Wikipedia talk:IPA for English

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[edit] Australian bad and lad

What's the difference between the vowels in bad and lad in Australian English? Thanks in advance Ferike333 (talk) 18:40, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Length, perhaps a bit like the diff tween the two can's in "I can can that for you" in US English. kwami (talk) 18:53, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Both cans have same basic vowel. The first one is unstressed, so its vowel is reduced to schwa.--Confused monk (talk) 17:24, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

The two cans in that sentence have completely different vowels. It's not length.

Sounds interesting. Didnt know about both. Thanks Ferike333 (talk) 16:54, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Questions

The table says that the second U in the word "curriculum" is written in IPA as /ʊ/ or /ʉ/, but shouldn't it be /juː/? Also, aren't /ər/ and /ɜr/ the same, as is /ɒr/ and /ɔr/? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.13.25.115 (talk) 22:52, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I can't remember ever hearing anyone pronounce "curriculum" with a full /ju:/. The difference between /ɜr/ and /ər/ is the same as between /ʌ/ and /ə/: the latter are reduced vowels. /ɒr/ and /ɔr/ are the same for most Americans, but not in the UK. kwami (talk) 01:18, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

curriculum is /kərɪkjələm/ or something. not exactly sure but it definitely has a /j/. east coast US speaking. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.241.6.19 (talk) 23:28, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

So in North America, it's generally pronounced like /kərɪkjələm/, so I guess using /ʉ/ or /ʊ/ to spell it is... UK pronunciation? I know that it's stated at the beginning of the article that the table covers not just American English but also UK pronunciantion, but it should make a distinction in how words are written in IPA for the different dialects, just so people don't get confused as to how to write/read it in IPA based on their dialect, especially if they're just learning the IPA. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.13.25.115 (talk) 04:54, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Read the footnote: "Pronounced [ʊ] in many dialects, [ə] in others. Many speakers freely alternate between a reduced [ʊ̈] and a reduced [ə]." kwami (talk) 08:37, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Please stop adding your invented symbols. ɵ and ʉ are IPA symbols for different vowels not used in english.--Confused monk (talk) 13:22, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually they are used in English, but you're missing the point: This is a key to the transcriptions used in the articles. If the symbols are used in the articles, then we need to cover them here. If you come up with alternates that we can agree on, and then go on to substitute them in the thousands of IPA-en and pron-en articles, then we can eliminate these. kwami (talk) 18:32, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, it's you who invented this symbol, it's you who changed the transcriptions, it's you who keeps reverting when someone corrects them. (as in bonobo) I think it's you who is missing the point. --Confused monk (talk) 13:36, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

You can look up the edit history of the article with the 'history' tab, which should dispel your suspicions. But I'm glad you brought 'bonobo' to my attention: though the single edit I had made last week was in error, and you were right in correcting it, the article was missing the other and AFAIK more common pronunciation. kwami (talk) 14:19, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Agreed with /ʊ/ which is used by the OED, but I think the use of /ɵ/ for that was made up by a Wikipedian... Have you ever seen it used anywhere else? Everyone uses /ə(ʊ)/ for that (but that only make sense if we transcribe the vowel in code as /əʊ/). One (quite old) dictionary using /ou/ for the vowel in code and italics for optional phonemes uses /ou/ for kilogram (despite not using /o/ for anything else), so we could write /o(ʊ)/ by analogy. If we really have to make up symbols, /a/ for BATH (staff, clasp, dance: kinda free alternation between /ɑː/ and /æ/) and /ɔ/ for CLOTH (cough, long, gone: kinda free alternation between /ɔː/ and /ɒ/) would be more useful. (And, BTW, why we have /i/ for HAPPY but not /u/ for INTO (influence, situation, bivouac)? --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 20:07, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I have seen /ɵ/, but for the life of me I can't remember where. /o(ʊ)/ isn't bad, though it doesn't capture the /ə/ alternate. As for /u/ for into, I don't control that distinction (and neither does the OED), so I can't say. (I think moreover that I would support a move to change /i/ in city to traditional /ɪ/, which is generally clearer to the reader, since /i/ is mistakenly used in a number of articles for both /iː/ and /ɪ/. Would /ʊ/ work similarly for your /u/?) kwami (talk) 20:15, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Webster's describes reduced /oʊ/ as a rounded schwa for some speakers, though they don't transcribe it as such, instead transcribing both /oʊ/ and plain schwa. kwami (talk) 14:40, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

