The Wikipedia coverage of vowels is on the whole pretty comprehensive. In the article on Vowels all the variables that characterize vowels are listed one by one, with the odd exception of vowel length or quantity. To find information on that topic, you have to look further down in the article, to a section entitled Prosody and intonation. Something that immediately looks dodgy about that section is that it carries no references to published material, something that in general Wikipedia does not approve of. A lot of the section is, as you might expect, about stress, tone and intonation, all of which are aspects of speech that I think of as syllable-related, not specifically vowel-related, and all of which are covered comprehensively in other WP articles. It seems to me that basic information on vowel length is relevant and should be retained, but the rest of the material should be removed. However, a sentence in the lead paragraph might perhaps mention that vowels are involved in prosodic variables. What’s left should be re-titled “Vowel quantity” and moved up to be appended to the list of vowel variables.
There is, in fact, a separate WP article on Vowel length, about which I will write some comments later. Meanwhile I will try to tidy up the Vowel article.

Wikipedia has a rather cursory treatment of the term Phoneme, and I noticed that there was almost no mention of the possibility of choosing alternative analyses of phonemic systems such as the English vowel system, in spite of the fact that there was a great debate during the early and middle 20th century (before Generative Phonology) around this topic. It was usually known as the “God’s Truth vs. hocus-pocus” debate. A key paper was Yuen Ren Chao’s catchily-titled ‘The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems’. When I first taught in the Linguistic Science Department at Reading University we used to get the first year Linguistics students to read the various papers on the subject in Martin Joos’s collection of papers Readings in Linguistics 1 (I never liked the sequel, Readings in Linguistics 2). To be honest, I don’t think the students really enjoyed reading them. Still, it seems odd that so many publications on the phonemes of English still seem stuck in the God’s Truth camp. It seems to be commonplace to state without reservation that English (well, RP) has twenty or more vowel phonemes. Sometimes writers note in passing that this is a bigger total of vowel phonemes than one finds in the world’s other languages. It is, indeed, massively bigger, considering that most other languages have only a handful. Yet it is perfectly possible (as I have pointed out before) to analyse the vowel phonemes of English in a different (perhaps hocus-pocus) way that reduces their number to seven or six, if one should wish to.
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I have now added a section to the Phoneme article called “The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions”, and I am waiting to see if anyone objects to it. So far, it has just received one attack of vandalism!

A happy New Year to all.

[NOTE: I HAVE NOW ADDED NAMES OF SOME WOMEN WHO HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED AS RP SPEAKERS. NOT EVERYONE WILL AGREE WITH THE CHOICES, AND THE SOURCES ARE NOT IMPECCABLE]


I don't want to keep coming back to the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation, but it's one of WP's most controversial topics and it gets a lot of attention (some of it unwelcome). What I am complaining about at the moment is the section on "Notable RP speakers", which has been there for years. The problem with this section is that all the speakers listed are male, with the exception that the reference to The British Royal Family necessarily includes some royal female speakers.

I could easily come up with a list of female speakers that I would consider to be speakers of RP as defined in this article, but I'm not going to. For a start, I don't believe in RP any more than I believe in Father Christmas. If I did believe in it, I wouldn't include the Royal Family as RP speakers. Finally, it's not possible just to add new names to the list of notables, because only people who have been cited by name in a published source will be acceptable to Wikipedia (Dame Vera Lynn used to be on the list, but I removed her name because no reference was given). What all the listed speakers have in common is that they have been classed as RP speakers by John Wells in his blog, which is acceptable as a citation. Phoneticians other than John Wells are acceptable sources.

So here's the challenge: if you would like to see a proper representation of women speakers and you care about what WP says about RP, publish your list of female speakers somewhere other than WP (a blog will do), and the names can then be added to the present list. If you prefer, you could send me your list and I'll publish it here.

[I HAVE NOW EDITED THE PL ARTICLE TO INCLUDE SOME OF THE MISSING INFORMATION]

Reading the Wikipedia article on Peter Ladefoged, I notice that the role he played in the IPA doesn’t get proper recognition. The relevant bit says “Ladefoged was also a member of the International Phonetic Association for a long time, and was involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet. He was also editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.”
 
I think the article ought to record how long PL was a member of the IPA – I imagine his membership must have been very long. I think the bit about his being "involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet" ought to make a mention of the importance of his contribution to the 1989 Kiel Conference - in fact, the Wikipedia article on the Kiel Conference itself makes no mention of him beyond listing various related publications of his. The article should also record that he was President of the IPA – I believe that was from 1986 to 1991. And I must say I have no recollection of him ever having been editor of JIPA.
 
I’d be glad if anyone could give me the relevant facts. I’ll be happy to make the necessary corrections.

I normally write here to criticize things that I find wrong with Wikipedia's coverage of phonetics and phoneticians, so it's a pleasure to make a note for once of a really good article that appeared recently. This is on Lilias Armstrong, a UCL phonetician of great accomplishment who is not now well known. I learned a lot from reading it (as I did from studying her Phonetics of French​).

