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Who exactly received this pronunciation?
Sep. 2nd, 2005 02:27 amI support the goals of the Wikipedia; I think user-maintained information can be quite powerful. Wiktionary I'm less certain of; it doesn't seem quite as necessary, or useful, or likely to be accurate.
For instance, it utterly lacks the word "granola". It also has a page about "Orphaned words" ("Orphaned words are words that are now rare or obsolete from which commonly used, extant words have been formed, usually by adding a suffix or prefix. They could also be considered roots of the extant words.") that gives "stroy" as the obsolete root of "destroy", which is nonsense. (There was a word, "stroy", but it (a) did not mean "create" and (b) formed from "destroy", and not vice versa. There was a word, struere, which did mean "construct", but it was a Latin word, not an English word.)
I must admit, though, I lost a great deal of my tentative confidence when I saw the front page, which has a nice graphic in the corner with the IPA for "wiktionary". IPA: a point in their favor. The fact that it says ['wɪkʃənrɪ]...many, many points against. For those who don't read IPA, this is, very roughly, "WICK-shun-rih."
I can accept the final [ɪ] instead of [i]--that is, a "short i" rather than a "long e"--because I gather that in Received Pronunciation (i.e. "standard British"), dictionary does in fact end with this sound. I can almost forgive the [r] instead of [ɹ], even though the former is used in, say, Spanish and the latter in English, because it's often more convenient to just use "r" for the English r-sound.
But what happened to the vowel between the [n] and the [r]? In English, it's a short e, [ɛ]; in RP, it's a schwa, [ə]. But it's got to be there; the American Heritage doesn't list a pronunciation without it, nor Merriam Webster's Collegiate, nor Merriam Webster's Third New International, nor the Oxford English Dictionary.
I know that practically no one else in the world cares about this. But it's my job to care. And when a website can't spell its own name correctly, I have trouble having confidence in it.
For instance, it utterly lacks the word "granola". It also has a page about "Orphaned words" ("Orphaned words are words that are now rare or obsolete from which commonly used, extant words have been formed, usually by adding a suffix or prefix. They could also be considered roots of the extant words.") that gives "stroy" as the obsolete root of "destroy", which is nonsense. (There was a word, "stroy", but it (a) did not mean "create" and (b) formed from "destroy", and not vice versa. There was a word, struere, which did mean "construct", but it was a Latin word, not an English word.)
I must admit, though, I lost a great deal of my tentative confidence when I saw the front page, which has a nice graphic in the corner with the IPA for "wiktionary". IPA: a point in their favor. The fact that it says ['wɪkʃənrɪ]...many, many points against. For those who don't read IPA, this is, very roughly, "WICK-shun-rih."
I can accept the final [ɪ] instead of [i]--that is, a "short i" rather than a "long e"--because I gather that in Received Pronunciation (i.e. "standard British"), dictionary does in fact end with this sound. I can almost forgive the [r] instead of [ɹ], even though the former is used in, say, Spanish and the latter in English, because it's often more convenient to just use "r" for the English r-sound.
But what happened to the vowel between the [n] and the [r]? In English, it's a short e, [ɛ]; in RP, it's a schwa, [ə]. But it's got to be there; the American Heritage doesn't list a pronunciation without it, nor Merriam Webster's Collegiate, nor Merriam Webster's Third New International, nor the Oxford English Dictionary.
I know that practically no one else in the world cares about this. But it's my job to care. And when a website can't spell its own name correctly, I have trouble having confidence in it.