I currently have a draft of a proposed Help:IPA page for the Kannada language, and I was referred here by @Hoary to seek advice on ways I can improve it for potential inclusion in the Help: category. Any advice or criticisms would be much appreciated.

Link to draft: Draft:Help:IPA/Kannada Krzapex (talk) 12:18, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, @Krzapex. I have little knowledge of Dravidian languages, but I do have some comments about your draft.

• "suit" is not a good choice for English approximation, because it has variant pronunciations as /sut/ and /sjut/.
• I doubt that most English speakers could even tell you what the Korean currency is, and would be unsure how to pronounce it. According to Wiktionary, the currency is pronounced [wʌ̹n] in Korean, and /wɑn/ in AmE, /wɒn/ in BrE - none of them quite the /(w)o/ you want. I think the BrE "want" is probably closest, but I don't know how to convey that to an AmE speaker.
• I really don't think that "Irish 'boat'" (whatever that is supposed to mean) is a good match for /aʊ/
• 'Hungary' has the sequence /ŋg/ in all varieties of English I've ever heard, and certainly in RP/ "Hangar" does not have the /g/ in most varieties of English (except in the Midlands and North West of England).
• your use of "th" to key the dentals will not work for most English speakers outside India (and maybe Ireland). To most Anglophone ears, the salient feature of /θ/ and /ð/ is their fricative nature, not their dental articluation, and if you write "th" you will get θ or ð.

Of course, the whole problem with "English approximation" is that you are trying to capture distinctions that are completely imperceptible to most Anglophones. I see that Help:IPA/Hindi and Urdu addresses this problem in notes, and I think this is the better approach. ColinFine (talk) 14:36, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]