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IPA-x templates

Hey everyone. There was a recent discussion about a different group of language templates (the xx-icon family of templates) that had the same design approach as these - a template for each language. That discussion resulted in changing the design to one template that accepts as a parameter the language (see Template:In lang) - so in this example, instead of a template like {{IPA-ja}} it would be {{IPA|ja}}. For editors, the change is very minimal as instead of a hyphen they use a vertical bar (so exactly the same amount of characters), but the behind the scenes can now be maintained much more reasonably. Now if you want to apply a change to all templates, you need to update each individual template (currently ~289 templates), once consolidated, there is only one single template that needs to be updated. User:Trappist the monk has experience with this procedure as he was the one that merged the xx-icon set. Would love to hear any comments you have before moving on this in TfD. --Gonnym (talk) 11:38, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Sounds good. This would require the {{IPA}} template to count parameters, as {{IPA|ja}} is currently a valid input yielding ja. (IPA without enclosing square brackets or slashes is frequently used in charts etc.) Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 12:10, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
Counting parameters is generally not a problem that causes much worry.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:05, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
We need to have a way of banning the usage of slashes when linking to phonetic (meaning: non-phonemic) guides. [esˈtaðos uˈniðoz mexiˈkanos] is only a valid transcription when you use the brackets; when you use the slashes, you need to write /esˈtados uˈnidos mexiˈkanos/ and that type of transcription isn't covered on Help:IPA/Spanish. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 12:27, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
Is there something in the 'text' of phonetic and phonemic transcriptions that can be relied upon to guarantee that transcriptions containing that 'something' will not be confused with the other? For example, is it ever possible for phonemic transcriptions (/.../) to be written with characters that are not basic ascii or space modifier letters? If any unicode character can be used in either transcription, it becomes very difficult or impossible for a machine to determine which of /.../ or [...] is the correct form.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:05, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
@Trappist the monk: I'd rely on the language code. For example, IPA|es|transcription should always yield Spanish pronunciation: [transcription] since Help:IPA/Spanish uses broad phonetic transcription. In general, AFAICS, hardly any of our Help:IPA/X guides uses phonemic transcription. The plain IPA template should, of course, allow both brackets and slashes - but that goes without saying. I don't think this can ever become a major issue, but it will be an additional thing to clean up and could create a problem that doesn't exist right now. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 18:37, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
This seems reasonable. Though what about IPAc templates like {{IPAc-pl}}? — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 15:40, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
Different series of templates? As such I don't think that they should be discussed here but could be (probably should be) discussed in a separate discussion. A quick glance seems to indicate that, amonst themselves, they are mostly the same except for each language's translation table.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:05, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
It depends on the language. In some languages, the input and the output can have one-to-one correspondence, while in others the output may depend on surrounding sounds. To self-plagiarize, the IPAc templates are "kind of things of the past, as most of them were created before Lua modules became available, and even the Lua-based ones still inherit syntax from their non-Lua predecessors, when a module can take a full, undivided word or phrase as an input and convert it to IPA for languages with phonemic orthographies (Wiktionary has such templates for Spanish, Italian, Polish, Finnish, Japanese, etc.) or take a whole IPA transcription as an input and provide tooltips for each symbol. But that solution is also not free of problems as such a complex template would require skilled and committed editors maintaining it as changes are made to the key and bugs are found."
But the idea of a meta IPAc template, at least for languages with reasonably consistent input–output correspondence, is enticing. (I was working on it and that's when I shelved the overhaul mentioned below because I realized the enormity and complexity of the task.) Nardog (talk) 07:47, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
For the record, this topic arises from this discussion on my talk page.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:05, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
I was working on overhauling the IPA templates just over a year ago as I too saw a bunch of things that needed to be changed:
  • Labels
    • In some templates, e.g. br returns "Brazilian Portuguese:", while in others e.g. fi returns "Finland Swedish pronunciation:" and langfi "Finland Swedish:". This should be consistent (towards the latter I think, given the default is overwhelmingly "<language> pronunciation:" with lang returning "<language>:").
    • In some templates the names of languages or dialects are linked while in others they are not. This should be consistent, while an option like |link=yes may be useful.
    • In most templates entering a text that does not match the code for a canned text (lang, local, etc.) as a label will have no effect. So editors have done things like {{small|Label:}} {{IPA-xx|...|}} to show customized labels. This is counterproductive. The template should be able to show customized labels by {{IPA|xx|...|Label:}}, or at the very least by e.g. {{IPA|xx|...|label=Label:}} for compatibility. (Perhaps the audio too should have a named parameter like |audio=. The template documentation currently recommends e.g. {{IPA-fr|o|-|Fr-eau.ogg}} to keep the default label—even though |3=Fr-eau.ogg will do the job.)
    • Currently there is no way to disable the reducing of the size of the label contra MOS:SMALLTEXT. An option like |small=no would be nice.
    • Most IPA-xx templates use &nbsp; after the label, which is inappropriate ({{lang-xx}} certainly don't use it). I have a suspicion whoever first made these didn't know how to insert a normal, breaking space at the end inside {{#switch:...}} and just used &nbsp;.
  • /, ˈ, and ˌ, which are often used in transcriptions, trigger line breaks in undesirable positions. So editors have used {{nowrap|{{IPA|...}}}}, {{IPA|/{{wj}}ˈxxx{{wj}}ˌyyy/}}, etc. ad hoc, but this can easily be solved once for all by wrapping the entire transcription in <span class="nowrap">...</span> and all whitespaces within it in <span class="wrap">...</span> (inserting <wbr /> after whitespaces is another way but this doesn't work on Firefox or inside <blockquote>...</blockquote>).
  • Currently the audio is added via Template:IPA audio link, which is redundant. I think the function should incorporated in the main template/module. (There is no justification why IPA-xx templates support appending an audio but {{IPA}} doesn't either.)
  • There exist the categories "Pages including recorded pronunciations", "Articles including recorded pronunciations", and their respective language-specific subcategories, added by templates like {{Audio-IPA}} and {{IPAc-en}}. First of all, do we need these? If so, I think the new template/module should also use them (though only in certain namespaces), automatically figuring out which one to add.
See this for my attempt if you're interested (I know it's kludgy; I was still working on the premise that IPA-xx would still be in use, but I'm down with the proposed transition provided a bot owner is willing to fix the existing transclusions). Nardog (talk) 07:25, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Request for citations for phonetic symbols for Unicode submission

Hi. I'm in negotiation with the Unicode committees to add support for the new extIPA and VoQS symbols, and am requesting a bunch of other unsupported phonetic symbols as well. I've gotten some feedback from LingList, but thought it would be worth asking here as well. I'm open to any system -- Americanist, Dania, whatever -- but my focus is extended IPA support, both obvious things that aren't on the chart, like superscripts, and extensions like those for Sinologists. The main gap in coverage is in superscript variants -- see Secondary articulation#Unicode support of superscript IPA letters for existing coverage of the standard IPA, but there's a lot missing from the Americanist set as well.

So, if you don't mind, I'll list the attestations I've dug up so far and ask you to add any others you know of or come across. Feel free to add additional symbols, but note that Unicode is no longer accepting letters with detached diacritics. (That is, if the diacritic doesn't connect to the base letter, they expect the font to handle it.) They also want a demonstration that a character is actually needed: a table of theoretical symbols won't be enough if they're never used for anything. But writing in a symbol by hand in your department's working papers should be enough -- that's how we got support for ⟨ꞎ⟩. It's nice to have a symbol in an explanatory table and in transcription both, if possible, but the transcription is more important.

