Talk:International Phonetic Alphabet

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International Phonetic Alphabet was one of the Language and literature good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

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October 13, 2006	Peer review	Reviewed
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June 10, 2007	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
June 13, 2009	Good article reassessment	Kept
August 6, 2009	Good article reassessment	Kept
July 1, 2019	Good article reassessment	Delisted
Current status: Delisted good article

Linguistics: Phonetics Low‑importance

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This article has been mentioned by a media organization:

"What IPA stands for". The Star (Malaysia). September 8, 2004.

This is not a help page. For information about the use of IPA on Wikipedia, see Manual of Style/Pronunciation, Help:IPA, or Help:IPA/English.

Ypsilon as a consonant in Greek

The most extreme difference is ⟨ʋ⟩, which is a vowel in Greek but a consonant in the IPA.

Is it worth mentioning that that's not strictly true? It functions as a consonant in the digraph ⟨αυ⟩ as in "αυτός". — W.andrea (talk) 17:58, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Removed. — kwami (talk) 10:58, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism

This page is very deformed on my screen and it has "User:Cheezdeez ON TOP" spammed in the references. I did a quick scroll through the history but couldn’t find when it was done. 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:25D4:36E8:765A:6396 (talk) 19:58, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Funny, I don't see it, and have not noticed removal of such a thing. I seem to remember seeing a similar complaint somewhere yesterday; was that you too? —Tamfang (talk) 23:30, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I guess it was template vandalism. — W.andrea (talk) 17:37, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Something of the sort, and I gather it has been resolved, and the offender banned. —Tamfang (talk) 03:30, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Coptic??

I am willing to entertain the possibility that IPA derives some letters from the Coptic alphabet (though the article nowhere says so), but am confident that the Coptic alphabet is not descended from the Romic alphabet. —Tamfang (talk) 03:06, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Changing example of language where glottal fricatives are actually bare phonation

I think it’s dumb to use the encyclopedia language as an example, and what other languages does the source list? When it’s there, I can make a change to a different language mentioned in the source. 2601:C6:D200:E9B0:81A3:2C7E:31BA:AAB4 (talk) 17:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I asked you at Talk:Duodecimal what's dumb about it. Are you prepared to give a meaningful answer this time? Or are you merely forum-shopping for someone to take your unsupported opinion seriously? —Tamfang (talk) 02:37, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Same I-don't-like-it-rationale as in Talk:Indo-European languages. It's all natural to use the encyclopedia language (as long as we can extract examples from it) for reasons of maximal familiarity to our readers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Austronesier (talk • contribs) 08:42, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tilde is missing?

The tilde ⟨~⟩ is often used for free variation, but it's not mentioned on this page. Should it be added, or is it not part of the IPA? I just checked the handbook and didn't see it listed, but I'm only an amateur.

Relatedly:

Tilde § International Phonetic Alphabet covers this usage, but doesn't cite any sources
Free variation also doesn't mention the tilde notation

— W.andrea (talk) 17:52, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's used for phonetics more broadly, not just for IPA, but the same for most of the other symbols. — kwami (talk) 05:08, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is there an article that covers generic phonetic notation? — W.andrea (talk) 13:01, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That would be Phonetic transcription. Remsense ‥ 论 13:03, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We have a section for it here. I just haven't yet found a source for it.

BTW, at phonetic transcription, I don't know that we have a distinction between morphophonemic and diaphonemic delimiters. I've seen a double solidus for morpho. Not sure if all of the possibilities are used for both. — kwami (talk) 15:23, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

How to notate the Catalan l·l trigraph?

I've been cleaning up the markup at Diacritic, which has mainly been to replace italics with angle-brackets. But I'm not sure that I have done the right thing with ⟨l·l⟩ in Catalan. Any advice? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:16, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't call it a diacritic. It's a punctuation mark intended to break up the digraph ll, much like the apostrophe in other languages, e.g. in pinyin Xi'an (disyllabic) vs xian (monosyllabic), or dang'an (dang-an) vs dangan (dan-gan). Or the hyphen in English co-op vs coop or un-ionized vs unionized. The only reason this is notable in Catalan is that it only occurs in this one sequence.

That said, I don't mind listing it among diacritics and digraphs, because that's where people might expect it. — kwami (talk) 10:08, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What does this have to do with the IPA? Nardog (talk) 11:09, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you both.

First, nothing to do with IPA as such, my question is about linguistics notation (which resides here at #Brackets and transcription delimiters).

Interpunct#Catalan documents its history and function, but doesn't give it any markup.

So coming back to linguistic markup, what is the appropriate Brackets and transcription delimiter to use? None? Italic?--𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:18, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on what you want to do. Angle brackets are good for something small like this that might be hard to see if it were just made italic, but typography is a matter of aesthetics and what works for the reader, not any particular rules. — kwami (talk) 15:22, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What does Nörsk sound like?

Has anyone else noticed that there's no way to find anything on the Internet that can speak IPA aloud? 72.210.7.64 (talk) 20:12, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You have http://ipa-reader.xyz/ which if you input the IPA transcription it will read it for you. If you want to transcribe 'Nörsk' into IPA, use https://unalengua.com/ipa-translate?hl=en&ttsLocale=en-GB-WLS&voiceId=Geraint&text= Nörsk in IPA is [nˈɜːsk] Saussure4661 (talk) 00:56, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Unclear sentence

What does this mean? "An IPA symbol is often distinguished from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound in broad transcription, making articulatory descriptions such as "mid front rounded vowel" or "voiced velar stop" unreliable."

"...symbol is often distinguished from the sound..." Well, yes, a symbol is visual and a sound is sound. What is this intended to mean? It can surely be said more clearly.

Why are "articulatory descriptions such as "mid front rounded vowel" or "voiced velar stop" unreliable" in broad transcription? They are not precise (a mid front rounded vowel may be slightly lower or higher, more or less rounded, etc.) but within a broad transcription they are just as reliable as an IPA symbol, or more reliable.

"there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound in broad transcription": I can't even guess what this is supposed to mean. If it's broad transcription, we would not expect a 1-1 correspondence between symbol and fine-grained allophone, but there had better be a one-to-one correspondence between letter and phoneme (or unit at whatever level of abstraction is intended). That's what transcription is all about. Linguistatlunch (talk) 19:16, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

yeah, those descriptions aren't very clear.

the number of distinguished phones in broad phonetic transcription is very often different from those of phonemic transcription. especially in languages with small numbers of phonemes. but you also don't want to call 'e' a 'high-mid front unrounded vowel' if it's being used for a mid or low-mid vowel sound. There's reason people speak of 'schwa' rather than 'mid central vowel'. — kwami (talk) 19:18, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]