe the general tendency is to have a 1:1 correspondence between IPA symbol and article. Current exceptions include the affricates and a few ejective consonants (the examples listed on the official IPA chart). The near-close central vowels don't have their own articles, though there are separate sections for them since some languages contrast near-close central with near-close front or with close central. — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 03:46, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
The reason I'm asking (I tend to err on the side of saying too little, which often serves me well by avoiding edit wars but in this case seems a bit silly) is that it touches on an RfD discussion currently underway. The sections on the near-close central vowels have taken the form of prose templates, which have been nominated for deletion on the grounds that content belongs in mainspace. That splits the discussion into two parts: whether it is true that content should be in mainspace, and where in mainspace this particular content should go. An administrator has inquired as to where the discussion was (if any) that determined that these vowels shouldn't have their own articles.
This discussion may, evidently, be of interest to members of this wikiproject (and vice versa, so to speak). It's here: Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Near-close_central_unrounded_vowel. Pi zero (talk) 11:23, 19 November 2008 (UTC)