Who exactly received this pronunciation?

[tahnan]

I 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.

Comments

[jadelennox]

yes, I think Wikipedia does a splendid job, but I've had less of a success level with the spinoff projects. Perhaps because Wikipedia entries are often written by experts in the field (for example, I've contributed to the children's literature page, and I'm working on the critical theory pages) which is something that encyclopedias can't always boast. But dictionaries are written by experts in the field, lexicographers, whereas wiktionary is more likely to be written by people who like words (and can't, because its copyright, use the most concise research available for definitions, which is other dictionaries). I've had similar problems with wikinews, which seems to be used for oddly focused reports. There are really journalists on the field, and anything that is just repeating AP reports isn't useful, so it's individuals telling what they see from the where they are. Which is occasionally useful (say, in New Orleans now) but is usually useless and not even an interesting perspective.

I'm not sure if its density of people contributing, or if Wikipedia is just a special case in the contributions of experts sense.

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

My IPA is rusty, but I think their pronunciation is pretty close to my own near-RP pronunciation -- there's no schwa in there at all. 'Dictionary' is pretty much a three syllable word for me: DICT-shun-ree, not DICT-shun-air-ee. So WICK-shun-ree works for me.

The short-i over long-e is recognizable to me as being supposed to be a higher social class of dialect than I speak, although it's trying a bit hard -- it's the sort of way a retired colonel wearing a blazer in a 1950s BBC TV show would pronounce it.

So I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and suggest that perhaps it really is a pronounciation difference rather than a mistake.

j

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I was hoping that my RP-speaking friends would weigh in. It occurred to me that I could come up with a three-syllable pronunciation of an analogous word, namely "LAV-uh-tree" for "lavatory" in the Lumberjack Song. The OED also doesn't have that pronunciation.

On the other hand, that rhymes with "tea", which also varies from what the OED sanctions. At this point, we're way out of my ability to judge, but I would expect the schwa to drop only if the final vowel changed. What I need is a retired colonel in a blazer to ask.

All the same, I'm not sure why a chiefly American dictionary (as far as I can determine) would use RP for its logo.

[neilfred.livejournal.com]

Did you fix the wrong info about "stroy"? The logo may be an exception, but that's the great thing about Wikipedia and its spinoffs -- if there's content you think is inaccurate, you can actually fix it!

(Of course, I understand that in many cases it would take a good deal of time to properly rewrite stuff. I mostly only ever make tiny incremental improvements -- for example, I recently fixed a Wikipedia entry that for some reason used "climatic" where clearly they meant "climactic"...)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I didn't. Part of what's wrong with Wiktionary is that people like me who notice mistakes don't fix them. I've noticed that this is a problem, but naturally, I'm not going to fix it by fixing mistakes.

In truth, I didn't fix it because it was on one of their basic information pages, rather than in an entry, and while Wikithings are changeable by anyone, I didn't really want to wade into what's likely one of the more watched pages by the Wikians.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Ooh! The dreaded Wikians!

But I act the same way. In Trillian (which has some funky Wiki feed) it claims "a trillion is a thousand billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000". Erm. Sorry, one too many "000,"s. (but on the main wiki place it's correct) I wouldn't even know how to send a correction in, and, honestly, it's not worth it. For the people, by the people, but, hey, some of us are busy...