User talk:Lhynard/Projects/Say What

Phonetic Convention
This is an awesome project, especially for a non-native English speaker like myself. I'd like to contribute to it in a more systematic way, but then I've noticed that there are some entries that don't use the same conventions as others, or the ones established in the Dragon article.

For example, the sound /æ/ is denoted as '@' in the Dragon article, but is instead expressed in the corresponding IPA notation throughout the wiki. That is not the case with the vowel sounds /oʊ/ and /ɔ/, represented in the article as 'o' and '0', respectively, but displayed here with no distinction. The sounds /ə/ and /ʌ/ are indistinctly represented as 'u' both in the article and on the wiki, etc.

Moreover, there is no apparent convention in the representation when the phonetic description comes from different sources. For example, p. 4 of Tomb of Annihilation has a phonetic guide to pronounce the names of many NPCs in the adventure and monster names throughout the book, but uses a different convention when displaying them than that of the Dragon article. And even within the wiki there are examples of different notation, such as stress syllables emphasized with boldface or all-caps (I don't recall seeing the standard IPA symbol /ˈ / anywhere).

I'm not advocating for any particular convention (although my preference does lean towards something closer to IPA), but maybe it would be beneficial if we had something of a policy when adding pronunciations. Any thoughts? &mdash; Sirwhiteout (talk) 18:58, May 1, 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks!


 * Yes, you raise points that I was already considering. My plan was to just get any pronunciation onto the pages from any source as a first priority and then come up with some sort of wiki-wide convention after that for a round two.


 * The problem, as you noted, is that the sourcebooks do not follow any sort of convention. They are not even consistent. Just look at how many ways we are told how to pronounce Eilistraee. It's ridiculous. :)


 * Like you, I would prefer something closer to IPA. (I was the one who decided to use ash (æ) instead of the at symbol (@), simply because I could not bear using an at symbol like that! :) ) A problem, though, is that most people probably have no idea what the IPA symbols mean. I love linguistics and phonetics, but I don't even remember what ʌ is, though I would much rather use schwa (ə) than u for the so-called "uh" sound so prevalent in English.


 * Anyhow, as I said, in the future, I wanted to come back and attack the problem, perhaps even coming up with some sort of in-line template to use across the wiki for pronunciations that would link to a key. I was quite happy that&mdash;once again&mdash;you seemed interested in working on one of my more pedantic projects. :)


 * ~ Lhynard (talk) 19:20, May 1, 2018 (UTC)


 * For example, here are the two Wikipedia templates that I was considering implementing here in some form:
 * wikipedia:Template:IPAc-en
 * wikipedia:Template:Respell


 * I really like the IPAc-en template, especially if the alt-text explaining each individual phoneme works here too. However, the second (Respell) appears to be more easily (perhaps trivially) converted from the notation most sources use. Can we implement both? My vote would be to use IPAc-en as the primary one. In case an ambiguity appears or it is not exactly clear how to translate, we could use the second to approximate the original as it appears in the source, perhaps even keeping it as a note.


 * (Curiously, in the IPAc-en template documentation, one of the aliases for schwa is @.)


 * I'm looking forward to working on this one. For some reason, particularly pedantic projects appeal to me. :) &mdash; Sirwhiteout (talk) 04:34, May 5, 2018 (UTC)