Talk:List of words of disputed pronunciation

/old talk1

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1. Are the pronunciations in italics and brackets to the right of each word the correct pronunciations, or the mis-pronunciations? This isn't clear from the text. Ideally, the article would state first the `correct' pronunciation, followed by a list of mis-pronunciations with indications as to their likely regions (because a lot of the words in the list seem, to me, to be mispronounced only in certain parts of the world, rather than by all Anglophones. In fact, at the risk of raising some ire, most of the non-placename words seem to be ones mispronounced by American English speakers).
2. Are 'local' pronunciations defined, a priori, to be the correct ones? Taking Arkansas as an example, the note immediately after the word (which, in general, seem to be explanations of mispronunciations) is actually a definition of the correct pronunciation...a bit confusing.
3. Chinese ... "is the pronunciation recognised by some" (my italics)...since when is an ill-defined and vague 'some' the authority on pronunciation? This needs more rigour, imo.

charlieF 09:51 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

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I think this article should be merged to mispronounciation. Any thought? I will, if there seems no objection. -- Taku 02:21 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

I STRONGLY object! "Mispronunciation" is POV. -- Zoe

Not so, in general. While no doubt that applies in some cases, in others there genuinely is an increase in difficulty in communicating - particularly if two words come to sound similar as a result. Of course the reverse can be the case, when people deliberately choose "wrong" pronunciations in order to improve communication (as in radio operators' deliberate sounding of the final "e" on "five" and "nine" to give "five-er" and "nine-er"). Anyhow, there really are some objectively meaningful, non-subjective mispronunciations. PML.

Then what about mispronounciation article? "Disputed pronounciation" iteself is already POV. Besides, the section called List of words of disputed pronounciation is placed in mispronounciation doesn't mean they are mispronounciation at all. It simply means they are discussed in the context of mispronounciation. -- Taku 02:30 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

I'd have to object too. Much as "mispronounciations" often bug the hell out of me (especially nu-kyu-ler), it's really a POV issue, especially in cases where a proper name is mispronounced unanimously by the locals (for example, a street "Eldorado" in my hometown was always "El-do-rah-do"; the city of Lima, OH is called "Lime-uh" rather than "Lee-ma" by every sensible person in NW Ohio, as well as the Toronto/Tronna pronounciation given in this article). I think disputed or differentiated pronounciation is a much better classification. -- 24.210.220.34[?] oops, wasn't logged in. -- Wapcaplet

Though, on second thought, as some of the prior discussion on this article indicates, this list could quickly become ridiculous and useless. There are simply way too many ways to pronounce words in all the different languages and localities in the world. Maybe it shouldn't even be here... -- Wapcaplet

Wasn't this page split off of a "mispronunciation" list? -- goatasaur

I mean the problem is we basically don't want to have a list of something article in the first place. Every article in wikipedia should be about something and this is not something. We want to discuss why the same spellings are pronounced differently and why it is claimed a mispronounciation. Yes, pronounciation is a really POV issue. But we need to cover POV issues in NPOV manners. Is this current article is good enough? Of couse, not. -- Taku 03:56 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

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Hello. This article wasn't "split off" from list of words commonly mispronounced. It originally was that article, but I moved it here to make the title NPOV. I also made a first attempt at NPOVisation of the contents. It was not intended to be a separate article from the mispronunciation one, but just a NPOVisation of it. All along, the page was a list of words for which the pronunciations are (a) different for different people, and (b) argued about. So I changed the title to reflect that. The word "disputed", in its simplest usage, just means that there are people who enagage in disputes (in the sense of arguments, or debates) about these matters. It is not a point of view that the pronunciation of these words is disputed; anyone can observe such disputes occurring - many of them on this very talk page! (Or at least on the original version of it.) Unfortunately, the matter is complicated in that the verb "to dispute" also has another meaning: "to question the truth or validity of". But even with this meaning, the word is still applicable. For each of the words in the list, there exists at least one pronunciation which some people question the validity of. So even though I didn't originally mean the word in this way, it still seems to me appropriate enough.