That proves you're wrong.--Confused monk (talk) 16:56, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

← After all, /i/ and /ɪ/ are in complementary distribution, as the former is only found at the end of syllables and the latter never is; but /i/ is handy for avoid having to mark syllables in /njuːkliər/ nuclear vs /njuːklɪər/ new clear. If we used /ɪ/ we should write /njuː.klɪ.ər/ to make clear that it's three syllables (and that it doesn't become /nuːklɪr/ in dialects with the mirror-nearer merger). OTOH, most dictionaries for RP use /ɪ/. Maybe we could allow both? For example,

ɪ	bid, pit, happy[1]

1. ^ Also transcribed /i/ at the end of syllables (e.g. /njuːkliər/ is equivalent to /njuː.klɪ.ər/), where in articles with the happy tensing it is pronounced more like /iː/

(ditto for /ʊ/ vs. /u/, but I think that the cases where using the former can cause ambiguities are much rarer). --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 21:44, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten about the syllabicity issue. That wouldn't be a problem if we transcribed vowels phonemically even before /r/, so clear were "/kli:r/", but as it is that's a good argument for keeping "i". IMO it wouldn't make much sense to transcribe it differently at the ends of words than elsewhere. However, there are a lot of articles that use "ɪ" for city, and I haven't bothered to change all of them, so we should at least have a note under /ɪ/. kwami (talk) 07:42, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

On the other hand using /iːr/ would require marking syllables in words such as keyring. It also makes little sense in either non-rhotic dialects (to distinguish neared from need you would need a more complex rule than just Ignore any /r/ which is not followed by a vowel), or dialects with the mirror-nearer merger (where they're not distinguished at all). Given that the dialects we've decided to cater with include RP and GenAm and exclude Scottish English and the like, I see little point in using /iːr/. Just use /ɪər/ and let Englishmen drop the r and Americans drop the ə. As for happy, how's this? --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 10:10, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Good, though I'd take out the "sometimes". It's a good 95% of the time, as that was the convention we'd agreed on. kwami (talk) 10:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Changed "sometimes" to "often"; remove it altoghether when the 95% becomes 99.5%. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 10:33, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

We had an earlier round of complaints that <ɨ> is never used for English and therefore should be abolished, and I just came across a couple of elementary textbooks that use it. One is Linguistics by Akmajian et al., p 82. kwami (talk) 14:59, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

You still don't get it.--Confused monk (talk) 17:01, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

BTW, what happens to plurals, past tenses, etc. of words ending with /i/? (I'm not a native speaker.) If the happy tensing is really just allophonic, I would expect Tony's to be pronounced with a laxer vowel than Tony. If this is not the case, then the happy tensing might have become phonemic, as Rosie's and roses might contrast as /rəʊziz/ ~ /rəʊzɪz/, and studied ~ studded would be /stʌdid/ ~ /stʌdɪd/. Is there any dialect with a three-way distinction between Rosie's, roses, and Rosa's? --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 12:47, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

They have the same quality as their unadorned singulars/present tenses etc. For example, John Bunyan rhymes "stories" [ˈstɔːrɪz] with "more is" [ˈmɔːrɪz] in "To Be a Pilgrim". The rhyme no longer works for those of us who say [ˈstɔːriz]. +Angr 13:35, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

That was my point (text was struck by mistake). If there are people for whom "the rhyme no longer works", that's a point against using /ɪ/ in words such as happy. Does anyone know how widespread this, er..., studied–studded split is? --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 15:27, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

I think any dialect with happy-tensing applies it also to inflected forms of affected words; to the best of my knowledge, any dialect that has a tense vowel in "Rosie" and "study" will have a tense vowel in "Rosie's" and "studied". As for a three-way contrast between "Rosie's", "roses", and "Rosa's", I believe it's made both by more progressive English English accents (the more conservative ones merging "Rosie's" and "roses") and by more conservative American English accents (the more progressive ones merging "roses" and "Rosa's"). +Angr 15:58, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Although I'm neither British nor conservative, I distinguish between Rosie's, roses, and rosa's. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:37, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

