Module talk:zu-IPA

Phoneme /ŋ/

I think using the phoneme /ŋ/ is a bit misleading. There is some dialectal variation with this. In some dialects, there is only [ŋɡ], and never [ŋ], so there is no phoneme /ŋ/. In other dialects, [ŋɡ] simplifies to [ŋ] in all positions except for stem-initial position. So words like ingane or ngena are pronounced with [ŋɡ] in all dialects, but words like insangu or a prefix like ngi- are pronounced with [ŋɡ] in some dialects and with [ŋ] in some other dialects.

I propose changing the transcription /ŋ/ to /nɡ/ because (1) it more accurately reflects dialects of both types and (2) [ŋ] in the dialects which have it is clearly from a weakening of [ŋɡ]. Thoughts? Smashhoof2 (talk) 05:12, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

@Smashhoof2: This seems like a good idea to me, but shouldn't it be written as /ᵑɡ/ instead? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:05, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: All of the other prenasalized consonants in Zulu are analyzed as clusters, and I think that's the best analysis because of morpheme boundaries such as in-galo, for example. Smashhoof2 (talk) 19:04, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

@Smashhoof2: At Wiktionary, we have to toe the line between meaningful description of phonemes and solid linguistic analysis. A good example is our treatment of English's <r>. A linguistic publication would normally choose to represent it as /r/, since there is only one phonemic rhotic consonant, and the exact value of the sound is irrelevant except for narrow transcriptions. At Wiktionary, however, we think that /r/ is potentially misleading to our readers as they look at broad transcriptions of various languages with different rhotics, and we therefore try to err on the side of phonetic analysis; as a result, we write English <r> as /ɹ/. I'll implement /ng/ for now, but I'd like you to consider the argument here and see if you think it applies. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:10, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Is your concern that the nasal is actually velar [ŋ]? I think assimilation of /n/ to [ŋ] before a velar is nearly (but not quite) universal, so I don't think it's entirely misleading to write /nɡ/, because people would assume it's [ŋɡ]. However, we could also write it as /ŋɡ/, which shows that the nasal is velar, but implies that the velar nasal is phonemic. Or we could do what I see is done for Spanish IPA here, where they write both the phonemic and phonetic form. For example, sangre is transcribed /ˈsanɡɾe/, [ˈsãŋɡɾe]. Smashhoof2 (talk) 19:40, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, showing both is ideal, but I don't have the ability or knowledge needed to implement that. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:53, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

@Smashhoof2, Metaknowledge At amanga, the Module is outputting /ng/ with the ordinary g (looptail in some fonts) rather than the IPA ɡ, which is putting the entry into CAT:IPA pronunciations with invalid IPA characters. I don't know if that's happening in other entries, but can it be fixed? —Mahāgaja · talk 12:48, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

 Fixed. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:05, 1 February 2019 (UTC)