​Vowels
 
I have recently had a rather bizarre email correspondence with someone about his theory of vowels and consonants, from which belief I have been unable to shake him. The theory is that “vowels start with a fully closed, blocked glottis with the vocal folds pressed together. Consonants start with a non-closed glottis”. This, according to my correspondent, is what distinguishes the two classes of speech sound.
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It is, of course, notoriously difficult to produce a watertight definition of vowel and consonant. If we leave aside the phonological definitions that have been advanced (that’s a different story), we are looking at the physical characteristics of the two sound classes. In Wikipedia’s article on Vowel, the lead paragraph gets off on the wrong foot: … a vowel is a sound pronounced with an open vocal tract, so that the tongue does not touch the lips, teeth, or roof of the mouth, such as the English "ah" /ɑː/ or "oh" /oʊ/.  Most phonetics textbooks mention the fact that the tongue makes contact with the upper molar teeth in non-open vowels. Additionally, palatography has shown that the tongue makes contact with the outer edges of the palate in the case of front close and front close-mid vowels. There are clear illustrations of this in Daniel Jones’ Outline of English Phonetics (see Fig 37, p. 65 for /i:/), and he also gives palatograms for “short I” and /e/. Interestingly, he says that his English /u:/ does not produce a palatogram – I think that’s true for me too, but my Cardinal  7 and 8 certainly do have tongue-palate contact at the back of the palate.

​Searching for other articles in Wikipedia that might discuss the definition of vowel, I looked at the vowel section of Articulatory Phonetics. The entire section reads as follows:
Vowels
·         Nasal vowel / Oral vowel
·         Previous Vowel / Later Vowel
·         Rounded vowel / Unrounded vowel
·         Open vowel / Close vowel
 
It seems a rather cut-price approach simply to list a few points with links to other articles. And goodness knows what the relevance of “Previous vowel/Later vowel” is. Some work is definitely needed here.

A proposal has been made by a Wikipedia editor to "deprecate" (i.e. stop using) the symbols /ᵻ, ᵿ/ in the transcription of English in Wikipedia. These are the special non-phonemic symbols invented by Clive Upton for the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation, to stand for "either /ɪ/ or /ə/" and "either /ʊ/ or /ə/" respectively. Wikipedia users are invited to vote on whether they want to keep or drop these symbols here. You can also see the reasons put forward for abandoning the symbols.

So far, nobody seems to want to keep them.

There is a rather strange article in the list of phonetic topics in Wikipedia, with the title Phonetic palindrome. Like many of the more oddball articles in WP it appears to have been written by a single author with little in the way of supporting scientific citations. Wikipedia itself notes “This article needs additional or better citations for verification”. The point of the article is that certain utterances are claimed to sound the same if you hear them spoken normally or hear them reversed. One simple example given is “Mom”. The article warns that there is no guarantee that the pronunciations will sound identical “because certain pronunciations can cause a shift in the articulation of the vowel, differentiating the beginning from the end in its pitch”.  We are told “In Finnish almost all palindromes are phonetic - and phonematic written”. Such statements suggest that the writer is not strong on phonetics.
The article contains quite a few examples, though regrettably most are not supported by sound files. In one case there is a reference to some work by John Oswald, who made reversed recordings of William Burroughs in the 1970’s, but if you want to find the recordings you have to look in the WP article on Palindrome in the section headed ‘In speech’. I have listened to the recordings and they just sound like unintelligible mush to me (try these examples). The Palindrome article is a much better piece of work than the Phonetic palindromes one, I think.
There is one overwhelming flaw in the whole article, however, and that is the unquestioning use of the concept of utterances “sounding the same”. Anyone who has experimented with synthetic speech knows that after you have played your bit of sound material to yourself many times, it can be clearly heard as saying what you intended it to sound like, but if you ask someone else to say what they hear, the answer is usually not what you intended. This is a form of auditory illusion. Psychologists have worked on such illusions for a long time. The “Verbal Transformation Effect” is perhaps the best-known: hearing the same thing over and over again often results in successive perception of a whole series of words, some phonetically quite dissimilar (I have been a subject in a VTE experiment, and found the effect quite disorienting). There is a Wikipedia article on Semantic satiation that describes a somewhat similar illusion.
My feeling is that if you equip yourself with some software that can play a sound recording backwards, and you then start listening to any old scrap of speech material played forwards and backwards, pretty soon you will convince yourself that you are hearing something different from what you heard at the outset. And if you are looking for bits of speech that sound the same whether played forward or backwards, you will soon convince yourself that you have found some.
Unless this article can be backed up by scientific evidence, I think it should be taken out, or moved into the Palindrome article with a lot of improvements.

The discussion referred to in my last post has developed further, as you can see here. It is now claimed that there is no proposal to remove IPA transcriptions altogether, but editors want to remove them from the "lede" and put them somewhere else. I have to say that I am still in favour of keeping things as they are.

For a long time Wikipedia has been including IPA transcriptions of words and names in the opening paragraph (see for example 'apoggiatura'), but there is currently a discussion among WP editors about a proposal to remove them as "unnecessary clutter" that is confusing to readers who don't know how to interpret the symbols. You can see the discussion going on here.

In WP, the opening paragraph is very important. It is often referred to as the "lede" (a rather pretentious spelling of "lead"), and its job is to enable the reader to judge if the article is likely to be worth reading. Some editors have suggested that if the transcriptions are retained, they should be removed from the lede and put in an "infobox", a little table usually situated at the top right of a page (see for example 'Henry Sweet').

Not surprisingly, I am strongly opposed to removing the IPA transcriptions, which I find extremely useful. Wikipedia has produced a lot of "help" material to allow users to familiarize themselves with IPA, so these transcriptions aren't inaccessible to the uninitiated (see for example here). The help pages aren't free of faults, but they are easy enough to follow.

If anyone reading this blog knows how to edit Wikipedia pages, I would urge them to add a note to the discussion to oppose the removal of IPA from WP ledes. The discussion is free for anyone to join in.