Toby Bartels wrote: The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following explanation of their pronunciation scheme: "For most words a single set of symbols can represent the pronunciation found in each regional variety of American English. You will supply those features of your own regional speech that are called forth by the pronunciation key in this Dictionary" And it seems like a panacea for the pronunciation problem. But it's not, because some words simply have different underlying representations in different dialects, and the system only works for dialects that are roughly the same except for a few sound changes. It fails for wildly or even mildly divergent dialects. The American Heritage Dictionary system sweeps this problem under the rug by saying "The pronunciations are exclusively those of educated speech", which, to my mind, is a cop-out, and not a satisfactory solution for Wikipedia. However, the question of dialect remains. Obviously listing pronunciations in all possible dialects is not a reasonable solution, and indeed, nor are any of the systems used in American dictionaries. I recognize that the general task of specifying a pronunciation that speakers of any dialect will automatically speak in their dialect is not ideally handled by IPA. However, I have do not know of any system advocated by linguists other than what phonologists call "broad transcription" using IPA. Can you point me to a book or paper, written by linguists, that specifies such a system for English, and advocates its use by and for general (non-academic) readers? I have never encoutered such a system, and I doubt that one exists. Barring the existence of a standard system, I don't really see that Wikipedia has any other options besides IPA for specifying pronunciations. Certainly I hope no one thinks Wikipedia should invent its own system. When it comes to standards, it should be our job to follow them and describe them, not create them. So I advocate having IPA transcriptions for standard dialects (like Standard American English and Received Pronunciation), and having special pages describing how the various nonstardard dialects differ both phonetically and phonemically from the standards. I don't know much about morphophones and I'm not sure it's a concept widely accepted by linguists. PS: I have made a page on meta called [[Pronunciations]] and am going through the list archives and posting links to relevant discussions there. I'm not sure what the policy should be regarding where further discussion should occur, so if you want to respond, do so either here or on the list. -- David [[User:Nohat]]

Toby Bartels wrote: The reasoning behind morphophones is that even though people speak with different regional dialects, how the pronunciations are stored in each person's internal lexicon in their brain is the same, or can be representented symbolically in ways that are equivalent. The morphophonic system taps into this internal consistency between different dialects and thus a single symbolic form can represent the different (but equivalent) pronunciations for speakers of different dialects. For example, in such system we would have a single symbol for the sound represented by the final "er" in the word "runner". A speaker of a non-rhotic Boston dialect, for example, would then always produce this sound as a plain schwa, and a speaker of, say, standard American would produce it as a rhoticized schwa. In the morphophonic system, only a single pronunciation would be needeed to specify the two different pronunciations in result. The problem with this system is that the fundamental assumption that internal representations of pronunciations are equivalent is false. This is what I meant by "mildly divergent" dialects. Besides regular sound change, dialects also differ in some cases in how pronunciations are represented in the lexicon. It is simply the case that some dialects have fundamentally different internal representations for the pronunciations of some words. If you don't agree, then how would you specify a single pronunciation using a morphophonic system for the words "almond", "apricot", "aunt", "controversy", "clerk", "creek", "florida", "garage", "greasy", "lieutenant", "mayonnaise", "mischievous", "pecan", and "tour", just for starters? I just don't see how a simple system could capture all these variants with a single representation. You're not advocating a system that has a symbol that corresponds to /u/ in AmE and /Ef/ in BrE so that "lieutenant" is represented with one set of symbols, are you? OK. I'd be really interested to learn how the above problem is solved. - David [[User:Nohat]]