Kirk (talk) 21:57, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

For example, see 'r with ascender' below. The ref in the TIPA manual is an unsourced chart and so by itself is insufficient to attest to use. Doke (1936) and (1938) are old and so do not demonstrate that the character is needed for digital typesetting. (AFAIK there is no conservation project for these languages that makes use of Doke's field notes, for example.) Dolgopolsky (2013) attests to rather minimal current use. Hopefully taken together these will be adequate.

full letters

  • retroflex lateral flap ɺ̢ ( in SIL fonts)
    Rumsey (2017) Dependency and relative determination in language acquisition
  • voiceless retroflex implosive ƭ̢
    Melaku Dissassa (1980) Some aspects of Oromo phonology, fn p. 10-11 [insufficient!]
    Bickford & Floyd (2006) Articulatory Phonetics, table 28.1 [just a table]
  • retroflex click ǃ̢
    Julian Bradfield (2014) Clicks, Concurrency and Khoisan
    Bickford & Floyd (2006) Articulatory Phonetics
  • lɾ (r with ascender)
    Fukui (2004) TIPA Manual, v. 1.3, p. 29 (#111)
    Doke (1938) Text Book of Lamba Grammar
    Doke (1936) An Outline of ǂKhomani Bushman Phonetics
    Dolgopolsky (2013) Indo-European Dictionary with Nostratic Etymologies, vol. I, p. 230, 494
  • ⨎ (Beach letter for palatal click)
    Beach (1938) The Phonetics of the Hottentot Language
    Derek Elderkin (1989) The Significance and Origin of the Use of Pitch in Sandawe

superscript variants

Evidence for remaining superscript Greek letters, and remaining subscript Greek and Latin letters also welcome. (See Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables.)

zero attestation
minimal support
  • ʀ
    Penhallurick (1991) The Anglo-Welsh Dialects of North Wales [list of symbols only]
  • ɢ
    Wolfgang Kehrein (2002) Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals
  • ˑ [half-long]
    Heselwood (2013) Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice
  • ɮ
    Wolfgang Kehrein (2002) Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals
  • ħ
    Edmondson et al (2005) A Laryngoscopic Study of Glottal and Epiglottal/Pharyngeal Stop and Continuant Articulations in Amis
  • ɧ
    Riad (2013) The Phonology of Swedish, fn 12 [almost certainly inadequate on its own]
  • ɫ
    Eric Bakovic (2005 Nov 16) Orange you glad I didn’t say the C-word?, Phonoblog, UC San Diego [a blog is unlikely to be sufficient]
  • ɘ
    Caudal (2011) Contribution aspectuelle des temps et de la phrase, in Perspectives théoriques et empiriques: Sur l'aspect en anglais
  • F [as a tone letter]
    Grønnum (2013) Fonetik og Fonologi
  • Q
    Fujimura & Williams (1999) Syllable concatenators in Japanese, Spanish, and English
some support
  • q
    Menán du Plessis (2009) Unity Hypothesis for the Southern African Khoesan Languages
    Deborah Tooker (2012) Space and the production of cultural difference among the Akha prior to globalization
  • ː [length sign]
    Heselwood (2013) Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice
    Boersma & Hamann (2009) Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception, in Loan Phonology
  • ʜ
    Amanda Miller (2011) The Representation of Clicks, in he Blackwell Companion to Phonology [substituted with a full-cap H]
    John Esling (2010) Phonetic Notation, in The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences
    Miller-Ockhuizen (2010) A prosodic account of Juǀ’hoansi consonant distributional asymmetries
  • ʙ
    Crowley & Lynch (2006) The Avava Language of Central Malakula
  • ɽ
    Evans (1996) First – and last – notes on Wurrugu
    Upton, Parry & Widdowson (1994) Survey of English Dialects
  • ɾ
    Penhallurick (1991) The Anglo-Welsh Dialects of North Wales
  • ʈ
    Riehl & Cohn (2011) Partially nasal segments, in The Blackwell Companion to Phonology
    Harvey et al. (2013) Two types of pre-stopping in Kaytetye
    François (2010) Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral of Hiw
  • ɬ
    McDonough & Ladefoged (1993). Navajo Stops, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 84
    Wolfgang Kehrein (2002) Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals
    Kehrein & Golston (2004) “A prosodic theory of laryngeal contrasts
  • ʎ
    Wolfgang Kehrein (2002) Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals
    Maddieson (1981) “UPSID: Data and Index”, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 53
  • ɭ
    Wolfgang Kehrein (2002) Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals
  • ʟ
    Wolfgang Kehrein (2002) Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals
    Maddieson (1981) “UPSID: Data and Index”, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 53
  • ʧ and ʤ
    Perry (2000) Phonological/phonetic assessment of an English-speaking adult with dysarthria
  • ȵ
    Lu (2008) A Grammar of Maonan
  • ɤ
    Bekker (2003) The Vowels of South African English
    Wetzels (2009) Nasal harmony and the representation of nasality in Maxacalí, in Loan Phonology
  • ʏ
    Edward Flemming (2002) Auditory Representations in Phonology
  • æ
    Akademisk Forlag (1974) Dialektstudier, vol. 3
    Andersen (1958) Fonemsystement i østfynsk: på grundlag af dialekten i revninge sogn
    Theo Homan (1975), Skíðaríma: An Inquiry into the Written and Printed Texts, References and Commentaries
  • ɷ
    Penhallurick (1991) The Anglo-Welsh Dialects of North Wales
    Anderson (1987) A Structural Atlas of the English Dialects
  • ɿ and ʅ
    Lee & Zee (2014) Chinese Phonetics, in The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

Probably enough attestation

  • ʢ
  • C [as an IPA wild-card letter]

CfD on categories for pages including recorded pronunciations

There is a discussion on categories named "Pages including recorded pronunciations" or "Articles...", which editors here may be interested in. Nardog (talk) 17:48, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Move discussion

WikiProject Linguistics participants may be interested in a move discussion at Talk:Prosody (linguistics). — Wug·a·po·des​ 23:25, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I-J?

In some translations, the letters I and J are interchanged in ways that's confusing to me as an English speaker. For example, Joseph Stalin -> Iosif Stalin, or Jesus of Nazareth -> Iēsus Nazarēnus. Do we have any articles that talk about this? I imagine there's a name for this, but I don't know what it is, and searching for "IJ" doesn't come up with anything useful. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:08, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes we do. See for instance Latin alphabet#Medieval and later developments, I#History, J#History, and, as both your examples are names taken from the New Testament that was entirely written in Greek in which iota serves to write both the vowel [i] and the consonant [j] (as does Classical Latin I), also Greek alphabet#Letters. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 21:36, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Finno-Basque languages

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived: Resolved, moved to draft space (Draft:Finno-Basque languages)
Hi all! The article Finno-Basque languages (created 6 Feb 2020) needs some communitiy attention. While we have several articles about remote, dubious and absurd relationship claims, this article has major problems with sourcing and neutrality. The page creator is very insistent about the validity of the proposal. I don't want to EW there, so for now I just leave the appropriate tags. –Austronesier (talk) 11:42, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Proposal of meta-use of languoid, doculect, and glossonym terminology in talk pages

This is prompted by, among other things, this discussion and also this one. My proposal is to "officialise" the use of the terms "languoid", "glossonym", and "doculect" (see here) in talk pages of Wikipedia language articles and related linguistic articles. Particularly in relation to linguistic classification, the current standard terminology is ambiguous and imprecise and generates more than often confusion. I think that if we can agree on using the above terminology we can at least be sure that we are referring to the same things when discussing about linguistic classification (or other topics) in talk pages. Note that this is just a proposal to add somewhere on this project that people are encouraged to use the terminology when it is necessary to disambiguate in talk pages and not in main articles (unless we wish to do so, but that would be a separate suggestion). However, we don't really need to make this official (I don't have strong feelings about it being official), and I encourage anyway all of us to use the terminology if needed when discussing things in talk pages if there isn't agreement on making the use official. Happy editing y'all! :) --SynConlanger (talk) 11:07, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Need help for a special letter

Hello! I would need your help because I need a special letter for this article. It is an "S" which look like fraktur but is apparently not; it can be seen here (p. xixx) in front of "Editio Sixtina". Currently, the article uses "𝔰" as it is what ressembles the most to what I want, but it is far from being perfect. Veverve (talk) 17:12, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

If you want to use Unicode, then a better choice would be U+1D516 MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL S: 𝔖. The letter you want to represent is a capital letter, not a small letter.
Using the {{Script}} template is probably better, that is, using {{Script|Latf|S]}: S. The Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols are only ever meant to be used in Mathematics. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 18:31, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
Thanks! I will use Textura black letter S. Veverve (talk) 18:40, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
@Veverve: I don't think this is a viable solution because it depends on users having Textura blackletter locally installed on their device. I for one haven't, and all I see is an enlarged capital S displayed in my default browser font for Latin (Latn) script, which happens to be Noto Sans. On Template:Script/styles.css you can see that template {{Script}} does not embed fonts; instead, it only lists fonts that provide suitable glyphs if installed.
Though you say "it is far from being perfect" you might want to use a resized U+1D530 MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR SMALL S, thus: <span style="font-size: 150%; line-height: 100%;">𝔰</span>, which displays as 𝔰. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 20:46, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
@LiliCharlie:I was not aware of this problem, however the textura letter is way better (I also used it on this article instead of a 𝕮) and I would really prefer to keep it this way. Maybe using Template:Contains special characters in the article could help alleviate the problem. Veverve (talk) 21:03, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Transliteration of Biblical Hebrew letter names