Sadly, many people misunderstood my intentions. Tannin put forward the opinion that there really are objectively correct ways of pronouncing at least some words, so that the old title deserved an article. So he added some content to that article (which was at that time just a redirect), with the result that there were now two articles where previously there had been only one. I disagreed with this action, and proposed that the contents of list of words commonly mispronounced should be merged back into this one. Then Zoe came along and made repeated attempts to destroy this article, even though she seemed to arguing exactly the same point that I was - that the word "mispronunciation" was intrinsically POV. (I asked her to point out where in the article it made any assertions about anything being mispronounced, but she didn't, so I still have no idea what her objection was.) At this point I got too annoyed to carry on, and decided to leave the article until some later date.

It still needs work, of course, and I'm still intending to do some things to it. But I don't think it is useless. Perhaps, since so many people don't understand the title, it should be moved again. But even if the title is objected to, I still maintain that:-

1. the article is not useless, as there certainly are some words whose pronunciations arouse strong feelings in some people, and a comprehensive encyclopaedia should tell us what these words are and why, and
2. calling one pronunciation "right" and another "wrong" is inescapably POV, so that the contents of the article at list of words commonly mispronounced should be merged into this article, with list of words commonly mispronounced itself reverted to a redirect.

Okay, so do people still want to dispute either of these two points? :) -- Oliver P. 03:20 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

On the priviso that the list does not contain words where the correct pronunciation is undisputed and the mangled version simply wrong. that's OK with me. However, I must point out a fundamental error in logic in the above: if it is POV to call one P "right" and another P "wrong (everyone agrees on this), and if opinions as to the range of the acceptable vary considerably (another premise to which all agree), then taking a position, any position on the "rightness" or "wrongness" of an attitude towards pronunciation is and must be equally POV. In other words, arguing that all pronunciations are equally valid is every bit as POV as arguing the reverse. A subtle point? Yes. A difficult point? No. An important point? Absolutely! Consider the difference between atheisim and agnosticism: it is vast. To regard all pronunciations as valid is the linguistic equivalent of hard-line atheisim. We cannot do that here. Tannin

I made no error of logic in the above, regarding the POV issue. (I think I did make an error in my discussion of the meaning of the word "disputed", but I'll come to that.) I fully agree with you that taking any position on the "rightness" or "wrongness" of an attitude towards pronunciation is and must be POV. That is why the article takes no such position. It is why the page is not, and can never be, about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of any pronunciation. That's what I've been saying all along. This page is just about words for which pronunciations exist which some people dispute. And I think I did mean "dispute" in the sense of "question the truth or validity of", after all. If someone pronounces "Melbourne" as "Mel-BORN", and you tell them that they're wrong, then you are disputing their pronunciation of the word. You misunderstand the issue when you speak of words for which "the correct pronunciation is undisputed". For Wikipedia purposes, we can't even say that there is a "correct" pronunciation. (And, as you point out, we can't say that there isn't, either.) All we can report on, within the NPOV policy, is the fact that some people dispute the pronunciations of some others. And that is what this article is for. I hope that clarifies things. But since a large part of the misunderstandings going on here (on both sides) are related to the word "dispute", I think we need to change that in the title. The problem is, I can't think of a better way of phrasing it right now. List of words commonly pronounced in ways which other people don't like[?] is a bit unwieldy. ;) -- Oliver P. 13:54 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Ugh. I've just discovered this page and I hate it and also think it should be deleted. BUT I can't leave it alone as it is so I've tweaked a few things. Here are some notes to justify myself on some of my changes. First, capitals are usually used for stress in pronunciation guides, not emphasis of the difference: so we're not comapring feb-U-ary to feb-RU-ary. Second, I prefer to keep as much of the original spelling as is clear, so I've changed arken-saw and ar-KAN-zus to AR-kan-saw and ar-KAN-zas, because this marks out the differences and doesn't raise irrelevant questions about why -zus when it's just a neutral vowel. Third: Reich is [raIC] with the sh-like ich-laut[?], not [raIk]. Fourth: 'mores' would originally have been (in English) MOR-eez with the old-fashioned English pronunciation of Latin, and the change to -ayz came about when (c. 1900) they started teaching the 'new' pronunciation). -- I've added a couple of new words or names but I really don't think this has much value in this form. Gritchka 12:32 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)