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  Peter Roach

English Vowels and Wikipedia Symbols

19/1/2015

1 Comment

 
There is a strange article in Wikipedia called International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects, where someone has created a gigantic table that sets out to give phonetic values for the phonemes (well, Wikipedia diaphonemes) of English, for eleven different accents. The consonant section is fairly straightforward, but when we get to vowels it becomes very complicated. The essential question, for me, is whether the phonetic values are based on published analyses by competent phoneticians. There are references peppered over the chart, but some of them seem pretty strange. Below the chart are 51 footnotes, and someone has just queried (on the Talk page) what is said in no. 51. In fact, that question arose over a misreading of the symbol ɵ as e, but it has made me look more closely at the RP column. This is claimed to be based on Roach (2004), which is my “Illustration of RP” published in JIPA 34.2, and on the British Library web page about RP phonemes.  But many of the phonetic values in the chart don’t correspond to either. We get [oː] for THOUGHT, [ɪj] for happY, [ɑɪ] for PRICE, [oɪ] for CHOICE and [əʊ~ɒʊ~ɔʊ] for GOAT. Then in Footnote 51 we read this:

 “Roach (2004) notes that many people in England use [o:] for this vowel, but also that RP traditionally distinguishes between maw /mo:/ and moor /mʊə/, tore /to:/ and tour /tʊə/, as well as paw /pɔː/ and poor /pʊə/. If one wishes to make that distinction today it would be best to use ɵ instead of ʊə. This will lead to tore as toː and tour as tɵː”.

Well, I didn’t write that, and I don’t see the merit of transcribing tour  as tɵː. This makes me wonder if the other columns are as unreliable. I will try to correct the RP column when I get some time.

1 Comment
Piers Messum
19/1/2015 08:18:16 am

Very glad you're doing this, Peter. I used to hesitate when I saw incorrect information in W articles, but now I just dive in and correct it. I'm also quite happy to remove multiple paragraphs if I think someone has got it completely wrong, as you say you did with the acquisition stuff.

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    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

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