Wiktionary talk:International Phonetic Alphabet

I am not quite sure about the bilabial and labiodental approximants. The 'w' in Dutch is a labiodental approximant (I think) unless you speak the Surinam version of it then it is a bilabial one as in English. Certainly for Dutch ears the difference is quite unmistakeable. It would seem that this table only has a symbol for one of them? nl:Gebruiker:Jcwf

Sample sounds
Not being a linguistics professional, I find the tables in this article not especially illuminating. How much trouble would it be to add sound clips to the symbols, so mere mortals could comprehend them? After all, pronunciation is primarily an aural concept. ~ Jeff Q 20:58, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * User:Dvortygirl often adds audio samples to entries. I asked her to add some to Pronunciation key some time ago. See said she would do it (but said it might take awhile). I suggest you post a request on her talk page to remind her. Ncik 21:31, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I think she didn't do them mainly because someone else already had. I'm not sure where that chart is now.  --Connel MacKenzie 00:05, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

proper coding for phonetic alphabet
The phonetic alphabet consists mostly of question marks in my browser. Could someone put it in proper html code? Like "ü" should be "& u uml ;" (without the spaces) etc. Then every browser should show the right signs. Anjil 10:57, 14 September 2006 (UTC) 222


 * Where? If you use the template, then it will display IPA characters correctly.  If you need to insert a character in editing and the symbols do not appear correctly at the bottom of the page in the browser you're using, there is a workqround that I sometimes use.  Just follow the link in the IPA template to the appropriate Wikipedia page, where all the symbols should be displayed correctly. --EncycloPetey 22:49, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

IPA to audio?
Is there an online engine to produce a sound file from an IPA pronunciation string? That would be very handy. 60.242.130.234 23:40, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
 * No. Part of the problem is that there are many extra little symbols that may be inserted into a string of "standard" characters to indicate secondary stress, aspiration, tone, etc.  An engine will also be unable to produce regional accent, so it would be a very crude approximation.  Consider that the same IPA symbols might be used to code the word public, but it will sound different spoken by an Englishman, Irishman, Australian, etc.  The biggest problem though, is dealing with the optional little symbols.  --EncycloPetey 06:08, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * You can try IPA Reader to heard the sound. It would be interesting also a IPA to English machine (you can put the IPA and the machine would offer you the English word corresponding to this pronunciation).--BoldLuis (talk) 21:23, 14 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Collins English Dictionary's website seems to machine-generate pronunciations for many words, e.g. the audio in the section section (the second and third audio files on the page) for foggy. It sounds very unnatural and awkward. Some of the pronunciations of foggy at ipa-reader.xyz do sound more natural; others have the same awkward mechanically-spliced-together quality to them. - -sche (discuss) 21:37, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

the vowel chart
The primary purpose here is pronunciation, not inscription. That vowel chart, although certainly informative, should also feature something like the which can be seen with Wikipedia's "Template:IPA_chart/table_vowels". Keep the table which links to the glyphs which were chosen for each vowel, but the one that aids pronunciation is more useful here — for readers which come from an IPA transcription for the represented pronunciation of a word. JamesEG (talk) 14:40, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Tones
I see that tones for Chinese words in the articles are marked differently (with digits). Шурбур (talk)

Adding a 3d interactive plot of IPA vowels
Using the formants F1, f2 and f3, it would be great to add a 3d interactive plot object of the IPA vowels. I have read R software could make it, but I am afraid I have never used it. --Backinstadiums (talk) 18:55, 13 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Wiktionary is first and foremost a dictionary. —suzukaze (t・c) 05:40, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Guidance on bracketing
Despite reading a bit about it such as at w:en:help:IPA, I still don't understand when // and when [] are used. Could someone clarify this as it applies to Wiktionarians in the body of this article? Arlo Barnes (talk) 02:33, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think we could explain it better than that link did. If you don't understand how phonemic and phoentic distinctions differ, you probably shouldn't add IPA to entries. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 02:49, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Voiceless Nasals
Can we add the Voiceless Nasals to this table? They occur in Welsh pronunciation when nasally mutating P, T, and C (and apparently exist in other languages like French, Icelandic, and Ukrainian too). To clarify, they are the following symbols: m̥, n̥, ŋ̊. – Guitarmankev1 (talk) 18:51, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Is this encoding really necessary?
Is there any benefit to requiring users to replace regular Latin g with a specific font (ɡ) just because that's what the IPA encodes? Is there any chance for confusion? Does the actual IPA standard actually require this font? Korn &#91;kʰũæ̃n&#93; (talk) 11:07, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

Correction: "post-alveolar ejective affricate" -> "palato-alveolar ejective affricate"
For the IPA term for "⟨t͡ʃʼ⟩" in the chart on this page, the text is given as "post-alveolar ejective affricate". This term does not seem to exist. According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palato-alveolar_ejective_affricate, the proper term for that sound is "palato-alveolar ejective affricate".

Requesting a correction to the terminology.

Vajíčko (talk) 19:02, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Proposition: add uni-code(s?) in diacritic & characters tables
I believe it would be quite useful to others than me to have alt & uni codes directly in the tables of this article as a cheatsheet to write those when need be.

Mathieu Lenaers (talk) 16:25, 29 July 2022 (UTC) Mat

Open Vowels Not appearing
In the vowel section, the open vowels (last row of the chart) don't show up. I'm on Safari on iPhone. I don't understand the source code, but it looks like theres supposed to be a section there. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Vowels 47.72.172.227 01:47, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Beyond IPA: IPA does not reach the whole world
US President Joe Biden is not an outlier. Anywhere that IPA appears, Appendix:English pronunciation not only should/ought appear, it MUST appear if Wiktionary is ever to reach its full potential. This is regardless of any opinions about how scientific IPA is versus other systems-. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:15, 27 April 2023 (UTC)