Template talk:IPAc-en: Difference between revisions

It seems like it should be possible to automatically generate respells in this template, which would be a good feature. To borrow sdkb‘s example from Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Pronunciation/Archive_10#h-Automating_Template:Respell_better-2020-12-08T01:44:00.000Z, the most recent discussion of this I could easily find, (and incorporating Nardog‘s point about syllabification):

I’d think it’d be a simple enough matter to just have {{IPAc-en|ə|.|ˈ|k|ɪ|l|.|iː|z|respell=yes}} → ə-KIL-eez than to have to do {{IPAc-en|ə|.|ˈ|k|ɪ|l|.|iː|z}} {{respell|ə|KIL|eez}} → ə-KIL-eez. This would help us avoid repeating ourselves, making it easier if we ever decide to e.g. change our pronunciation key. Would anyone be interested in coding the |respell= parameter?

Dingolover6969 (talk) 04:25, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for reviving this discussion, @Dingolover6969! I still think this would be an excellent feature to develop if anyone has the time and technical knowhow. Sdkb ^talk 04:39, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Minor point: A stress mark implies syllabification (IIUC), so you can simplify .|' to just '

• {{IPAc-en|ə|ˈ|k|ɪ|l|.|iː|z|respell=yes}} → ə-KIL-eez

— W.andrea (talk) 13:53, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For one thing, it would require checking the output for bad respelled syllables, e.g. in “metonymy”

N {{IPAc-en|m|ə|ˈ|t|ɒ|n|.|ɪ|m|.|i|respell=yes}} → mə-*TON-im-ee

This example is from Help:Pronunciation respelling key § When to use and when not to: [avoid] when a respelled syllable would be the same as an existing word that is pronounced differently.

— W.andrea (talk) 14:12, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at the notes on the respelling page. I see some snags in there:

• … it is acceptable in some cases to attribute the following consonant to the same syllable as the checked vowel, as in bal-AY, even though in IPA it is customary to attribute it to the following syllable, as in . However, when the following consonant is a voiceless plosive …

• … use yoo(r), unless it is subject to yod-dropping or yod-coalescence

• /s/ may be respelled ss instead of s when otherwise it may be misinterpreted as /z/: “ice” EYESS, “tense” TENSS (compare eyes, tens).

That said, even if what you want isn’t possible to do 100% reliably, it should be possible to write a tool that at least gets most of the way there. Maybe it could give its best guess, then flag the edge cases (like the above ones) and ask you what to do with them, like: “Detected an ⟨s⟩. Does this risk being confused with /z/?” If yes, it replaces it with ⟨ss⟩.

— W.andrea (talk) 19:15, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is this the right place to ask for help in inserting an IPA pronunciation? I used https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/english-to-ipa-translator/ to create one but am having difficulty in putting it into wiki code. The name I’d like to create is: Teatime, as tee-ah-tim-ee. Halbared (talk) 09:31, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think Help talk:IPA/English would be a better place to ask, though if you’re having trouble with this template specifically, then this page is fine. You’ll need to explain what the problem is either way. — W.andrea (talk) 13:51, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like you want something like {{IPAc-en|t|i|A:|t|I|m|i}} → , however this is incomplete because it’s missing emphasis. Note that I’m using ASCII shorthands for the IPA symbols, which this template converts automatically. For reference, “teatime” is {{IPAc-en|'|t|i:|t|ai|m}} → — W.andrea (talk) 14:11, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, that is most helpful.Halbared (talk) 14:59, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, for example for “Gemini” word the pronunciation of Oxford is {{IPAc-en|ˈ|dʒ|e|m|.|ə|.|n|aɪ}} and rendered as Which has bug for the voice /e/. Please inspect. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 05:57, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Use /ɛ/: {{IPAc-en|ˈ|dʒ|ɛ|m|.|ə|.|n|aɪ}} → . See Help:IPA/English#cite_note-20 for why we use /ɛ/ rather than /e/. Nardog (talk) 06:08, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, is there a way to programmatically correct the template to accept /e/ as input and then show /ɛ/ as output? Because using /e/ is the tradition of Oxford dictionary, see here. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 06:16, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As the link I provided explains, the problem with that idea is that /e/ is also used for what we transcribe with /eɪ/ so the template can’t know whether the user intended to mean /ɛ/ or /eɪ/. Nardog (talk) 06:17, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(FWIW, the link you gave is Cambridge, not Oxford, and Oxford now uses /ɛ/, except in works aimed at non-native speakers such as the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.) Nardog (talk) 06:21, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I got the reason. But the thrown exception text is “[invalid input: ‘e’]” which is very ambiguous. I propose to correct the thrown exception text to:

ambiguous input: use /ɛ/ or /eɪ/ instead of /e/

This way, the thrown exception text would be more useful to users. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 06:27, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For future reference:

/ɛ/ is transcribed with ⟨e⟩ in many dictionaries. However, /eɪ/ is also sometimes transcribed with ⟨e⟩, especially in North American literature, so ⟨ɛ⟩ is chosen here.