If you can contribute, please see discussion at Talk:Biblical Hebrew#Recent edits to letter names. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:33, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Phonetics and phonology of the Gronings dialect

An edit warrior keeps reinserting incorrect information regarding phonetics and phonology of the Gronings dialect. Can someone fix that portion of the article? Does the source that person used back up the information in the article at all? Because I seriously doubt that. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 08:59, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

We probably have too many vowel articles

There is a consensus to merge articles about true-mid and close-mid vowls (1), renaming mid-centralized cardinals (2), merging near-close central vowels with those about close central ones (3, already implemented), merging Mid central vowel with Schwa (part of 4), and no consensus on the rest of the proposals included in 4 and 5. signed, Rosguill talk 01:03, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hello. I think that we have too many vowel articles, and at the same time too few to be consistent in the way we represent vowels on Wikipedia. I'll explain what I mean.

The article open back unrounded vowel currently covers four variants of [ɑ]: open back (close to cardinal [ɑ] or identical), open near-back, near-open back and near-open near-back. That's four variants of [ɑ] in one article. The article about the open front [ɶ] also covers open and near-open variants. This is how it should be: the vowel articles on Wikipedia aren't about cardinal vowels but vowels in world's languages that are close to any given cardinal vowel (except for vowels like [ɪ]).

Also, we don't cover all combinations of height/backness/roundedness in separate vowel articles on Wikipedia. That's another inconsistency. Here's my proposal, divided into parts:

Regarding true-mid vowels

(1) Merge the articles about true-mid vowels with those about close-mid ones:

...and create separate sections for true-mid vowels that contrast with close-mid ones (or close-mid and open-mid ones) in those articles.
Reason: The true-mid [e̞, ø̞, o̞] rarely contrast with their close-mid and/or open-mid counterparts. There are obscure dialects or languages such as the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian or Kensiu that contrast three heights of mid vowels. Danish contrasts close-mid /ø/ with true-mid /œ/ (which is lowered to open-mid or near-open when in contact with /r/). These contrasts seem to be much rarer than those between close-mid and open-mid vowels, as in French, German or Italian. The IPA recommends that in cases like this (where the quality of a vowel is in-between two or more cardinal values), the simplest symbol be used unless there are convincing reasons (a phonemic contrast, traditional transcription in dialectology, etc.) to do otherwise. ⟨œ⟩ and ⟨ø⟩ are probably equally "complex", but ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩ are simpler than ⟨ɛ⟩ and ⟨ɔ⟩ because they're ordinary Latin letters. Furthermore, the mid back rounded vowel is probably more of a variant of the close-mid [o] than just a vowel in-between [o] and [ɔ], because like [o] and unlike [ɔ] it can contrast with the (near-)open [ɒ] (which can be considered a subtype of [ɔ] as they sound so similar to each other) by height alone - see this article by Geoff Lindsey and our vowel charts (Geordie is probably no exception - the contrast between /ɒː/, /ɔː/, /oː/ and /uː/ is rather unstable). Lindsey's research might be a proof that essentially all (or nearly all) contrasts between rounded back vowels are subtypes of a /u–o–ɔ/ contrast, not matter the exact height, backness, length, etc.
Neither close-mid front unrounded vowel nor close-mid back rounded vowel cover *just* vowels in the close-mid front/back area but also their centralized counterparts (near-front in the case of [e] and near-back in the case of [o]). Also, compare e.g. File:Estonian vowel chart.svg with File:Finnish monophthongs chart.svg. Neither Estonian /e, ø, o/ nor Finnish /e, ø, o/ are exactly in-between cardinal [e, ø, o] and [ɛ, œ, ɔ] but closer than that (closer to the close-mid cardinals), it's just that the Finnish vowels (listed in the true-mid articles) are a tad more open than the Estonian ones (at least that's what the vowel charts suggest). This might suggest that there are some WP:CONTENTFORK issues with those articles.
Regarding near-close vowels

(2) Rename the articles about the mid-centralized cardinals [i, y, u]:

...and move fully front and fully back near-close (un)rounded vowels to close front unrounded vowel and close back rounded vowel, respectively (we don't list any fully front variants of the near-close near-front rounded vowel on WP and the distinction between front and near-front rounded vowels is mostly meaningless anyway). The near-close near-front rounded vowels typically transcribed with ⟨y⟩ (those in Dutch, French and Hungarian) should be moved back to close front rounded vowel and we should specify their height there.
Reason: The articles about [ɪ] and [ʊ] shouldn't cover peripheral vowels but only the centralized ones, which means that we probably should rename near-close front unrounded vowel and near-close back rounded vowel back to near-close near-front unrounded vowel and near-close near-back rounded vowel, which are the official names of the IPA symbols ⟨ɪ⟩ and ⟨ʊ⟩. Fully peripheral near-close vowels, at least of the unrounded front and rounded back type, are just variants of [i] and [u]. The older IPA practice was to prefer the symbols ⟨i, y, u⟩ over ⟨ɪ, ʏ, ʊ⟩ and use the latter when necessary. Also, when a language contrasts near-close front/back with close front/back vowels based on height alone, the near-close front/back vowels are almost never written with ⟨ɪ, ʊ⟩ but ⟨e, o⟩. Near-close front rounded vowel should probably be renamed to near-close near-front rounded vowel for consistency.

(3) Merge the articles about the near-close central vowels with those about close central ones:

Reason: [ɨ, ʉ] are the closest cardinal vowels, and the vowels listed in close central unrounded vowel and close central rounded vowel may or may not be the same as the corresponding cardinal vowels. "Near-close" is just slightly lower than fully close and those vowels have never been assigned separate IPA symbols, unlike [ɪ, ʏ, ʊ].
Regarding schwa-like vowels

(4) Merge the articles about (often non-contrastive) schwa-like sounds into schwa:

Reason: Scholars have simply not caught up yet with the latest reforms of the IPA. In English, ⟨ɜ⟩ is used for a vowel that can be open-mid, true-mid or close-mid (it's often just true-mid) in accordance with one of the former IPA definitions (or the former definition) of ⟨ɜ⟩. In Swedish ⟨ɵ⟩ is true-mid rather than close-mid. The symbol ⟨ə⟩ does *not* denote a specifically true-mid unrounded central vowel but just a schwa, a vowel in the general mid central area that can be rounded or unrounded. English schwa is an unrounded close-mid-to-open-mid vowel. Romanian and Sindhi schwas are open-mid, yet they're most typically transcribed with ⟨ə⟩ which is supposedly a vowel between close-mid and open-mid (that's what the current IPA chart suggests, very falsely in my view). IMO we're giving WP:UNDUE weight to something that simply isn't distinguished that strongly in the literature. WP:CONTENTFORK might also be an issue.
Also, should we ever do that, we should move the open-mid central unrounded vowels that are typically transcribed with ⟨ɐ⟩ back to near-open central vowel.
Check User:Kbb2/Schwa to see how the table in that article would (or could) work.
Regarding open front vowels

(5) Merge the articles about open front vowels into one article:

Reason: A separate article for the open front rounded vowel might violate WP:UNDUE. It's an extremely rare vowel that doesn't occur as a phoneme in any language, it just happens to be one of the cardinal vowels (we already have an article about them). Plus, Danish [ɶ] (a canonical example of that vowel) is actually near-open, not open. Also, the distinction between [æ] and the front [a] isn't very clear as they sound awfully similar to each other. I think that as long as we differentiate [æ]/[a] from the central [ä] (which does sound different) that's good enough. [æ] should've never been assigned a separate IPA symbol by the way, and it was Anglocentric of the Association to do so. (EDIT: I've struck that out - it was an unnecessary personal comment). One of the reasons I'd like to see those three merged is that if we merged open front unrounded vowel with open front rounded vowel we'd have a discrepancy - the near-open variant would be covered in the case of the rounded vowel but not in the case of the unrounded vowel. Plus, the open front unrounded vowel might be transcribed with ⟨æ⟩ anyway.

Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 17:07, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly agree that our coverage of vowels, and perhaps even consonants, needs to be improved. Simply put, every symbol on the IPA chart does not need its own dedicated article because not every sound is notable enough to warrant its own article. This is especially true of vowels because outside the cardinal vowels, there's no firm boundaries for their categorization. Further, the depth of coverage we can go into on each vowel is limited, making many of these permastubs, but we can give far more comprehensive and helpful if we organize our coverage by broad natural classes rather than particular phones. I'd like to propose a far more radical scheme of 5 comprehensive articles:
Front vowels
Back vowels
High vowels
Low vowels
Central vowels
These, with some obvious overlap, will cover describing the vowels in their domain. Vowels which have substantial coverage in their own right, like schwa can be spun out and summarized in these articles, but in general individual phones would not have their own articles unless they're notable. I think these articles should not include the tables of languages which have certain phonemic sounds, and instead we should have those lists at a dedicated page such as Phonemic status of ɜ or List of languages with phonemic ɜ. This will help divide our coverage between generalist and specialist articles, limit the number of pages that need to be maintained, and maximize use for our readers.
All this said, I still support Kbb2's proposal as an improvement over the status quo. Wug·a·po·des​ 17:26, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
I'm generally in favor of the proposed mergers but I would keep Mid central vowel. Schwa talks about phonological development rather than the phonetic sound(s), and the majority of its content is better merged with Vowel reduction or something rather than with Mid central vowel, and then Schwa can be turned into a redirect to Mid central vowel. Nardog (talk) 00:17, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support merging articles on similar vowels. Not every sound in every spoken language deserves an entire article on its own, partially as many really aren't that notable. If they do get their own articles anyway, we will eventually just end up with hundreds of permastubs. Geolodus (talk) 15:04, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
Support per nom. —Yours sincerely, Soumyabrata (talk • subpages) 14:34, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
  • (Mildly) support merging. The merger should not be used to dismiss well-sourced information accumulated in the individual articles, though. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 16:48, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Addendum: Oppose suggestions regarding open front vowels: I sympathize with the point of view that some of the IPA symbols may be questionable (I believe not only ⟨æ⟩ is Anglocentric and should never have been adopted by the IPA, but also ⟨ɪ⟩, ⟨ʊ⟩, and ⟨ʏ⟩). Nevertheless, Wikipedia is not the place for advancing such a point of view. I would much rather merge [ä] into [a], thus having one article per simple IPA symbol, and no additional articles with diacritics. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 19:18, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
@J. 'mach' wust: That's just a small portion of my argument. To quote myself, A separate article for the open front rounded vowel might violate WP:UNDUE. It's an extremely rare vowel that doesn't occur as a phoneme in any language, it just happens to be one of the cardinal vowels (we already have an article about them). Plus, Danish [ɶ] (a canonical example of that vowel) is actually near-open, not open. Also, the distinction between [æ] and the front [a] isn't very clear as they sound awfully similar to each other. I think that as long as we differentiate [æ]/[a] from the central [ä] (which does sound different) that's good enough. [æ] should've never been assigned a separate IPA symbol by the way, and it was Anglocentric of the Association to do so. One of the reasons I'd like to see those three merged is that if we merged open front unrounded vowel with open front rounded vowel we'd have a discrepancy - the near-open variant would be covered in the case of the rounded vowel but not in the case of the unrounded vowel. Plus, the open front unrounded vowel might be transcribed with ⟨æ⟩ anyway. I've now struck out that unnecessary personal comment of mine. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 04:27, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
I know what you have written. Whether or not you now retract a portion, my argument does not change: the IPA is the accepted standard in this field, and that we best represent the vowels by having one article for each simple IPA symbol. I think we should therefore discontinue the following articles (though without deleting the information they contain):
  1. [ɨ̞] (already discontinued, though information has been deleted)
  2. [ʉ̞] (already discontinued, though information has been deleted)
  3. [e̞] (already discontinued, though information has been deleted)
  4. [ø̞]
  5. [o̞]
  6. [ä]
I do not think a separate article for every IPA symbol is WP:UNDUE, since the IPA is the accepted standard in this field. To the contrary, I think what is WP:UNDUE is having separate articles for sounds that do not have their own IPA symbol but require IPA diacritics – especially when, as I fear, a majority of the sources never even uses these diacritics.
As to the discrepancy that you mention, it already presupposes the merger of [a] with [ɶ], which I would not support, and on top of that, an asymmetry in the open front vowels is inevitable since the IPA cover of the open front vowel is asymmetric (there is no rounded equivalent of [æ]). BTW, the canonical example of [ɶ] in my neck of the woods is Viennese German, though I have never researched it. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 12:28, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
@J. 'mach' wust: I don't think it's inappropriate to talk about information that has been deleted as if there was an option to retain it without changing the consensus that already exists regarding not listing more than one example per dialect. It was removed out of necessity.
We didn't discuss merging open central unrounded vowel with other articles. If, per current consensus, we merge the three open front vowels into one article, adding the open central one there could create some chaos, and I don't know a better way to get rid of open central unrounded vowel than to merge it with open front unrounded vowel. Perhaps open back unrounded vowel is the second best target for the merger. Dozens of millions of Americans think of their /ɑ/ when they hear the open central unrounded vowel. An argument against such a merger would be that only a minority of transcribers use ⟨ɑ⟩ for a central vowel.
We should add some Bavarian dialects to open front rounded vowel. I think that Traunmüller's Vokalismus in der westniederösterreichischen Mundart shows that the height of Bavarian /ɶ/ is variable and it doesn't have to be open-mid, as in Amstetten. It can be more open than that (then the same could apply to /æ/ and /ɒ/), but that could be just me misinterpreting the formant plots. I don't know. I'm out of my depth when it comes to formants, for the most part. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 08:47, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
I don't think it's inappropriate to talk about information that has been deleted as if there was an option to retain it without changing the consensus that already exists regarding not listing more than one example per dialect. – As I have explained in the very section you have linked to, there is no such consensus.
We didn't discuss merging open central unrounded vowel with other articles. – We are discussing it now.
If, per current consensus, we merge the three open front vowels into one article […]. – As this section shows, there is no such consensus either.
I don't know a better way to get rid of open central unrounded vowel than to merge it with open front unrounded vowel. – I think we should respect the sources: languages where sources use [a], [ä], [a̠], etc. should be added to [a], languages where sources use [ɑ], [ɑ̈], [ɑ̟], etc. should be added to [ɑ], languages where sources use [ɐ], [ɐ̞], etc. should be added to [ɐ]. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 09:34, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Maybe someone isn't paying attention here, but there most certainly is a consensus on one example per language/dialect. That's not something that you can "explain" away or ignore. It's there, backed up by explicit discussion and a decade of implicit consensus through editing by scores of editors across dozens of articles. If one wants an exception to this for a particular case, they should have a clear and compelling reason for it. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 15:28, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
I do not know who pays attention and who does not, but what I have seen is that this implicit consensus has exceptions for languages with more than one quality of the respective sound; and that in the current discussion, two editors are against the deletions and one editor thinks the deletions are “hasty and premature”, whereas one editor is in favour of the deletions and one other editor tends to side with the latter – rather a case of WP:NO CONSENSUS. And then there is yet another implicit consensus those who pay attention may notice: the implicit consensus that some languages have had two examples in the articles for [e] and [e̞], for [ɨ] and [ɨ̞], or for [ʉ] and [ʉ̞]. I do not understand how this implicit consensus should be canceled out by a merger of these articles. How do you weigh one implicit consensus against another? Do you have any clear and compelling reasons? --mach 🙈🙉🙊 18:09, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
I've already provided a link that directs to where the explicit consensus is (which you have acknowledged). If you want to make a case to change how we do this, then make it. But you're wasting your breath and trying the patience of other editors when you say there isn't a consensus for one example per dialect/language when there clearly is. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 18:40, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
We have three points. Why do you only acknowledge one of them?
  1. Your user subpage delineates the implicit consensus. If you read it carefully, you will notice that it allows exceptions in cases where languages have more than one quality of the respective sound.
  2. The languages in question used to have two examples before the merger. If you read the above merger discussion carefully, you will notice that nobody mentioned that this should be changed.
  3. If you read the below discussion carefully, you will notice that three out of five editors that have participated want to reverse the deletions until further discussion. Incidently, this is also in accordance with WP:BRD and WP:NOCONSENSUS, which kind of outweigh your user subpages. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 20:26, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
No, the user subpage delineates the explicit consensus and even links to the relevant discussions. It allows for a discrete number of exceptions, themselves based on explicit consensus for those particular cases. You generalizing from those cases goes against this consensus. Again, trying to come to a new consensus is fine. But calling what we've had for more than ten years something other than an established, explicit consensus is either gaslighting or sloppy reading. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 22:14, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
@J. 'mach' wust: WP:COMMONSENSE tells you that two examples per dialect should've been stated explicitly by me as a part of the merger. That is something I'd never do, because I was already aware of the consensus when I was posting the message. Are you really trying to tell me that you know better than me what I meant when I posted the proposal? Those users that are against the deletions are either unaware of the consensus or are against the deletions that aren't connected to the one example per dialect thing. Your message is an overgeneralization. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 00:08, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
If you put so much emphasis on the User:Aeusoes1/Phone tables consensus that it should overrule WP:BRD and WP:NOCONSENSUS and that everybody should know it, then why do you keep ignoring that it foresees exceptions for languages that have more than one instance of the respective sound?
You have merged [e] with [e̞], [ɨ] with [ɨ̞], and [ʉ] with [ʉ̞]. A number of languages have either sound. I fail to see any difference between this situation and the Basque or clicks situation: it is an unusual and highly notable situation. We should point it out to our readers, especially since we have sources and because we used to point it out to our readers before the merger, and especially since a majority of the editors on this page want to keep this information. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 05:16, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
This might sound really wild, but IMHO it would be an improvement to any of these articles to incorporate this kind of information in actual prose. I think that approach would be a better way of conveying the interesting outliers and representative tendencies of these vowels' relative distributions. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 05:34, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
I have thought of that, too. The downside is that we would loose the example words. After all, I would be very frustrated as a reader if an article mentioned the interesting information that a language had two qualities of the respective sound, but then only gave one example. I therefore prefer a combination: Use a common rowspan="2" prose description for both sounds, but still have two rows in the example columns, e.g. [1]. That is, if the sounds are allophones in complementary distribution. If however the sounds are phonemes on their own right, I would rather have them in different rows – similar to what we are doing _mutatis mutandis_ with the different phonemes in the examples for languages like English –, e.g. [2]. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 06:29, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure I understand. Why would prose need to omit example words? Look at the second paragraph at Spanish phonology#Consonants. There are numerous examples in the prose and they're used to illustrate the kind of thing we're talking about. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 18:12, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
Having examples within prose is certainly possible. However, it is not what we are currently doing in our “phone tables”, since these tables have three dedicated columns for the examples. I am all in favour of describing the sounds in the “Notes” column of the phone tables, but when it comes to providing examples, I think we better keep using the three dedicated examples columns. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 19:13, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
That's what I mean. There's information we want to convey and we're butting heads with the limitations in pigeonholing all information into tables. It's an encyclopedia and at some point we want to do more than just list examples and have actual encyclopedic content in the form of paragraphs. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 19:49, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

