User talk:Williamchacha

Welcome!

Hello, Williamchacha, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created, such as English phonetic alphabet, may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Questions or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! rʨanaɢ (talk) 20:33, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed deletion of English phonetic alphabet[edit]

The article English phonetic alphabet has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

No indication of notability beyond the fact that it's used in the curriculum of one course at one college; no external sources.

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. rʨanaɢ (talk) 20:33, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Objection to deleting English Phonetic Alphabet:, please give me 2 more weeks so that I can find more references for the article.[edit]

I would like to make an objection to delete this article. I do apologize for not making it clear that English Phonetic Alphabet is applied and taught in worldwide. It was fielded in private school in South Korea during 2010 and is currently used to teach children at aboriginal reservation area in Northern Ontario. In addition, EPA is acknowledged by TESL (teachers of English as a second language) Ontario, the most creditable and recognized non-profitable teaching professional association in Ontario that providing support for teachers, students, and government bodies. Workshops were held in TESL Ontario 2010 fall conference to help the industry and the public learn about EPA. The lesson was webcasted and is available in the TESL Ontario Conference Webcast Archives. Usually TESL will publish lesson in conferences onto their website 4 months later. I expect it will come out in early February and it can greatly improve the notability of this wiki article. I will also use these two more weeks to find more creditable sources for citation.

Nomination of English phonetic alphabet for deletion[edit]

The article English phonetic alphabet is being discussed concerning whether it is suitable for inclusion as an article according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/English phonetic alphabet until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on good quality evidence, and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article. rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:42, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Issues with the EPA[edit]

Regardless of the discussion regarding whether the EPA article gets deleted from Wikipedia, I just glanced over it and quickly noticed several problems with either the article or the EPA itself, which you might want to consider. I don't know if these are just errors in your transcriptions (which seem to, in many cases, have been written by someone with a limited knowledge of the IPA and phonetics) or shortcomings in the system itself:

<Aisa> → /Ey Zhu/. I'm a speaker of American, not Canadian, English, but I really doubt any standard English pronounces Asia (which you have misspelled) as [iːʒə].
<purple> → /pEr pel/; <people> → /pEy pel/: The second syllable of these words is a syllabic consonant (or a schwa), definitely not a full vowel [ɛ]. Again, I seriously doubt anyone says "purPELL" and "peoPELL".
<pure> as /pʊər/: again, maybe a Canadian English thing, but given other errors here it's just as likely someone who doesn't know IPA wrote it. In my dialect, and certainly in Standard American English, this word is pronounced [pjuɹ], which in EPA should be "pyUwr".
Related to that point: is this meant to be a phonemic alphabet (one which only represents meaning-relevant, phonemic differences), or a phonetic alphabet, which respresents the actual pronunciation of words after phonological changes have been applied? The examples given are inconsistent in this respect. The one I just mentioned above, <pure>, ignores the glide [j] ("y"); maybe you argue that that is not one of the phonemes of the word, it's just a sound inserted by rule, but then on the other hand you transcribe <think> as /THingk/, writing out the phonological change that transforms /n/ to [ŋ].
This document, written by someone who I assume is the creator of this alphabet and is your boss or advisor, argues that EPA is a "computer-friendly" alphabet. Why, then, does it have graphemes that need to be underlined? Show me a keyboard that has keys for underlined letters. This is not a keyboard-friendly means for text input. Furthermore, it is generally not good to use font formatting as a distinctive feature of letters, as it's not represented in the letterform itself. An example of what I mean: highlight th in your browser in the English phonetic alphabet article, "copy" it, and then "paste" it into another window (or into Notepad or something like that). The underline formatting is lost.
- The same problem applies to the use of bolding to indicate stress. On top of that, this makes it not so feasible as a handwritten system, as there is no easy way to write bold letters by hand.
What is the meaning of capitalization and underlining? I see that a capital letter always means that the next letter is part of the same segment, but why are some two-letter strings both capital (SH, TH, CH) and some not (Zh). Zh is written in a way similar to the noun strings (Uy, Aw, etc.) rather than the consonant strings, why? And why are some of the two-character consonant strings, th and ng, written as underlined lowercase rather than capital; what about them is any different than SH, TH, and CH, and how does this writing difference help someone who's trying to learn English pronunciation? It seems just random and ad hoc to me.
this document again, describes the difference between [θ] and [ð] (EPA TH and th) as the former being made by putting your "tongue between your teeth and blow air out", and the latter by "between your teeth and suck air in". This is a completely inaccurate description of how that sound is made ([ð] is not an ingressive, it is a voiced dental fricative, the only difference between it and [θ] is voicing---whether or not your vocal folds are vibrating as you pronounce it), and again belies a lack of understanding of basic phonetics by whoever designed this alphabet or wrote these materials. It is irresponsible for something claiming to be a teaching aid to supply this kind of inaccurate information, and irresponsible of whoever adopted this for their classrooms to have done so without (apparently) consulting anyone who knows basic phonetics.
In part of the article (which I have since removed), you say that the capital letters in EPA should be written a small capital letters by adjusting their font size, and you argue that this can't be done on Wikipedia. First of all, that is not true; font size can be adjusted, or you can use small caps letters in the first place. Secondly, it is not keyboard-friendly (normal keyboards don't include small caps characters or font-size changers). Thirdly, as I explained above with underlining, it's not appropriate to encode phonemic differences in font styling. Fourthly, I don't even know if it's a good idea to use small caps as you suggest, as some capital and small caps letter forms look roughly the same. Compare the following:
- Zh vs. ᴢh (capital vs small caps; lowercase is zh, very difficult to tell from ᴢh)
  - Zh vs. Zh vs. zh(same thing, only using font size rather than small caps)
- Ow vs. ᴏw (capital vs. small caps; lowercase is ow, very difficult to tell from ᴏw)
  - Ow vs. Ow vs. ow(same thing, only usinf font size rather than small caps)

These are serious problems; some are problems with the article and the materials, but some are problems with the writing system itself. It's no wonder this alphabet has not been adopted by any major dictionaries; what I find surprising is that it has been adopted by even the few classrooms that have adopted it so far... rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:25, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Williamchacha. You have new messages at User talk:Rjanag/Archive10.
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Image[edit]

The image you uploaded (File:Vowel chart.jpg) needs to have explicit permission for use on Wikipedia. This needs to be verified through OTRS, which is a system for sending e-mail verification that you have permission to use this on Wikimedia projects. You can find more information at commons:Permission. rʨanaɢ (talk) 20:04, 28 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]