User talk:Josephinethe3rd

Variant pronunciations

Although there are certainly several places in the US where people pronounce anger as "/ˈeɪŋ.ɡɚ/" (see w:Phonological history of English short A#Non-phonemic æ-tensing), "/ˈæŋ.ɡɚ/" is more the norm. There's nothing wrong with adding your pronunciation as a variant, but you shouldn't replace the only pronunciation given unless yours is the actual uncontested standard- and even then, it would be better to have both. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 05:36, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that link really addresses this situation. I added my pronunciation, but do you have a sound file or something of someone pronouncing it with æ? I don't think I've ever heard that pronunciation in my life, either in real life or on TV (which I would think would use a pretty standard dialect) and the few people I've asked about it agree with me that æŋ.ɡɚ sounds wrong. — This unsigned comment was added by Josephinethe3rd (talk • contribs).

I have to agree with Josephine here. /ˈeɪŋ.ɡɚ/ is the only US pronunciation I think I've ever heard. However, replacing pronunciation data is generally frowned upon, and your edit to manga was definitely not OK. You need to respect others' contributions before replacing them (in cases like this, discussion is best). Thanks! —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:06, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I pronounce it æŋ.ɡɚ, and that's the way it's shown in the US English dictionaries I've looked at so far (Merriam Webster online, the New Oxford American Dictionary on my Mac). Google Translate does read it as ˈeɪŋ.ɡɚ, though. It's very easy to filter out minor dialectal differences like this, so you may have heard it many times and not noticed. Not that I'm saying it's the most common- I have no way of knowing that. I tried to avoid such a statement by saying "more the norm", but that doesn't quite work out the way I meant it to. Standard also doesn't quite fit, since there isn't an explicit standard one way or the other.

For manga, I've heard it pronounced meɪŋgə often before, but rarely mæŋg‌ə, and then only by people who have no idea what they're talking about. In fact, I can't think of any words in the English language other than proper nouns that have æŋ, so that's really the same issue as anger. In any case, either pronunciation is wrong. /ˈmɑŋgə/ is the closest English approximation of the Japanese pronunciation. The only reason people use the other two is because they don't understand Japanese phonology. — This unsigned comment was added by Josephinethe3rd (talk • contribs).

A pronunciation is never "wrong" unless almost nobody says it. Just because it is a mark of ignorance doesn't mean that you can discount how common it is or delete it. Also, please sign your posts by typing ~~~~ at the end. Thanks —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:12, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Please understand the difference between a phonetic and a phonemic transcription. Phonemic transcriptions are given between slashes //. Phonetic transcriptions are given between brackets []

We are discussing the phoneme /æ/ ("trap" vowel) in American English. It is true that this is not phonetically [æ] in very many varieties:

"For most speakers, what is transcribed as /æ/ is always raised and sometimes diphthongized when appearing before a nasal consonant (that is, before /m/, /n/ and, for some, /ŋ/). This may be narrowly transcribed as [æ̝ˑ], [æ̝ə] or, based on specific dialect, variously as [ɛə], [eə] or [ɪə]" (from w:General American)

This is true for all instances of /æ/ in dialects affected by the w:Northern cities vowel shift. You may pronounce the phoneme /æ/ as [eɪ] in this situation in your dialect. However, adding a narrow phonetic transcription is in most cases unnecessary, as it is often well documented how phonemes are realized in a particular dialect.

Also, adding /ˈeɪŋ.ɡɚ/ suggests an alternative pronunciation, e.g. /ˈiːð.ə(ɹ)/ "either" vs. /ˈaɪð.ə(ɹ)/ "either".

It's confusing that the International Phonetic Alphabet is so often used to make phonemic transcriptions :) --Moogsi (talk) 08:07, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

So apparently 2 different phones (I think that's the right term- speech sounds, anyway) are the same phoneme if they are perceived as being the same, even if they are actually different. So the k in skill is the same phoneme as the k in kill, even though they are different sounds. Correct?

Well æ (as you said, the "trap" vowel) is not perceived to be the same sound as eɪ (the first vowel in "anger"). "Bad" and "anger" thus do not have the same phoneme for 'a'.Josephinethe3rd (talk) 01:09, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Almost... what the kill/skill example is demonstrating is exactly this: a phoneme is not a sound. The phoneme /k/ is not the sound [k], or the sound [kʰ].

The definition of a phoneme isn't dependant on what you can hear. The usage of the word perceive is deliberate. Just because you can hear the difference between the /k/ in 'kill' and 'skill', it does not mean they are different. They are both transcribed as /k/. Similarly, just because you can hear a difference between the /æ/ in /bæd/ and the one in /æŋɡɚ/, it doesn't mean they are different phonemes.

The phoneme /æ/ is not a sound. It is realized as sound when you speak. For example for most Americans /æ/ is raised and tensed into something like [ɛə], [eə] or [ɪə] before a nasal, and is something like [æ] elsewhere. For some people nothing happens at all: /bæd/ and /æŋɡɚ/ really do have the same vowel in them. This is true for me.

How you pronounce a particular phoneme in a particular situation is predictable depending on your accent and dialect. How the phonemes are transcribed is a matter of convention. And it's convenient because anyone regardless of how they speak can look at the transcription and know how to pronounce the word. How phonemes are defined is too much detail to go into, but the wiki article is pretty good.

Oh and 'phone' is the right word to use, yes —Moogsi (talk) 14:31, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Well, no, it isn't predictable. I've heard manga pronounced as both mæŋg‌ə and meɪŋg‌ə. So just writing mæŋg‌ə doesn't tell one how it should be pronounced. And again, why is it that the a in anger and bad are considered to be the same phoneme? They are not perceived to be the same sound. And how is one supposed to know when to use the pronunciation given on a particular article, and when to use a different one? By the way, is this also the reason why future is transcribed as fjuːtʃɚ, even though it is not pronounced that way?Josephinethe3rd (talk) 02:11, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

It should be predictable in that someone who says ˈeɪŋ.ɡɚ is likely to also say meɪŋg‌ə, and someone who says æŋɡɚ will probably say mæŋg‌ə. Not every phonemic distinction is valid in every regional lect- someone with the pin/pen merger hears the same phoneme for both. For many from the Northeast, caught is completely different from cot, and Mary, marry and merry have three different pronunciations. For me, the vowel in anger is like the vowel in man, not like the vowel in main. There are only a couple of words that are actually spelled with -eng- (aside from English, which is another phoneme entirely), so it's hard to find a minimal pair. I could really find only a couple: for me, "Bengal tiger" doesn't sound like "bangle tiger" (I pronounce Bengal differently as a proper noun), and "Engels" is different from "angles". For you, those are no doubt the same.

At any rate, my original point was that it's a bad idea to replace variant pronunciations that are true for a significant number of people. It would be like someone getting rid of all the final consonants in pronunciations for words ending in -r because their pronunciation was non-rhotic. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:51, 26 November 2012 (UTC)