Toby Bartels wrote:
This is what morphophones are all about -- a scheme
where all
dialects read in their own sound. We don't have to invent our own
ad-hoc scheme, since linguists have been studying morphophones, and
quite often in the context of English, since 1962. (IPA, in contrast,
does phonemes, or even lower-level structures.)
The "Webster's Dictionary" systems often
seen in US dictionaries are
roughly morphophonic, but not very sophisticated linguistically. (But
Merriam-Webster's current system is phonemic, despite it's
old-fashioned non-IPA, Webster's-ish look. Therefore the worst of
them all, IMO.)
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]]