But for the time being, would the following mixed prosa and examples column format be OK to you for conveying the information that languages like Nothern Welsh or Maastrichtian Limburgish have two qualities of the respective vowels (two allophones in complementary distribution in the case of Welsh, two phonemes in the case of Limburgish)?

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Welsh Northern dialects[1] llun [ɬɨːn] 'picture' Close when long, near-close when short.[1] Merges with /ɪ/ in southern dialects. See Welsh phonology
pump [pɨ̞mp] 'five'
Limburgish Most dialects[2][3][4] leef [leːf] 'dear' The example word is from the Maastrichtian dialect.
Maastrichtian[2] bèd [bɛ̝t] 'bed' Typically transcribed in IPA with ⟨ɛ⟩.

Of course, they would not actually be in the same table. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 20:16, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

I think the rule should be one example per phoneme, and one phoneme per dialect. I agree with Aeusoes1 in that these pieces of information would ultimately be better presented in prose. Nardog (talk) 16:52, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
So you would have something like the following?
Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Welsh Northern dialects[1] pump [pɨ̞mp] 'five' Close when long, near-close when short.[1] Merges with /ɪ/ in southern dialects. See Welsh phonology
Limburgish Most dialects[2][3][4] leef [leːf] 'dear' The example word is from the Maastrichtian dialect. In the Maastrichtian dialect, this sound contrasts with a true-mid sound typically transcribed with ⟨ɛ⟩.
As I have already said, I think such a solution is very frustrating to readers: if there are two qualities of these vowels, then why do we only provide one example? --mach 🙈🙉🙊 19:08, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
Oh, sorry, scratch "one phoneme per dialect". What I meant to say is one dialect per phoneme, in that, as a general rule, there is no point in listing realizations of the same phoneme in multiple dialects if they all realize it with the same quality. Nardog (talk) 19:37, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
What I am talking about are only the cases where a vowel systematically has different qualities. As I have said before, I think it is interesting and notable information if a language distinguishes different qualities of a vowel that are so close to each other, whether or not they are allophones or phonemes. I think this is information relevant to our readers, and it is information that belongs with the respective vowel article because it illustrates the extent of possible differentiations. I am totally fine with such differentiations being mentioned in the “Notes” column, but I still think we must provide examples as a courtesy to our readers. It would be very frustrating to readers if we mention two qualities but only give an example for one of them (BTW, which one should we exemplify?). --mach 🙈🙉🙊 06:22, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
@J. 'mach' wust: I have fully reverted your reverts. You can't impose your WP:POV on those articles. We're supposed to reach the consensus here and then edit the articles accordingly. Your behavior is ridiculous. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 07:03, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
You are mistaken. Please read the policy WP:NOCONSENSUS: We are supposed not to make any deletions unless we have reached consensus here. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 07:50, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
Mach is correct. Again, it is BRD, not BRRD. Give the status quo precedence whenever a bold edit is challenged, especially if you're the one who went bold. Nardog (talk) 08:02, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
If a language contrasted close-mid and true mid, or two dialects of a language each realized phonemically distinct vowels as close-mid and true mid, then I think the inclusion of both would be warranted. Nardog (talk) 08:02, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
If I understand you correctly, you would include both qualities in a case like Maastrichtian because they are phonemes, and include them with example words in the appropriate example columns. But what about a language like Northern Welsh that has two qualities of a sound as allophones in complementary distribution? (As I have already said, I would include that information as well because it is relevant to the respective vowel, and I also would include examples because I think mentioning a sound without giving an example is pointless.) --mach 🙈🙉🙊 08:18, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
I'd say describe it in the Notes column, if at all. [ɨ] vs. [ɨ̞] is not a significant difference (precisely the reason we merged the articles). Nardog (talk) 08:43, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
I believe as Wikipedia editors, we should not be the judges of what is and what is not a significant difference. That is for the WP:SOURCEs to decide. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 09:21, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
I mean "significant" in the sense that it is enough to mention in the article (as a separate row in this case), nothing more. We make such judgments every day; it's called editorial discretion. Nardog (talk) 01:17, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
I don't feel comfortable making broad rules based on phonemes. These are phone tables, so we are talking about the actual sounds, not the abstract, language-specific conceptions of them. If we want to cover the incidence in Welsh of a phonemic contrast between two similar sounds (which I agree is notable), then we should do so in article prose, rather than in a table or a notes column. We're tying our hands by avoiding article prose.
It's actually kind of tiresome to see that every single person agrees that article prose would be an improvement, that it would be in reality the best solution here, but then no one wants to actually bell that cat. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 16:22, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
As I have said, I am all in favour of describing the sounds in prose, and I have twice posted proposals of how to do so, but both proposals have been met with utter silence.
And as I have said, I do not understand the point of describing two qualities of a sound in prose, but at the same time only allowing one example, or in other words, forbidding the other sound (which one?) to be illustrated with an example. That is how I understand your point of view, Aeusoes1, and it does not make any sense to me, so I sincerely hope I have misunderstood you. Therefore, I am asking you again: what do you propose we do? How would you include the Northern Welsh [ɨ] sounds or the Maastrichtian [e] sounds in the respective articles?
@Nardog: Have I understood you correctly: In the case of allophones like Northern Welsh [ɨ] and [ɨ̞], you would not mention them at all, not even in prose; but in the case of phonemes, you would mention them with examples? Just asking to be sure I have understood. (As I have said repeatedly, I would also mention allophones in prose, but with examples because I think they are interesting and unusual and noteworthy.) --mach 🙈🙉🙊 18:52, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
Take a look again at the Spanish phonology example I gave. That's how I think you can have example words in prose. That way you have examples and you're contextualizing everything in ways that you can't do (or can't do very easily, at least) in a table. When you do that, then the pressure to have exhaustive examples in the table is greatly reduced.
If you've got an idea for specific article prose, I recommend either BRDing it (still leaving the tables alone pending consensus) or putting a sample in talk space for discussion if you think it might be too contentious. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 19:40, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
So you want to get rid of the phone tables altogether. I disagree. MOS:USEPROSE does not mean we should never use lists. Lists or tables are preferrable when we are putting together numerous items of equal importance that are comparable in one or several ways (cf. WP:WHENTABLE), like the phone tables.
I believe that Spanish phonology#Consonants would benefit a lot if it were converted into a list (or a table). It is a list in disguise, consisting of numerous items comparable in several ways: What sound, what varieties of Spanish, what example? The one-sentence paragraphs indicate bad prose. If the information would be organized in a table, it would be much more readily understandable to readers. With the phone tables, we have the same sitution. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 19:02, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
Not sure how you got "replace tables with prose" but that is not my stance. We can still have the phone tables, but article prose would be a better focus of our energies if we're trying to talk about distribution or languages that have phonemic contrasts of similar sounds. As another example of article prose, look at palatal approximant.
And no, the Spanish phonology article would not improve if we converted article prose into a list or table. Your comment is a perfect example of how a list or table would oversimplify nuanced information. That all you see is a "list in disguise" (which is a joke, particularly for the second paragraph that I was pointing to in the first place) prompts me to question your capacity to even recognize the necessary nuance to produce the relevant article prose in the first place. If all you want is a list, all you'll see is lists. But we need something higher order than that. It might make sense to augment prose with a table, but that table wouldn't be able to house all the information in that section, even if the prose could do with some cleanup. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 19:32, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
In the case of allophones like Northern Welsh [ɨ] and [ɨ̞], you would not mention them at all, not even in prose; but in the case of phonemes, you would mention them with examples? What? No! I meant: When multiple sounds with slightly different qualities which are discussed in the same article (like [ɨ] and [ɨ̞], and [e] and [e̞]) are found in the same language (or dialects of the same language), only one row need be dedicated to them in the occurernce table unless the sounds belong to different phonemes. This does not preclude mentioning the other allophone(s) in the Notes column. And I'm not talking about what to do in prose at all. In prose you can do anything so long as it enhances the discussion of the subject of the article. Nardog (talk) 23:58, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