LOL. Your accent may be conservative even if your politics aren't. +Angr 18:40, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean "conservative" tautologically (that is, specific to this particular feature) or do you mean accents that are generally conservative? I've always considered California English with its cot-caught merger, pin-pen near-merger, merry-marry-Mary merger, raised front vowels before /ŋ/, fronted /ʌ/, and lowered /ɪ/ to be fairly "progressive". — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 20:12, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Of course I mean conservative with respect to the weak vowel merger. Are there any accents that are in general either conservative or progressive? California English is progressive in the ways you mentioned, but conservative in the ways most North American accents are conservative: rhotic, flat-BATH, non-H-dropping, etc. +Angr 21:01, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I should've been clearer. I meant amongst American dialects. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 21:34, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Per the objection to <ɵ> above, I just found the source: Bolinger 1989. He's widely cited for this distinction, but his citers have sub'd symbols like <ŏ> for his "labial-colored" reduced vowel. But he himself uses <ɵ>. This might be the source of the distinction that was already on Wikipedia when I got here. Bolinger contrasts (p 360) a mission with [ə], emission with [ɨ], and omission with [ɵ]. The OED transcribes omission with [oʊ], while Webster's gives [oʊ] and [ə] as alternates. (They warn in their preface that they don't transcribe reduced o / rounded schwa with a distinct symbol.) kwami (talk) 21:32, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

/ə(ʊ)/ would be quite equivalent to what Webster's does, if we used /əʊ/ for boat... --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 19:03, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

happy vowel proposal

Hey, this is interesting. Bolinger argues that the reduced vowel at the ends of words with happy tensing is just the final or pre-vocalic allophone of schwi. That is, happy is /ˈhæpɨ/. I was wondering if we needed to retain that distinction. Would following Bolinger be acceptable here? There are a couple advantages I can think of: (1) avoiding predictable allophones and extra symbols for our readers to memorize, and (2) avoiding the Latin vowel letters a e i o u. The reason the latter is important is that there are hundreds of articles where "i" is used ambiguously for either /ɪ/ or /iː/, and whenever an editor sees it, s/he knows it needs correction. As long as we continue to use "i" for the happy vowel, our readers will never be sure if we actually mean it, or if it's simply a sloppy transcription. Also, if we overtly transcribe all final ee's as either /ɨ/ or /iː/, it will be readily apparent when there is an error, and it will be quickly corrected. I have no confidence that many of the final i's in our transcriptions are truly the happy vowel.

On the other hand, I don't know how we'd handle the studied - studded distinction. kwami (talk) 23:14, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

If we used ɨ for happy, wouldn't that imply that people who pronounce roses and rosa's identically pronounce happy as [ˈhæpə]? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 02:09, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

No, different context. I merge /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ with /ɑː/ in most contexts, leaving /oʊ/ distinct (cot = caught vs coat), but before /r/ I merge them with /oʊ/, leaving /ɑː/ distinct (corrigible = core vs car). So, assuming happy is /ɨ/, then I merge it with /iː/ finally and before vowels, but with /ə/ before consonants. But there is the studied - studded problem—I don't know how Bolinger would answer that. kwami (talk) 04:54, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

According to the table, we're using /ɨ/ equivalently with /ɪ/, with a link to the OED according to which "ɪ represents free variation between /ɪ/ and /ə/". The vowel in happy definitely isn't a schwa in any "standard" dialect of English. So we would need to either 1) distinguish between /ɨ/ and /ɪ/, or 2) declare that we aren't using /ɪ/ the same way the OED does. I don't think that would be worth the trouble. (Also the "different context" argument would mean that studied might be pronounced with a schwa.) --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 17:07, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

BTW, can anyone think of a possible minimal pair between /i/ and /iː/? (The closest I can think of is seedy ~ CD, but they are distinguished by the syllable the /d/ belongs to and by the stress of the second syllable, so that'd be /ˈsiːd.i/ ~ /'siːˌdiː/.) If there are none, or if they are not distinguished by speakers with the happy tensing, the footnote for /i/ could be simplified to Pronounced /iː/ in accents with the happy tensing and /ɪ/ in other accents. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 17:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it's probably not worth the effort, as you say. Forget I said anything.

If I'm reading you correctly, we can simplify the footnote that way regardless. But IMO it's worth noting that even the OED has shifted.

Min pairs: manatee : humanity. bootie : booty. Andy's : Andes. chicory : chickaree. I have happy tensing, so the last three pairs are homonyms for me, but even for me manatee : humanity contrast. (OED has final stress for manatee and chickaree, though, which of course is often the historical source of such distinctions.) kwami (talk) 17:56, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I meant the first sentence of the footnote, the note about OED shifting is fine. (Just curious, how do you distinguish humanity from manatee?) --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 19:03, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

[ȷ̊uˈmænɪ̈ɾi] and [ˈmænɪ̈ti] (with a touch of aspiration on the [t]). I believe t/d flapping only occurs before reduced vowels.

