Re: [WikiEN-l] Pronunciations and IPA/SAMPA

There was some talk a while back about deciding on a standard method of indicating pronunciations on Wikipedia. Of course some people said pronunciations belong on Wiktionary, but that's beside the point: there are many articles where a discussion of the pronunciation of certain words is necessary, and there ought to be a standard way of notating that. In fact, there is. The International Phonetic Alphabet is ideally suited to marking pronunciations of words, and is flexible enough to describe broad transcriptions that represent how a word is pronounced in multiple dialects to minute phonetic details. This wisdom, of course, has been lost on the makers of most American dictionaries, who each insist upon using their own ad-hoc pronunciation scheme (one of my personal pet peeves). The _Cambridge Dictionary of American English_ is a notable, if perhaps not well-known, exception. The foremost dictionary of (mostly) British English, the _Oxford English Dictionary_ uses IPA, as does the major Australian English dictionary, _The Macquarie Dictionary_. But I digress. There are several pages on the Wikipedia that deal specifically with pronunciations, for example [[List of words of disputed pronunciation]]. And the way that the pronunciations are listed on that page is the worst possible mix of ad-hoc pronunciation schemes. In fact, some of the ad-hac pronunciations given I couldn't even figure what they meant. (does AHSK rhyme with American _task_ or _mosque_?). Clearly some kind of standard scheme is needed. I spent several hours today revamping that page, using IPA transcriptions and doing some serious research about which pronunciations are listed in what dictionaries. I put that page on [[List of words of disputed pronunciation/IPA]]. However, I later discovered to my tremendous dismay that the IPA letters simply do not display in IE. The scheme for encoding IPA in ASCII, called SAMPA, is capable of encoding anything in IPA, but it is not particularly readable (although some might argue the same about IPA). It was designed to be machine-readable, and it doesn't really seem like an adequate solution. It uses lots of non-alphabetic characters to represent sounds (the 'a' in _cat_ is '{' in SAMPA), and as a result SAMPA-ized pronunciations are frankly ugly. Anyhow, it seems that just using the HTML entities for the Unicode IPA extensions is not an acceptable solution because it leaves IE users with lovely but useless rectangles where there ought to be IPA characters. There is a LaTeX extension called TIPA that allows the complete set of IPA characters and diacritics. If this were installed into the TeX math extensions, then a similar syntax could be used to generate images of the IPA from LaTeX input. I see the following possible solutions (in the order that I think is good): 1.) Auto-detect the browser and send IPA Unicode to browsers that support it and TIPA LaTeX images to those that don't. (Pros: attractive display of IPA for all users. Cons: lots of programming) 2.) Just send TIPA LaTeX images (Pros: attractive display of IPA. Cons: Uses images in text when for some users embedded IPA Unicode would look better) 3.) Store the IPA in a special format or in a special tag, auto-detect the browser and send IPA Unicode to browsers that support it and SAMPA to the rest. (Pros: doesn't require inserting images or using TeX. Cons: SAMPA is ugly and hard to read) 4.) Render IPA into GIFs or PNGs and just insert them as images. (Pros: compatible with everything. Cons: time-consuming, and difficult to change) 5.) Devise a Wikipedia-specific pronunciation scheme and just use that (blech!) (Pros: no coding required. Cons: YAAHPS (Yet Another Ad Hoc Pronunciation Scheme)) 6.) Do nothing and continue to allow people to use ad-hoc pronunciation schemes (BLECH!!) (Pros: no action required. Cons: maintains status quo harms as described above) Of course, no. 1 requires doing some coding and testing for what may end up being a feature used on just a few pages. On the other hand, such code could possibly be extremely useful for the Wiktionary. In the meantime, I'm going to leave [[List of words of disputed pronunciation/IPA]] as it is, and wait for suggestions. Now of course there will be opponents of the IPA, because it's too technical or whatever reason. To those people I say the IPA for the purposes of representing English is really no more complicated than the pronunciation schemes used in American dictionaries, like the _Merriam-Webster Dictionary_, and the _Cambridge Dictionary of American English_, which is designed for learners of English, seems to do just fine with it. - David [[User:Nohat]] *

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