Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The sound of a tit

I love tits, I love their sounds in spring, I love it when they fly endlessly to and from my house bringing grubs to their young. For me, spring starts when I hear my tits calling.
When you record their call, you can propose them as a featured sound candidate because it is "encyclopaedic". A lot of research has been done on the calling of tits, and tits sound differently in the city then in the country site. There are dialects, so just a call of a tit may be alluring but it is just that.
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is the secretary general of the NATO. He is encyclopaedic and sure enough, he has his Wikipedia article in nineteen Wikipedias. His article is most often written in the Latin script, but there is also Яп де Хоп Схефер, იაპ დე ჰოოპ სხეფერი, ヤープ・デ・ホープ・スヘッフェル, Хооп Схеффер, Яап деХооп Схеффер, Яап де, Яап де Ҳуп Схефер, Хооп Схеффер Яап де and 亚普·德霍普·斯海费.

When I hear how people pronounce his name, it often does not sound like anything his mother would recognise him by. Mr de Hoop Scheffer was born and raised in the Netherlands and consequently his name should be pronounced in the Dutch way. This is relevant encyclopaedic information. There are services that help newscasters pronounce the news by making recordings like this available.

According to some, it is not encyclopaedic at all.  " It's just one person talking & then done." or "For the same reason that voiced articles are not featurable." I can say "It is just a tit sounding off" or "It is just another recording of the four seasons by Vivaldi by a minor artist", why would these be more encyclopaedic ? The case for a good recording of the pronunciation of the name of a famous person or place is easy to make; it is the difference between being understood or not.
Thanks,
      GerardM

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We had an argument about whether or not an information on pronunciation is deserving to be included in an encyclopedic context. This case was about the German Wikipedia entry on "Flönz", today the name of a blood-saussage which is being made in Cologne and about. It is spelt in a way that does not conform to Standard German common spelling, and there is simply no way to do otherwise, because the word derives from a local language, a so called dialect, having a phoneme pair [ønː] in [flønːts] which Standard German hasn't, hence Standard German cannot spell it.

Almost unbelievable to me, there were several serious suggestions, not to mention the difference between spelling and pronunciation in the article. Because, e.g., it was about the word, not the meaning and thus to be put into Wikitionary instead of Wikipedia. (Why not both?) Or as a German Word, it would have to be pronunced according to the German rules, only when used in the dialect, things were different, but this was not the articles subject matter. (The word is not a German word, just in the same way as "Jaap de Hoop Scheffer" isn't German) Also soneone claimed, the word were being used in a wider region but the one, we had a pronunciation for confirmed by citable references, thus pronunciation in general were unclear and thus not to be mentioned. (No reference given which confirmed the wider use, though) My impression from those argumnts is that, these editors do not understand what they are talking about, and they do not see the implications of their rigor to deprive readers of pronunctiation.

I would like having this as a general rule:
Since Wikipedia is a multilingual ressource, since readers of all tongues constantly look for this and that additional bit of information in language editions foreign to them, the reading and pronunciation rules of which they may not know well, my suggestion is to include IPA and sound sample versions of everything, that Wikipedia mentions, not only names.
I would like having this as a general rule. While it does not hurt those who already know, it will be valuable for all others.

Greetings, Purodha