Help talk:IPA

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view · edit Frequently asked questions 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.

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)[reply]

@JacktheBrown I agree. The chart is totally useless. I did try to save it in the hope that I will someday decipher it, but all the words and signs mean nothing to me at all. I am constantly being frustrated by phonetic spellings that mean nothing. How does a person go about learning them? 2604:3D09:8878:4500:5170:2E8B:73DC:84E5 (talk) 15:55, 17 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why? It should be savable. I suspect there must be many more very helpful pages that are also unsavable. Can that be changed? 2604:3D09:8878:4500:5170:2E8B:73DC:84E5 (talk) 15:51, 17 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean by saving? Nardog (talk) 00:36, 18 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Template talk:IPA#RfC: add option to disable link to IPA help page?

Hello, above is a WP:Request for comment about the template {{IPA}} that may be of interest to users of this page. grapesurgeon (seefooddiet) (talk) 21:39, 4 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a native English speaker, and I dispute the claim that the two 'b' sound different. To my ear there is absolutely no phonetic difference. The pronunciation is like 'lab-amber', the same as 'bamboo', 'Barbarella' etc. I don't think it is a very good example. Perhaps a clearer, more distinct example can be found to better illustrate the point being made. 179.180.80.100 (talk) 13:43, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. I'm not sure what that sentence is supposed to mean, especially since la bamba is a well-known phrase in English and the song title has long been nativized/anglicized. Wolfdog (talk) 15:13, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Probably a little late to the discussion here, but I think the b’s are controlled by the vowel(s) that come after. Example, the two B’s in barbarella (I think at least) are controlled by the ar’s that come after, because they sound different (an ä-sounding for the first and a ə aka schwa-sounding one for the second). Okso1 (talk) 21:41, 18 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I am told on zhwiki (link) that Segoe UI is not able to render the ligatures of some Chao tone letters correctly. An example is "˨˩˧", where the third letter is not connected to the preceding ones. More examples can be found at Tone letter#Reversed Chao tone letters, such as "˨˩˦꜔꜒" (composed of 5 letters, the first 3 and last 2 should form separate glyph). The ligatures seem correct under Charis SIL.

I think the table in Help:IPA#Rendering issues is a good place to document this issue. However, I am not sure how to create figures for this case. Srapoj (talk) 23:07, 16 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, so I just made a pronunciation thing for the article I created, Ingmikortilaq. After adding the pronunciation, it says “Audio file “m” not found” even though there is an “m” in the language it comes from, Greenlandic. I even copy-pasted the m it shows here, which looks like m, exactly the same as m. Can someone help me out here? Okso1 (talk) 21:36, 18 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]