— W.andrea (talk) 12:00, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, you can use the alias E for , which is from X-SAMPA. In fact, you can write the whole thing in ASCII: {{IPAc-en|ˈ|dZ|E|m|.|@|.|n|aI}} → — W.andrea (talk) 12:06, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some thoughts I had:

/ɡ/: ‘g’ in ‘guy’ -> ‘g’ in ‘guy’

• It’s unnecessary and inconsistent to show both the IPA and the letter when these are identical (the current pattern is <‘b’ in ‘buy’> but </j/: ‘y’ in ‘yes’>).

‘spheroidal’ -> ‘hero’, ‘coir’ -> ’employer’

• ‘spheroidal’ and ‘coir’ are quite rare words. I’d suggest replacing them with more common ones like ‘hero’ (or ‘zero’, ‘period’, ‘cereal’, ‘material’ etc.) and ’employer’ (or ‘destroyer’, ‘voyeur’ etc.)

/ʔ/: the catch in ‘uh-oh’ -> /ʔ/: ‘-‘ in ‘uh-oh’

• “catch” might not be familiar in this sense to those learning English, and “-” is more consistent with the rest of the tooltip system.

/ɜː/: r-less ‘ur’ in ‘nurse’ -> [removed]

• /ɜː/: r-less ‘ur’ in ‘nurse’ really shouldn’t exist because the diaphoneme system works on the principle that rhoticity is defined, but can be ignored. ‘fur’ already does the job so there’s no need for an “r-less ‘ur'”. There are no vowels in the NURSE lexical set that don’t have <r> in (at least, to my knowledge).

/ʊər/: ‘our’ in ‘tour’ -> /ʊər/: ‘our’ in ‘cure’

• ‘tour’ isn’t the best choice for /ʊər/, because ‘tour’ is normally one of the words which is changed in accents which only partially have the pour-poor merger. ‘cure’ is a better choice because it tends to be conserved where CURE is a present but declining set.[1]

For some reason /juː/ and /jʊər/ are buried at the bottom of the table in the doc. They should probably be moved up (at least above the punctuation, but I’d suggest near “goose” and “tour [sic]” ). ^{[citation unneeded]} (talk) 15:14, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect /ɡ/ was left in because it’s written with a different character (U+0261) than ‘g‘ (U+0067) and may display differently depending on your fonts. Though, it’s questionable if there’s any value in using U+0261 instead of U+0067 in the first place. ‘Spheroidal’ is used for the input codes where the /r/ begins a stressed syllable, which wouldn’t be used in transcription of ‘hero’ or any other words you suggested. No idea if there’s any allophonic variation worth preserving, but that’s why it is that. The /ɜː/ is a marginal phoneme that, just like /ʔ/ or /x/, doesn’t exist in normal words. Sometimes given a separate symbol /œ/, sometimes pronounced with an intrusive /r/. Consider the proper name ‘Goethe’. See also the previous discussions of ɔɪər and ɜː. The codes juː and jʊər are at the bottom because they exist for compatibility only and you shouldn’t use them. (Yes, I agree, it could be more explicit than that.) – MwGamera (talk) 01:35, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What MwGamera said, except Goethe should be transcribed with /ɜːr/ since it is pronounced with the NURSE vowel in rhotic accents too (hence Möbius in the key).

/ɔɪər/ represents the rare situation in which a word has /ɔɪə/ in RP and /ɔɪr/ in GA, so employer wouldn’t do (and voyeur is ).

cure is a terrible example because lots of people will interpret it as /jʊər/ rather than /ʊər/. Tour being “one of the words which is changed in accents which only partially have the pour-poor merger” is a good thing because that’s what the diaphoneme /ʊər/ represents (“/ʊər/ or /ɔːr/”). And /ʊər/ being more likely to be unmerged after /Cj/ than elsewhere isn’t even true globally; in Singapore it’s the opposite. Nardog (talk) 03:14, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In my defense, dictionaries say Goethe can also be pronounced with a non-rhotic vowel even by rhotic speakers. CEPD17 says exactly what I wrote (except that I skipped the syllable division) and implies the American pronunciation is the same by not respelling it with /ɝ:/ like it does for Goering. After reviewing H:IPA/EN, I’m not sure anymore how to interpret M-W and AHD’s \œ\. It might not be a single phoneme, but I’d expect this to mean something else than the actual NURSE, esp. when M-W lists the pronunciation with \ər\ separately here. – MwGamera (talk) 06:10, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As explained in the note, /ɜː/ can only be used for non-rhotic accents (so of course American dictionaries’ ⟨œ⟩ doesn’t mean NURSE), and we have no way of converting a transcription with ⟨œ⟩ in those dictionaries to our diaphonemic system. Some dictionaries include non-English pronunciations using their symbols for English supplemented with ⟨œ⟩ etc. (without distinguishing them from pronunciations English speakers actually use). Editors have found it best not to include those, to err on the descriptive side and since we have keys for other languages. Nardog (talk) 08:18, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]