User talk:Msh210/Archive/foreign pronunciations

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Removing "foreign" pronunciations

e.g. removing the US pron at (deprecated template usage) fubsy because the word is glossed British. Are you sure that's a good idea? Even if the word is definitely never used in the US (which I'm a little doubtful about), Americans can, for example, read British books aloud. Equinox ◑ 17:00, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

We can also read Estonian books aloud. Does that mean that the way we pronounce the words therein should be listed as pronunciations in their entries? Certainly not.

As to "if the word is definitely never used in the US (which I'm a little doubtful about)", it's listed as "British". If it's AmE also, then it can be edited. I didn't delete the revisions with the American pronunciation, and, in fact, I didn't even remove it from the wikicode! — I only commented it out. So it's easy to revert if anyone discovers that the word is also AmE.

And as to "sure that's a good idea?", I listed the words at RFC (though, admittedly, did not add {{rfc}} to them) to elicit coments before doing this; only one person commented, and with arguments that I did not find persuasive. So I was bold.​—msh210℠ 17:05, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

• Different dialects are not the same as different languages: they use each other's words. I think this needs to be run past the Beer Parlour. Ƿidsiþ 17:17, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
  • By all means.​—msh210℠ 17:24, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

• I've been thinking about this, and I've decided that if the word is really absolutely never used in the U.S., then I think you're right that we shouldn't list the putative U.S. pronunciation, because that's basically just making up information. However, if a word is simply rare in the U.S., then I think (1) that we should give its U.S. pronunciation (just as we give pronunciations for other rare words) and (2) that it's nonetheless reasonable to tag it as a U.K. word. So the intersection of {words-tagged-U.K.} with {words-with-U.S.-pronunciation} should not be Ø. —Ruakh_TALK 02:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
  • That's very reasonable, except that I'd rather tag the word as {{UK|and|rare|_|in the|_|US}} or something. In any event, the pronunciations I've commented out (or moved to the U.S. spelling) I'll leave that way. If someone knows one's a U.S. word too, he can uncomment it.​—msh210℠ 15:35, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

• I dunno, I think moving pronunciations to the U.S. spelling is a bad idea. The aim should be to have one entry for the word; there's no reason to make readers go back and forth between two entries to get the whole picture. (Put another way: colour is an extremely common word in the U.S., one that every child knows. We just spell it differently. It's not that color is pronounced one way and colour a different way; rather, colo(u)r is a single word with U.S. and U.K. spellings and with U.S. and U.K. pronunciations, and therefore an incidental correlation between spelling and pronunciation.) —Ruakh_TALK 15:51, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

This is a systemic problem for regional alternative spellings: we really should treat one of these as an alternative spelling, but we're too politically correct to give primacy to either an American or British spelling. Maybe we should just take the 100 most common Brit/Amer spellings and split them down the middle, and let the rest fall where they may. (This application of political correctness serves no purpose and will continue to be counterproductive for editors and readers.) —Michael Z. 2010-03-18 19:56 z