I am still not sure whether I understand you correctly. I see it is good that I have asked, so I will ask again: In the case of allophones, you would mention both sounds in the table, but give only one example? I think that is poor design and not helpful to readers. And how do hou decide what example to keep and what example to remove? --mach 🙈🙉🙊 04:49, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

Yes, give only one example. All sounds are allophones and are produced with a different quality in each and every phonetic environment. It is listing allophones of the same phoneme whose difference is so small they are covered in the same article that is not helpful to readers and impracticable in terms of deciding what to include. Keep whatever example that is considered a typical incidence of the phoneme.
As for Welsh [ɨ] and [ɨ̞ː] in particular, Welsh phonology treats them as different phonemes (which I assume is akin to positing different phonemes for [æ] and [ɑː] in RP-type English, which can be analyzed as short and long instances of the same phoneme just as plausibly), so that can justify listing both in separate rows. If we treat them as the same phoneme, then I don't think the difference is worth a mention even in the Notes column because, again, the difference is so small; if the difference is so significant the long one should be covered in the same article as [ɘ]. (By the way, the acoustic chart at Welsh phonology#Vowels shows both sounds at lower points than [i, u] and even [ɪ, ʊ], which suggests they are both better covered in the same article as [ɘ], provided the chart is representative of the "Northern dialects".) Nardog (talk) 05:45, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
All sounds are allophones and are produced with a different quality in each and every phonetic environment. – That is besides the point. It is obvious that there is an infinite continuum of phonetic realizations, and nobody has proposed listing each and every one of them. The point is that the reliable sources our material is based on single out some of them. They consider certain allophones worth mentioning and mention them, including examples. Our articles have had that information for many years. I still do not see any reason (or consensus) why we should now all of a sudden delete that information and deprive our readers of it. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 21:24, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose merger of IPA letters. I'm not concerned with the merger of the others, per arguments similar to Mach's.
    That is, I'm not opposed to finishing (1), and I support the proposed moves for (2), bringing them into line with IPA description. (3) is already implemented. Some of the merged material might belong at reduced vowel. Oppose (4), except for mid central vowel > schwa, since the IPA set up this vowel specifically for a reduced mid-central vowel, i.e., schwa. (Though I haven't considered Nardog's objections.) But the other four vowels in (4) were set up as full vowels, with a defined location in vowel space and defined rounding. They are thus incompatible with schwa. Oppose (5) and instead, as does Mach, support merging open front unrounded vowel with open central unrounded vowel. The problem here is that the IPA vowels are defined by articulation, but no-one uses articulation any more as the defining characteristic of vowels. Rather, we nearly always use vowel formants, including articles in JIPA and the IPA Handbook. Using formants, even Daniel Jones' and John Wells' pronunciation of ⟦a⟧ is central, not front, and is much more open than ⟦ɑ⟧. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, [ɶ] in the few languages that have it is less open than ⟦a⟧ -- that is, it's the rounded equivalent of ⟦æ⟧. Merging the articles would badly obscure this discrepancy between the definitions of the IPA vowels in theory (hypothesized articulation) and their values in practice (demonstrated formants). Merging open front<>central unrounded vowel, on the other hand, would IMO be okay as the distinction is generally not made in practice. However, I think we should clarify in the lead of the merged article that there is some debate over whether ⟦a⟧ is truly a front vowel. Maybe we could move it to a name that reflects this ambiguity? The fact that people are chronically proposing an IPA letter such as ⟨ᴀ⟩ for the low central vowel (and being rejected) suggests that there is confusion as to the nature of ⟦a⟧. — kwami (talk) 03:43, 17 December 2019 (UTC)
@Kbb2: @Nardog: @J. 'mach' wust: @Aeusoes1: -- pinging some of you in case you're interested in my 2 bits, since it's been a couple months.

BTW, re. not liking ⟨ɪ, ʊ⟩ as an undue influence of English, these are actually quite useful letters throughout Africa, where using the ATR/RTR diacritics makes extended transcription difficult to read. ⟨ɪ, ʊ⟩ pair up nicely with ⟨ɛ, ɔ⟩ for the RTR vowels. — kwami (talk) 03:51, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

I suggest not only not combining IPA sounds that aren't already combined, but uncombining those which are. If you are trying to find information about ONE CERTAIN letter which is in an article where there are two or more sounds, it can be hard, hellish, and even downright impossible to find that information you need. For example, let's say, if all nasals were combined, and you wanted to find information about ɲ, it could take longer than it should. The article could also combine information, basically how the news expresses bias, by hiding information. It makes people like me who are trying to create a language feel like tossing their computer in a piranha-infested lake and jumping in with it. And then swim off a waterfall. (maybe a LITTLE exaggeration) --LinguistWorldbuilder43 (talk) 22:18, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Diphthongs

How come diphthongs don't have Wikipedia articles?? Georgia guy (talk) 01:53, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Georgia guy, is diphthong missing something? We just finished talking about how we had too many vowel articles, do you want to split these out or something? Elizium23 (talk) 02:09, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
Because of their variability I guess. Also, their conventional transcription sometimes (or even often) doesn't match the actual realization; compare Dutch /œy/ in phonemic transcription with its phonetic counterpart [ɐø], which is how it's realized in the Netherlands. Creating articles for diphthongs is a bad idea. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 05:47, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Problems with IPA templates

There are a couple of problems with the IPA templates that make the resulting transcriptions less understandable than they should be. One is that all the language-specific IPA templates return an IPA transcription enclosed in square brackets; but the returned transcriptions are all phonemic, and so should be enclosed in slants. This is surely an elementary and serious conceptual error. Could it be fixed?

