User: Gritchka

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Linguist; administrator on Everything 2; occasional contributor to Wikipedia.

Created this account on Wiktionary on 29 May 2003, more out of idle curiosity than anything.

I don't often revisit things, so e-mail me if you want to discuss anything I do here.

Already my first attempt at adding something has immired me in problems. It's the simple word hard and all I wanted to do was add the pronunciation, /hA:d/.

Problems with this:

1. I don't say /hA:d/, I say /ha:d/, or at least that's how I transcribe what I say. With /A:/ it's an old-fashioned sub-accent of RP.

2. The template says I should mark it (UK), thus: (UK) SAMPA: /hA:d/.

3. But of course this isn't the 'UK' pronunciation at all. It's south-eastern and central England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and parts of eastern USA. Disregarding the shades of sound between /ha:d/ and /hA:d/, and the different qualities of English /r/, the alternative pronunciation /hard/ is for the rest of the USA and British Isles.

4. Conclusion: Country labels are not very useful. Only in relatively small numbers are there national or regional pronunciations that are more distinctive than the rhotic/non-rhotic and North-American/rest-of-world divisions. One example is Australian /da:t@/ as against UK /deIt@/, US /d{:4@/.

5. Sorry, I can't do 'US' (General North American) pronunciations, /d{:4@/ being a good example, because I'm not confident enough about the phonemic or indeed phonetic status of North American sounds.

6. The person who did the original hard had included heart as a homophone, which it isn't, not even in North American accents for which 'harter' and 'harder' would be homophones. I think. As the other person was a Belgian I decided my ear outranked theirs, but still.

7. Rats, this is confusing. I think I'll stick to E2 and Wikipedia.

Don´t give up that easily. Languages and local pronunciations are not the easiest topic, but what you wrote here, you can also write after the pronunciation key. You just showed that the way we were doing it was not adequate. You are allowed to modify the template.

For me hard and heart do sound the same. I think we also need some term for almost homophones.

CheersPolyglot 16:44 May 29, 2003 (UTC)