Is it /ɪ/ in other dialects, or /ɨ/ (/ɪ/), which is usually transcribed /ɪ/? kwami (talk) 21:19, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

That's what I suspected; I think that can be analyzed phonologically by having flapped /t/ at the end of syllables and voiceless/aspirated /t/ at their start (/hjuː.mæn.ɪt.i/, /mæn.ə.ti/), by analogy with "eat all" [iɾɔːɫ] ~ "he talks" [hiːtʰɔks]. As for the second point, I don't think there's a three-way /ɪ/~/ɨ/~/ə/ distinction anywhere: AFAICT, /ɪ/ has a central allophone [ɨ̞] (or something like that) in unstressed syllables; /ɪ/ is used in places where /ɪ/ is used by some speakers and /ə/ by others. (I guess this means that there are accents in which some but not all unstressed /ɪ/ are pronounced as schwas, otherwise everybody would just use /ɪ/ everywhere — as older British dictionaries do — understanding that unstressed ones would be fully reduced in those dialects.) Do not take anything I write too seriously, though: I'm neither a native English speaker nor a phonetician. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 22:14, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

You raise an interesting point about the flap, which ties into your earlier point on /i:r.iŋ/ - /i:.riŋ/, but syllabicity is a notoriously difficult issue in English. The fact that the IPA can't handle ambisyllabic consonants doesn't help any. kwami (talk) 00:54, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

←Is there any way ambisyllabic consonants can contrast with consonants in codas, i.e., can analyzing butter as /bʌt.ər/ really cause any confusion? (Remember we're talking about phonology. I don't know whether there's a hard-and-fast way to define syllables phonetically, and if there's one I strongly suspect that phonetical syllables don't always coincide with phonological syllables; but that's way beyond the scope of our transcriptions.) --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 10:40, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I've just found this (although I haven't finished reading it yet). It looks very interesting. I would have noticed that /ʃɛl.fɪʃ/ and /sɛlf.ɪʃ/ don't rhyme, but I would have been totally at loss in having to explain how the difference is realized phonetically. (I knew that a voiceless consonant in syllable coda shortens the vowel before it, but I had never realized that this happens with other sonorants such as /l/, too.) --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 10:56, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Vowel examples should demonstrate a wider range of environments

I don't want to make the examples cluttered, but it would surely be useful in many cases to demonstrate environments such as before a nasal, or before /l/, as well as before stops or finally. These tend to be the environments where allophonic variation is most likely (apart from before /r/, which has its own section). Instead, we often seem to be duplicating the same environment, which seems in most cases a waste of screen real estate.

For example, /oʊ/ is currently demonstrated by beau, hoe and poke. Three examples, of which two are word-final, and one before a stop. I would suggest that we include an example like pole, since, in my native dialect at least, the vowel in pole is phonetically strikingly different from the one in poke, and speakers of similar dialects may have trouble figuring out whether pole has /oʊ/ or, say, /ɒ/. We could get rid of beau, since it really doesn't add anything to the information conveyed by poke and hoe.

Similarly, for /ɪ/ we have bid and pit. Surely it would be worth adding pin, since in some accents this has a striking realization? Similarly for /ɛ/ where we could add pen. In these cases we wouldn't need to remove any examples.

Let me know what you think. Grover cleveland (talk) 14:17, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

I've added some, but I can't think of any word ending with /ɒl/, /ɒn/ (except gone and long which are pronounced with /ɔː/ in some accents), /ɑːt/, /ɑːd/, /ʊn/, etc. right now. Can you find any? --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 14:54, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

For /ɒl/ there's "doll", for /ɒn/ "Don" and "John", for /ɑːt/ there's "baht" (a word most people don't know, and if they do they know it more from writing than speaking), for /ɑːd/ you might get away with "baaed" (as in the "The sheep baaed at me"); there's also "Marquis de Sade". Wiktionary is unaware of any words ending in /ʊn/, but the sequence occurs in at least some pronunciations of "Sunni". There are several words with /ɑːt/ before a vowel, such as "sonata", "basmati", "legato". Examples of /ɑːd/ before a vowel make me hungry for Mexican food: "enchilada" and "avocado". +Angr 15:32, 2 July 2009 (UTC)