Less worrying, but still of concern to phoneticians, is that if an audio file is provided, the sounds made by the speaker are often different from the sounds denoted by the returned IPA transcription, and confusing to readers who don't know about the difference between phonemics and phonetics. The normal solution is to add a second, phonetic transcription to the phonemic one, showing the sounds used in that particular audio instance: e.g. "Wuhan (Chinese city) /ù.xân/ (audio-link) [wu˩ xæn˥˧]". It would be up to editors to add the second transcription where they felt it was appropriate, using the generalized IPA template rather than the language-specific one. Farnwell (talk) 20:15, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

The IPA templates are all more-or-less phonetic. If there are cases where an IPA transcription convention (as identified in the language-specific keys) differs from the sound files provided in a way that you believe would be confusing, it's probably something you should take up in the talk page specific to that particular language's IPA key. If there are confusing transcriptions and no such language-specific key, then the creation of key for that language is probably in order. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 21:01, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
I'm sorry to say that I disagree: I don't think the templates are more-or-less-phonetic at all. They're phonemic - or at any rate, they're highly prescriptive, with defined symbol-sets that disallow alternative or additional symbols. Some examples:
IPAc-cmn (Mandarin):
- coerces wu to u
- disallows h
- disallows ɹ
- disallows æ
The first three of these alternatives are used by established phonologists and are noted in the Wikipedia Mandarin Phonology page, so disallowing them is high-handed. The last is needed for a phonetic transcription of the city name "Wuhan", as articulated by the speaker in that audio illustration.
IPA-en (English):
- disallows e
- coerces əʊ to oʊ
The first of these is the standard transcription for the DRESS vowel in English dictionaries that use IPA, and the second is standard BrEng for the GOAT vowel.
IPA-fr (French):
- disallows æ~
There are claims in the literature that this is a more accurate rendering of the vowel of "vin".
These templates are surely in fact designed to force editors into producing phonemic transcriptions using a strictly prescribed set of symbols. All print publications have a strict set of house rules for phonetic renderings, and one would expect Wikipedia to follow suit. But three considerations follow:
a. Given that these are phonemic transcriptions, putting them in square brackets is inexcusable.
b. Wikipedia is different from paper publications in that its house rules arise from debate and consensus. To facilitate this debate, we need to loosen the criteria for phonemic transcriptions. We could do this by allowing any established variant into the phonemic symbol-set for a given language. So we would allow (for example) Lee & Zee's ɹ and Duanmu's h into the symbol-set for Mandarin, alongside the existing ɻ and x, and BrEng əʊ for GOAT/BODE as well as AmEng oʊ.
c. What would also be helpful, in my view, would be to include a narrow phonetic transcription alongside the phonemic one, e.g. wu˨ xæn˥˧ alongside the existing /uhan/, where the initial w and the raised and fronted quality of the second vowel are clearly perceptible. In my experience, phonemic transcriptions confuse lay readers, because they can't understand why the sounds they hear are so different from the sounds that the symbols are supposed to denote. The narrow phonetic transcription is particularly important when there's an audio file present, showing possible discrepancies between the phonemic rendering and what the speaker utters. I'm loath to add non-phonemic transcriptions at the moment, because the square brackets on the template-produced transcriptions mean that we would have two competing phonetic transcriptions, which would be even more confusing.
I'd be glad to hear editors' reactions to all this.Farnwell (talk) 18:38, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
I think you're confusing terms here. "Prescriptive" in linguistics has to do with grammars that describe how a language should be, contrasting with "descriptive" grammars that describe how they actually are. Prescriptive and descriptive are not related to phonetic/phonemic, which deal with either the actual sounds produced in speech or the abstract concepts in speakers minds, respectively.
So, saying that our IPA guidelines are "prescriptive" because we have clearly defined conventions is inaccurate. Saying that they are phonemic because they are broad is also inaccurate. You are right that phonemic transcriptions would be confusing to readers. That's why we don't do them. In general, we try to keep our transcriptions broad enough that we don't need diacritics, though there are some exceptions to this.
Again, if you have an issue with a particular language's conventions, feel free to bring it up at Help talk:IPA/French for French, Help talk:IPA/Mandarin for Mandarin Chinese, or whichever language has a transcription convention you disagree with. I imagine you will get a lot of resistance for changing the English transcription scheme, which is diaphonemic and therefore covers multiple English dialects. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 18:59, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
Aeusoes1, your comment about misusing 'prescriptive' verges on being a personal attack and should not have been made. I've posted a fuller comment on your Talk page. Farnwell (talk) 15:10, 20 February 2020 (UTC).
On the substantive question of whether the IPA-xx templates are phonetic, editors might want to consider these points:
a. The range of allophony allowed in a given language is extremely small. There's only one allowed variant in French (E vs. E:, which is a phonemic difference for a few speakers anyway), only three in Italian (nasals that assimilate to the following consonant), and only three in Greek (pre-nasalalised option for /b d g/). In English-IPA, all allophony is specifically excluded. So on the phonemic/phonetic continuum, these transcriptions stand very much at the phonemic end.
b. If the phrase to be transcribed does not include any of the allowed allophonic features, that transcription will be phonemic. The fact that the system used to produce the transcription catered for allophones and was therefore phonetic does not make *that transcription* phonetic. Since so few allophones are allowed, most transcriptions will in practice be phonemic.
c. The system produces inappropriate results in cases where the spoken output does not reflect the normal meaning of the symbols (a common difficulty with strictly phonemic transcriptions). Some instances of this are the audible initial [w] in "Wuhan", the strongly diphthongised middle syllable in /fi"rEntse/, absence of the pharyngeal fricative shown in the transcription of "Ivrit", and the lowered and wobbly first vowel in the same transcription. (See "Wuhan" and "Florence" for the first two, and "Hebrew language" for the second two.) The public understanding of descriptive linguistics is low, and these discrepancies between symbol and sound undermine it further, taking us in the direction of George Bernard Shaw's "ghoti" as a phonetic spelling of "fish".
d. The normal way of dealing with these discrepancies is to provide a phonetic transcription alongside the phonemic one; editors would do this where they considered it appropriate. But with the IPA-xx templates already marking their output as phonetic, the result would be two competing phonetic transcriptions. This would be decidedly incoherent, and would reduce public understanding still more.
e. It isn't obligatory to mark transcriptions with slants or square brackets. The Journal of the IPA leaves them out in its Illustrations (it uses them in the discussion, but not in the transcriptions themselves), as does the Handbook of the IPA; J C Wells' "Longmans Pronunciation Dictionary" doesn't use them. Popular foreign-language dictionaries put their transcriptions in square brackets, which is wrong, because they normally record no allophony - another nail in the coffin of public understanding. We could sidestep a minefield here by leaving them out.
If I had to reduce my case to one take-away message, it would be that removing the square brackets would let us add a second transcription glossing the first, and improve public understanding. I don't have any more to say on this for the moment. Oh, except for a thank-you to Nardog for sorting out the indentations on earlier posts. Farnwell (talk) 15:10, 20 February 2020 (UTC).
My patience is wearing thin here. You've written a lot, and most of it is dependent on the assumption that our transcriptions are phonemic, which they are not. As such, I'm only going to respond to the points designed to prove this point.
a. The range of allophony allowed in a given language is extremely small. Yes, as I said, these transcriptions are broad. See Phonetic transcription#Narrow versus broad transcription. Broad transcription is still phonetic. Let's take Spanish ánfora as an example. The phonemic transcription depends a lot on the phonemic analysis, but let's say it's something simple like /ˈaNfora/ with an archiphoneme /N/ that's undefined for place of articulation. A narrow phonetic transcription might be something like [ˈa̠ɱfɔɾa̠]. A broad phonetic transcription could be [ˈamfoɾa]. There's a whole range of transcriptions between them that differ in level of detail. But they are all phonetic.
b. If the phrase to be transcribed does not include any of the allowed allophonic features, that transcription will be phonemic. That's not quite what we do. As you said yourself, the range of allophony is small. Small allophony is not no allophony. You could have the phonemic transcription of an English word like bow as /boʊ/ and a broad phonetic transcription like [boʊ] that uses the same exact symbols, but is still phonetic. Again, it's just broad phonetic transcription.
Again, if you have issue with a particular language's transcription scheme, take it up with at the relevant talk page. All you've done is identified a handful of languages that don't exhibit much allophony in our transcriptions, which we can change if there is consensus. There are plenty of counterexamples, such as Russian, that have tons of allophones. These transcriptions aren't phonemic and if there's a particular convention you would like to see change, then bring it up in the relevant talk page. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 16:34, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
Handbook of the IPA, pp. 28–30 might help you (so might WP:TLDR). Nardog (talk) 16:48, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
What they said. Allophonics aside, I see no valid reason to allow multiple transcriptions of the same sound unless we differentiate between national/regional standards in a particular guide. You're not the first editor that holds that view and I must say that I've never heard a convincing argument to change our practice (it's also the practice of virtually every dictionary/paper out there). (Redacted) Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 17:38, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
While it's unrealistic to expect that every transcription on Wikipedia will be a narrow transcription of the recording, it is realistic to ask someone to record a different pronunciation variant. You can even do it yourself, if you're a native speaker of a standard accent of e.g. German, Swedish, etc. As far as I can see, some Dutch recordings could use re-recording as they're overpronounced. File:Nl-Brussels_Hoofdstedelijk_Gewest.ogg sounds about right ([-lək.xəˈβɛst], without an artificial pause that would allow the citation form of Gewest with a voiced fricative to surface) and so do File:Klaas-Jan_Huntelaar_pronunciation.ogg ([ˌklaːˌɕɑn -], without an artifical pause blocking /sj/-coalescence) and File:Nl-Ruud_van_Nistelrooy.ogg ([ˈryt.fɑˈnɪstəlroːj], without an artificial pause and pedantic gemination of nasals). But there are examples of overpronounced names that won't match the IPA should we decide to switch to a narrower transcription that would differentiate between Northern and Belgian varieties of Standard Dutch, where elision, voicing and nasal assimilations (including /n/ dropping after schwa, which I think is obligatory in normal speech, at least not before vowels) are extensive. Hell, even Uitspraakwoordenboek takes them into consideration in their transcriptions. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 06:37, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Request for comment on developing a linguistics editing competition

