Aeusoes1

I've taken a bit of attention to Non-native pronunciations of English, and Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages. I hate those titles but can't think of better ones.

I started Swadesh list of Slavic languages and transcribed the Russian part into a narrow IPA transcription; created the articles for Iwam language, Yanesha' people,^[1] Yanesha' language, ikanye, and yekanye^[2]; expanded the diaphoneme and diasystem articles; and reorganized and verified information at Russian phonology, Catalan phonology, Spanish phonology, Swedish phonology, and fortis and lenis to their present organizational states. I've also contributed phonology information to Rotuman language, Pazeh language, Abau language, Gilbertese language, Jamaican Patois, Nauru language, and approximant consonant.

As much as I know about Russian phonology, I don't speak much of it.

I've also added some quality tables and information to language bioprogram theory and post-creole speech continuum.

Despite my seeming awareness of creole grammar, I don't speak any creoles... yet.

• Guidelines, for /Phone tables present in phone articles like [m] and [u].

Similarly, I tend to remove IPA ligatures in the representation of affricate consonants (i.e. ʦ ʧ ʨ ʣ ʤ ʥ). The most important reason is that these are not official IPA; such ligatures used to be standard IPA practice. Another reason is consistency; for languages with other types of affricates (such as retroflex, alveolar lateral, labial, uvular or interdental affricates) there exist no ligaturing mechanism in unicode so that a dental sibilant affricate would be [ʦ] but a velar affricate would be [kx] and that's not fair.

But AE, you say (or, if you're being pithy, Æ), without such ligatures, readers may mistake an affricate for a plosive + fricative cluster. Remember that we're talking mostly about English speakers who have little conception of the distinction, though they certainly make it:

• |kæt| ('domesticated feline') + |ʃɪt| ('fecal material') → [kʰæʔʃɪʔ] ('litterbox monuments')
• |kætʃ| ('receive by grasping') + |ɪt| ('pronoun referential to non-human entity') → [kʰætʃɪʔ] ('exclamation from overzealous parents to their 9-year old little leagueer')

All right, all right. If making the distinction is that important to you, there is a remedy. No, not pot (though if you're getting your panties in a bunch over this, I'm sure it would only hurt your career). The best method is to use the tie bar such as with t͡s. Depending on your computer and browser, this may look like

1. tús.
2.  
3. t□s

The second one is the way it's supposed to look. On my computer it's closest to this, though the tie bar is a little skewed to the right. If I had my way, I'd be putting it like this ts͡ but this would solve the issue for Internet Explorer users by transfering the problem over to users of Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Mosaic, and Opera (oh, and more recent versions of Internet Explorer like the one that comes with Windows Vista). Naturally, this feeds a great consensus that Internet Explorer is wrong so the way we've been doing it at pages like Polish phonology, Russian phonology, voiced alveolar affricate, voiceless alveolar affricate, etc is t͡s or sometimes t​͡s (not to be confused by t ͡s).

So that's why I'm turning [ʦ] into [ts]. Join me, won't you?

It occasionally happens that I get chastized for removing unsourced statements. After all, it is said by my critics, we have {{fact}} tags.

However, we can't simply operate as though it's okay to have uncited information as long as it has a {{fact}} tag. Wikipedia has enough criticism about its accuracy without things like:

Increasing temperature is likely to lead to increasing precipitation^{[citation needed]} but the effects on storms are less clear. Extratropical storms partly depend on the temperature gradient, which is predicted to weaken in the northern hemisphere as the polar region warms more than the rest of the hemisphere.^{[citation needed]} Storm strength leading to extreme weather is increasing, such as the power dissipation index of hurricane intensity.^{[citation needed]} Hurricane power dissipation is highly correlated with temperature, reflecting global warming.^{[citation needed]} However, the increase in power dissipation in recent decades cannot be completely attributed to global warming.^{[citation needed]} Hurricane modeling has produced similar results, finding that hurricanes, simulated under warmer, high-CO₂ conditions, are more intense; models also show that hurricane frequency will be reduced.^{[citation needed]} Worldwide, the proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 or 5 – with wind speeds above 56 metres per second – has risen from 20% in the 1970s to 35% in the 1990s.^{[citation needed]} Precipitation hitting the US from hurricanes has increased by 7% over the twentieth century.^{[citation needed]} The extent to which this is due to global warming as opposed to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is unclear. Some studies have found that the increase in sea surface temperature may be offset by an increase in wind shear, leading to little or no change in hurricane activity.^{[citation needed]}

After a sufficiently long period (yes, there's a great deal of subjectivity in figuring out what this is) in which other editors have been given time to provide references, tagged info can be removed. I'll be the first to admit that I'm inconsistent in applying this, but I'm a lot less understanding of people crying foul when I delete uncited information than of people deleting uncited information where I wouldn't have.

The next common argument is that everybody–or anybody with a small amount of knowledge in the subject such as native speakers of a language or undergraduate students majoring in a particular field–knows the removed information to be true. There are two main problems with this. First, such people may be wrong.

Native speakers are able to provide a massive amount of expertise for their language but there are some things that native speakers are just not naturally conscious of or knowledgable in: phonetic particularities of vowels or consonants, theory (and the history thereof) of underlying structures, historical change, and the frequency of variations.

Undergraduate students, by default, have an incomplete knowledge of what they are studying. As such, they may have received what amounts to oversimplified lies-to-undergraduates; I've got a great linguistics textbook that talks about English's voiced plosives. Naturally, this doesn't mean that undergraduates won't know something accurate or with the proper caveats, but it is then in spite of their status as undergraduates not because of it.

Second, and more importantly, the specifics about what people know may be incorrect even if their general knowledge of the phenomenon is correct. This is the difference between common understanding (possibly the result of lies-to-undergraduates) and encyclopedic information. For instance, a common understanding is that French stresses the last syllable of a word. A deeper understanding of French shows, however, that stress is governed more by intonation unit level concerns so that battement is [batˈmɑ̃] but battement du cœur is [batmɑ̃ dy ˈkœːʁ]. Further caveats regarding e caduc (which is often unstressed) escape me currently but exhibit further complications that native speakers have brought up.

In brief, the common understanding can be wrong and is therefore unwelcome at an informative encyclopedia.

To be illustrative, I've made a table of instances I've come across where an unsourced common understanding statement was rephrased with a sourced statement. This table is expandable and if you can think of another example, you're welcome and add it.

This is a list of IPA symbols so that I can C&P with ease:

These are a few of my favorite things.

{{need-IPA}}

When an article needs to use IPA rather than ad-hoc or confusing systems.

{{IPA notice}}

To let readers know you're using IPA.

{{Essay-entry}}, {{inappropriate tone}}

When an entry doesn't have the right tone.

{{cleanup-translation}}

When someone no speak-a good English.

{{Unreferenced}}

When there's little to no sourcing.

{{Nofootnotes}}

When there's sources but no citation

{{refimprove}}

When there's some sources, but a need for more.

{{Onesource}}

When it's based largely on one source.