Whomping Walrus

Welcome

Hello, welcome to Wiktionary, and thank you for your contributions so far.

If you are unfamiliar with wiki-editing, take a look at Help:How to edit a page. It is a concise list of technical guidelines to the wiki format we use here: how to, for example, make text boldfaced or create hyperlinks. Feel free to practice in the sandbox. If you would like a slower introduction we have a short tutorial.

These links may help you familiarize yourself with Wiktionary:

• Entry layout (EL) is a detailed policy on Wiktionary's page formatting; all entries must conform to it. The easiest way to start off is to copy the contents of an existing same-language entry, and then adapt it to fit the entry you are creating.
• Check out Language considerations to find out more about how to edit for a particular language.
• Our Criteria for Inclusion (CFI) defines exactly which words can be added to Wiktionary; the most important part is that Wiktionary only accepts words that have been in somewhat widespread use over the course of at least a year, and citations that demonstrate usage can be asked for when there is doubt.
• If you already have some experience with editing our sister project Wikipedia, then you may find our guide for Wikipedia users useful.
• If you have any questions, bring them to Wiktionary:Information desk or ask me on my talk page.
• Whenever commenting on any discussion page, please sign your posts with four tildes (~~~~) which automatically produces your username and timestamp.
• You are encouraged to add a BabelBox to your userpage to indicate your self-assessed knowledge of languages.

Enjoy your stay at Wiktionary!

With all of that said, it would be even further appreciated if you labelled your pronunciations with the appropriate label when they are for words for which you have a dialect-specific merger.

For instance, if you merge "hurry" with "furry" (in other words, if those words in your dialect sound the same), you ought to label your pronunciations of impacted words with:

(accents with the "Hurry-furry" merger)

And if you have the Mary-marry-merry merger (in other words, if the proper noun, verb, and adjective in "Mary got married on a merry Christmas" sound the same to you) you ought to label your pronunciations of impacted words (that is, words ending in -arry [except if they rhyme with "starry"], -erry, or -ary) with: .

Other than that, keep up the good work. I would suggest that you consider learning IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) if you have the time, as that is the standard for pronunciation transcription that is used here (and most places in the linguistic world). Tharthan (talk) 02:01, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Hiya there Tharthan,

Thanks for the welcome as well as the tips! Is there a list of cases in which it's nice to have that extra bit of information attached via the {{a|}} function? Does this page contain all of this sort of thing, or are there analogues I should be aware of? I was unaware that the mmmm merger existed at all, so it'd be nice if there happened to be a handy collection of them somewhere which I could brush up on.

I tend to speak average everyday majority US-American English in most cases, so I've just been tagging my pronunciations as (US) and calling it a day so far - but I'm never an enemy to the idea of giving people more information where it's warranted. I just hope it's not the sort of thing I'll need to internalize a degree's worth of scholarly information in order to be able to do reliably, heh. My knowledge of the finer points of language is more casual than it is scholarly in most cases. That's why I'm sticking to pronunciations for the most part. Though you're right, I really should learn IPA. It definitely would help with the narrow scope of my contributions. Thank you for putting a term to the concept.

On when to tag things, though - you mentioned that a label's appropriate when "they are for words for which you have a dialect-specific merger", but I've been operating under the assumption that if the majority (at least, the US majority within a pronunciation under (US) tag) speak a certain way, that that way has become the norm, is no longer dialectical, and doesn't need to be appended with the linguists' arcana (of which I have a very incomplete understanding). Is there a guide somewhere for when to include this sort of thing?

Any information you might toss my way to help clear things up would/will be appreciated (: Though no rush at all - my presence here is super sporadic.

Thanks!

Whomping Walrus (talk) 16:53, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

The mergers that you need to concern yourself with learning are the hurry-furry merger, the Mary-marry-merry merger, and the cot-caught merger. Determine which of those you possess, and mark your pronunciations of impacted words accordingly. If you are particularly curious, you can also look into the wine-whine merger and the horse-hoarse merger, but those who maintain those particular distinctions are few and far between nowadays, so you do not really need to bother unless you are interested in knowing about those two. In other words, you don't need to be so particular about marking your pronunciations of horse-hoarse merger and wine-whine merger-impacted words as much as you do for, say, a cot-caught merger-impacted word or a hurry-furry merger-impacted word. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that someone can be a speaker of General American and also maintain the wine-whine distinction, so perhaps you would find knowledge of the merger worth looking into.

Something doesn't cease to be dialectal simply because it is present in a number of major dialects (e.g. Midwestern English, Western English). Remember: everyone has an accent, and everyone speaks a dialect. That has always been the case with language. Moreover, the United States' semi-standard "General American" is not a tried and true standard in the same way that the United Kingdom's "Received Pronunciation" is. Many people in the United States reject the notion that it is a national standard at all, and refer to it instead as "a widespread Midwestern dialect" (which it indeed originated as). The other thing is that General American is technically a dialectal continuum; an aggregate of similar dialects. There are speakers of General American with the aforementioned mergers, and there are speakers of General American without the aforementioned mergers.

With regard to rundowns, I gave you the rundown on how to determine if a word falls into the 'Mary-marry-merry distinction' category in the welcome message above. The only thing that I would add to that previous explanation is that words like "parody", "parity", "Carib", etc. are also Mary-marry-merry merger-impacted words. The hurry-furry distinction basically operates under this principle: if the word (say, an adjective) is derived from a word (say, a noun) that ends in "-ur" (for instance "fur", "blur") then the resulting word (for instance, "furry", "blurry") is pronounced with /ɝ/ (as in "fur"). However, if it is not of such derivation, then it is pronounced with /ʌ.ɹ/ [that is to say "uh" followed by an R]. Words such as "hurry", "curry", "worry", "flurry", "Murray", etc. properly have /ʌ.ɹ/ [that is to say "uh" followed by an R], not /ɝ/ (the sound of "fur", "purr", "blur", etc.). Those with the hurry-furry merger have lost this distinction in their dialect, and pronounce both sets of words with /ɝ/.

You can tell if you have the cot-caught merger by whether or not pairs like | "cot", "caught" | "Don", "Dawn" | "hottie", "haughty" | are homophones in your speech.

Thanks for your attentiveness. I hope to see more contributions here from you in the future! Tharthan (talk) 19:42, 17 September 2020 (UTC)