Template talk:IPA/Archive 11

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Purpose?

I wonder what is the point of the various language-specific IPA-XX templates. The whole purpose of having an article linked from a pronunciation transcription is to provide help to readers who are not sufficiently familiar with IPA to decipher the transcription. The old generic templates link to WP:IPA, which gives a good job in explaining the symbols: it provides audio samples, links to articles for the individual sounds, and examples from various world languages.

OTOH, the language-specific templates link to articles which (with the exception of Polish) only give a listing of the phonemes of the language, with examples from the same language. This is patently useless information for someone trying to understand pronunciation of a particular word. It only works for people who know either IPA or the language in question — i.e., exactly the group of people who don't need the help in the first place. For example, an American may think that Czech "j" is pronounced dʒ as in English; the pronunciation is transcribed as [j], and the "explanatory" link shows just "[j] jídlo", which can only serve to reinforce the false impression that it is pronounced as English "j".

Unless the "WP:IPA for foo" pages give the help provided by WP:IPA, i.e., audio, article links, and examples from another well-known language (English if possible), the language-specific IPA templates should not be used, as the old generic templates are clearly much more useful. — Emil J. 10:58, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, perhaps the usefulness is limited, not completely absent. Each one also points to the general IPA article, so I don't see the point of eliminating them. The Polish table's approach is good—I'd like to see the others developed that way. —Michael Z. 2009-01-20 15:27 z

I'm not saying that they should necessarily be eliminated, but we should think about what we are trying to achieve with them, and make sure that the goal is met to a reasonable degree. — Emil J. 12:47, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Idea: linking individual symbols

What do people think about this idea - making templates which produce IPA representations where each individual symbol is linked to a relevant article or help-page section? Likely to be of any use? I thought it might be useful for non-specialist readers who want to find quickly what a particular symbol means; and having templates which do the linking automatically will make it easier for editors who do this sort of thing often.

To illustrate what I mean, see the templates I've constructed for Polish: {{IPA-pl}} and {{Audio-IPA-pl}}. (The links currently go to subsections of Help:IPA, but most of them could be directed to individual articles on sounds instead.)--Kotniski (talk) 10:32, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Could be a good idea, but quite labor intensive. I'm not sure it would be implemented well. kwami (talk) 19:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Seems to me that entering and editing this would be more ongoing work than just looking up the sounds in a table and typing them normally. I am skeptical that it would work reliably for many languages. But if it is useful, then make it a one-time utility template—enter it with a subst:, and make it insert a normal IPA template into the article. —Michael Z. 2009-01-21 15:56 z

I did try this idea, but abandoned it in the end in favour of making one link to the appropriate WP:IPA for (language) page. My current preferred template for Polish is {{IPAr}} - it has the special functionality of allowing you to enter ordinary letters in place of the IPA symbols, which personally I find much easier. It could easily be extended (as I originally envisaged) to work for other languages, particularly those which (like Polish) have almost phonemic spelling.--Kotniski (talk) 16:41, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I'm all for linking to a chart rather than individual phonemes. But I'm saying that with a substitution, this could be a convenient utility for someone to enter IPA by typing the original language. For example: you type {{subst:IPA-pl|[|,|ł|o|dź|i|-|f|a|'|b|r|y|cz|n|e|j|]}}, and what gets left behind in the wikitext is “{{lang-pl|łodźi fa'brycznej}}, {{IPA|[ˌwɔd​͡ʑi faˈbrɨt​͡ʂnɛj]}}”.

I suppose it would only work for languages with phonemic native spelling. —Michael Z. 2009-01-21 18:37 z

Common.css discussion

This is of relevance to this template. Any comments there would be appreciated. Happy‑melon 16:18, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Making fhe listen symbol stay in the article

Currently when clicking listen next to a sound file on an ipa like in the article Marco Polo, the user goes off the article and to the file page which still awaits to be clicked and the user then goes back to the article and continues reading. This is a very bad usability issue for general readers. Could this be somehow changed so that when click the reader stays on the page?--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 15:02, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

In that case, the sound file is off-site: it's on Commons instead of Wikipedia. But it would be nice if this worked more smoothly. Does anyone here know how to do this? (I'm going to copy this to Template_talk:Usage_of_IPA_templates.) kwami (talk) 22:32, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

BROKEN!!!

This templates changes the font for the entire paragraph —often the entire introduction of an article— not just the pronunciation passed to the template!!! — Deon Steyn (talk) 12:23, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

All the template does is to put a <span class="IPA">...</span> around its argument. If this has any effect outside the <span>, it is a serious bug in your browser. — Emil J. 12:40, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

I've noticed something similar since the latest update of Firefox: if there is any Chinese text in a paragraph, the entire paragraph changes to my default Chinese font. Sometimes. kwami (talk) 21:59, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

No-wrap

Is the no-wrap meant to prevent breaks between syllables? Is IPA breaking at just any old letter, or just at the periods? Nowrap is not terrible, but it's a bit awkward in long bits in a narrow browser window, like in the intro for Nikita Khrushchev. —Michael Z. 2005-04-13 00:01 Z

Keep it. IPA examples should be short (one word or one sound only), and it is not nice if this is wrapped. Especially MSIE is horrid with this: it seems to want to create a horizontal scrollbar if an IPA snippet is wrapped even if otherwise not needed, because of serious errors in the font family handling. Jordi·✆ 00:14, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

So where'd the nowrap go to? I see IPA transcripts breaking at syllable separators. Dan ☺ 23:27, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

To MediaWiki:Common.css, I guess (or Special:Mypage/skin.css if you just need to fix the display for yourself). Alternatively, wrap the specific examples that break with {{nowrap}}.—Emil J. 13:57, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Enhancement request

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:IPA-en#Mouseover_help — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.159.111.3 (talk) 01:44, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Can template IPA *not* use font Helvetica?

Is there any way that the IPA template can specify to not use the Helvetica font? That font is defective in having the same glyph for U+0267 LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL OE ‹ɶ› as for U+0153 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE ‹œ›. On my browser (Safari on Mac OS X) these two characters are different in the edit box, but not in the article.

This defect means that the symbols for the open front rounded vowel and the open-mid front rounded vowel appear to be the same on the IPA vowel chart, and the comparison in this sentence from Open front rounded vowel#Occurrence appears meaningless: "It is the rounded equivalent of /æ/, not of open /a/, and so would be more narrowly transcribed as [œ̞] or [ɶ̝]." —Coroboy (talk) 18:33, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

You can assign your own font to the .IPA class in your custom CSS. This class is only invoked on Windows, so any Mac related problems are not this template's fault. — Edokter (talk) — 08:42, 23 June 2012 (UTC)