Should wikiproject Linguistics host an editing drive similar to the The Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon or the WikiCup? — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:15, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

  • I've been trying to think of ways to get more editors involved in this topic area and hopefully improve our content, and one thing that seems to work is friendly competition and prizes. The Wikimedia Foundation offers grants of up to $2000 through meta:Grants:Project/Rapid and Gretchenmcc is independently seeking grant proposals for linguistics outreach activities, so we could use grant funds to buy linguistics books as prizes for participants who improve the most content. I'm interested in whether other members of the WikiProject would be interested in supporting an editing drive (either as coordinators or participants). If there is sufficient interest, I would be interested in hearing ideas for topic areas or goals such as reducing the number of stubs or increasing the amount of GAs and FAs. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:15, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Language

Contributors to this WikiProject may be interested in a discussion at Talk:Language#Edits undone March 2020 regarding making that article easier to read. Cnilep (talk) 03:02, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

RFC notice

Hey WP:LINGUISTICS!

There's an RFC regarding the etymology of the word mottainai and its relationship (if any) to Buddhism. Please see Talk:Mottainai#RFC on Yuriko Sato citation.

Kind regards,

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:02, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

AfD Oligoisolating language

FYI - This AfD (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Oligoisolating language) might be of interest for members of this project. –Austronesier (talk) 10:21, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Macedonian language

Hello fellow users! I have recently taken the task to completely revamp the Macedonian language article in my sandbox and have made substantial progress in doing so. However, I got kind of stuck with the consonants, vowels and verbs section as writers usually report information related to those with a lot of technical terminology which leaves me confused as to what is relevant to go into the article. Is there are any fellow linguist savvy person who would like to help me please? I would appreciate it very kindly as one of my goals is to get the article to a GA level at least. Thank you very much in advance for any help you offer! P.S. I have an extensive grammar source in English and in Russian if anyone is interested in helping btw. DD1997DD (talk) 00:03, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

New language category

Hi all. Category:Central Indo-Aryan languages was recently created as a subcat of Category:Indo-Aryan languages. It currently has just one page, but there are a few edit requests asking to add more (see Category talk:Hindi, Category talk:Urdu, and Category talk:Hindustani language for the open requests). I don't know if this is appropriate, so I thought I'd ask here in case anyone feels like handling this. If so, then they'd probably want to get removed from the parent cat as well. Thanks, –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 13:38, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose that we merge the articles Cot and Caught per WP:COMMONNAME. Most of North America does not distinguish between these two concepts, and so there's no need to have two articles on the same word. I expect some resistance, but only from midwest and southern editors. And before people complain that this shows a US bias, Scottish editors have historically shown support for this merger. [April Fools!] — Wug·a·po·des​ 03:18, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Dybo's law incomprehensible

Recently a user has been adding a lot of new information containing all kinds of buzzwords like "morphophonological theory", "dominant acute". The article was previously already tagged for being incomprehensible, and I think these edits only made the problem worse. If there's anyone who is knowledgeable on the subject, it would be great if you could clean up the article so that it makes sense again. At this point I'm not sure if anyone can understand the article anymore. Rua (mew) 08:54, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

@Rua: Let's work together? :v Gnosandes (talk) 14:43, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Article etymology sections

Hello all- I came to the project page thinking I might find guidance regarding the naming of article etymology sections. Can anyone tell me if we have a preference? I have the sense that it is usually "Etymology", but couldn't find that stated anywhere in the vast and swirling MoS. Eric talk 16:42, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Why would this project have guidance on how to name an etymology section, not how to write it? I don't think we have an explicit preference (and frankly, why should we?), but if any page should cover it's MOS:LAYOUT, not here. Nardog (talk) 17:40, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
It won't be found in MOS:LAYOUT, which only covers the most common and general cases. I also agree that it wouldn't be covered by this WikiProject as we are concerned only with entire articles that treat of linguistics topics.
What you'll find is that if you take a survey of many articles that have etymological information, you may find a common naming convention, or you may not. I think if you are going to talk only about etymology and nothing else related, naming the heading "Etymology" would be the way to go. But for example, a geographic area that was named by Spanish settlers, you might find the heading named "Naming" or "Settlement" and the etymology is a part of that.
I don't know. Just use your brain. Are you asking for one article, or a series of articles or a whole swath that you intend to modify? Elizium23 (talk) 17:53, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the observations and advice. As it turns out, I was using my brain in an attempt to find guidance, including in our layout guidance, and either my brain, or Wikipedia's organization, failed me. So I dropped in here to see if anyone could point me elsewhere. The article that prompted my question: Lingones (see history). Eric talk 13:22, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Bilabial trill - Blowing a raspberry?

I was looking at the Blowing a raspberry article and thought someone in the linguistics wikiproject could help out. I have two queries that could help improve the article:

  • Does blowing a raspberry have to involve the tongue? If not, can it be considered a bilabial trill?
  • The article needs more information on how blowing a raspberry is used in various cultures. Is it universal?

If someone could find scholarly articles that answer those questions, that would be great. Tea and crumpets (talk) 06:46, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

@Tea and crumpets: Without having sources about the phonetics of the "raspberry" immediately at hand, I can tell from my personal experience with bilabial trills in Nias and Muna that these are pronounced very lax and with a very short duration.[1] In careful and loud pronunciation, only the first opening is strengthened, and the vibration quickly fades or is not produced at all.[2] This is quite in contrast with the "raspberry", where a strong continious audible vibration is intended (to imitate the sound of a fart). –Austronesier (talk) 07:17, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Yoder, Brendon (2010). "Prenasalization and trilled release of two consonants in Nias" (PDF). Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session. 50. Retrieved 7 June 2019. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  2. ^ van den Berg, René (1989). A Grammar of the Muna Language. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. Vol. 139. Dordrecht: Foris Publications. p. 17.

Content dispute in Nominative–accusative language

Regarding a content dispute in which I am involved and which has taken the form of edit warring (→ temp. full-PP for 2 days), we would highly appreciate to hear your third-party input in the talk page discussion. –Austronesier (talk) 07:25, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

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