Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Simple pronunciation markup guide (section)

== Undecided ==
Personally, I prefer IPA; it's scientific, unambiguous and it's an international standard. However, I am aware that some readers are not able to read IPA characters due to technical constraints. For this and other reasons simple pronuncation markup schemes are and will be used. That means that we do need a standardized "Simple Guide". And that readers should be able to learn it (it's supposed to be intuitive, but no scheme will be obvious for all, especially not for non-native English speakers). -- [[User:Kpalion|Kpalion]] 17:08, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)
:(I vote "undecided" becase I think a "Simple Guide" might be useful as long as there are people who want to use simplified schemes instead of IPA/SAMPA. However, I won't cry for it -- I'm still convinced that IPA is the best way to show pronunciation. -- [[User:Kpalion|Kpalion]] 00:00, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC))

IPA poses multiple problems.  Not only is it unfamiliar to dozens of casual readers (who of course could look it up), and does not display properly on all software or on machines without appropriate fonts installed, but for me the worst part of using IPA is that it is nigh impossible to edit without having a table of characters open or by your side, and as such is intimidating to contributors.  It is also too precise: it encourages people to reproduce [[non-rhotic]] and other variant pronunciations, and as such it can actually mislead readers.  SAMPA has most of the flaws of IPA, and sacrifices readability at the expense of typing.  

On the other hand, I tried to create a phonetic spelling system ([[Wikipedia:English phonetic spelling]]) that strove for a neutral representation of English sounds, based generally on the international values of the letters of the Latin alphabet, or using relatively familiar [[digraph]]s, that would not necessarily require ampersand codes or other non-intuitive factors.  I tried using it on a number of articles (see the history of [[metathesis]] for an example) but it did not go over well, so I have done no further work on the project.  I continue to think that a dialect-neutral representation of "ur-English" (i.e. ignoring rule-bound dialect features such as non-rhoticity, [[broad A]], or [[cot-caught merger]]) might be a good idea.  I am no longer optimistic that any such plan could be devised, or gain acceptance.  [[User:Ihcoyc|Smerdis of Tlön]] 02:38, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)