Help talk:IPA
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The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?
The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.
For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it. Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion. |
Tool
[edit]I'm not an expert on the subject, I would just like to know if there's a tool to have the pronunciation of a word automatically. JacktheBrown (talk) 10:24, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
Some missing letters.
[edit]Hi, I'm JakGuy and I want to say that ɞ, e̞ (ɛ̝), o̞ (ɔ̝), ɤ̞ (ʌ̝), and others are missing. I think someone would add them in the future!!! Do you agree? JakGuy1 (talk) 21:11, 5 May 2025 (UTC)
- Can their values not be inferred from the definitions of the base letters and the diacritics? —Tamfang (talk) 08:18, 9 May 2025 (UTC)
- Yes. Diacritics represent a change in the sound of the base letter. JakGuy1 (talk) 23:13, 9 May 2025 (UTC)