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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.
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.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. |
জ which is /dʒ/ should also include /ɟ/ (it doesn't have to be a affricate; rather I'd say it is more a plosive than an affricate) ঝ which is /dʒ/ should also include /ɟʰ/ চ which is /tʃ/ should also include /c/ ছ which is /tʃʰ/ should also include /cʰ/ The second ones can be better. Reference: https://ipa.bangla.gov.bd/ipa_allignment this site has some mistakes but I think in case of জ, ঝ, চ, ছ atleast, they are right. Even if you reject my proposal please inform me; I'd look forward to know what happened. AbdunNafiAlif (talk) 05:23, 4 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There is a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lead section#Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section#Pronunciation that may be of your interest. Regards,--Thinker78 (talk) 22:50, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was looking at the IPA chart in the Hopi Dictionary and it says that the "ts" sound (voiceless alveolar affricate) in Hopi is transcribed in IPA as ts (with the "s" as a superscript). I haven't found ts on any other IPA charts, and it seems that the current chart uses t͡s instead. The dictionary was published in 1998, so perhaps that letter format is no longer used? I came across this while transcribing the pronounciation for Koyaanisqatsi. Was hoping for some clarification, thanks. –Dream out loud (talk) 08:14, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Per a prior discussion, the language-specific Help:IPA pages for a number of languages were changed to simply redirect to this page. One of these languages was Kannada. I would like to bring back the Kannada-specific IPA key page, but I'm unsure how to go about doing this. In particular, if I just recover the page from the page's history logs, will all Wikipedia pages that use the IPA templates with the kn language parameter automatically redirect to Help:IPA/Kannada, or do I need to do something to make sure that happens? Brusquedandelion (talk) 00:03, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
ഉ which is /u/ should also include /ʊ/. I am only a student, but I think the latter is an allophone in many Malayalam dialects (e.g. pronunciation of ഉപ്പ്). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.46.133.227 (talk) 04:18, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
