Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. —Sean Whitton / 14:20, 27 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations

The list of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations has a couple issues to it. The first one comes from the point of view which dictates a pronunciation to be counterintuitive or not. Also, there may be several different pronunciations for a word which makes sense. Ever heard of the phrase, "you say (pa-TAIT-o) and I say (pa-TOT-o), you say (ta-MAIT-o), I say (ta-MOT-o)? Also, I am hitting this article up for Verifiability issues. Although it is easy to find the pronunciations, can you find any sources that dictate what is counterintuitive or not? Tavix (talk) 18:34, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Provisional Delete There may be some list or lists out there that not counterintuitive pronunciation (I'm sure the Language Log has posts on pronunciation sometimes). As it stands I don't see a source like that listed. I see lists of placenames and a pronunciation guide as sources and a list of pronunciation problems with placenames as an article. That is WP:SYN. I'm not prepared, however, to claim with any certainly that no such sources exist. If some sources pop up and are incorporated into the article properly, then it should be kept. However as it stands it should be deleted. Protonk (talk) 20:08, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not exactly sure what type of source you mean, perhaps because you seem to have made a typo ("list or lists out there that not counterintuitive pronunciation"). There are tons of blogs out there in which people exchange and list unusually pronounced names. They don't seem like authoritative references to me, but would a few of those suffice? Is the BBC list of British place names that the unsuspecting tourist is bound to mangle not the type of source you like?

I've now read but may still misunderstand WP:SYN. The headline is "Synthesis of published material which advances a position". Which position does this list advance? That some proper names in English are oddly pronounced? That can hardly be controversial. Or does every entry advance a position? Is "I think that Trottiscliffe's pronunciation is unexpected" a synthesis? That would make me depressed. I could see that the scope, as discussed below, is subjective unless a set of rules (like a general English pronunciation guide) is followed and thereby may advance a position. Again, all lists with the words "prominent" or "notable" in the header (and many others) suffer from the same problem. Do you really think that WP:SYN exists to prevent the creation of these kind of lists? Afasmit (talk) 08:12, 23 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion that is a problem with how WP:SYN is written (a clarity problem). SYN means that if you take source A which says A and not C, take source B which says B and not C and combine them into an article that says C, you have introduced an original concept by synthesis of two sources. In this case I see (in the cited references) a list of English placenames (source A) and a pronunciation guide (Source B). The article advances concept C: that there are placenames with "counterintuitive" pronunciations. That's what I mean about synthesis. Protonk (talk) 17:04, 23 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- Fabrictramp | talk to me 23:37, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Bad presentation of what might be an encyclopedic subject. "Counterintuitive pronunciation" is a high-handed way of saying that the word is pronounced differently than it looks. If you can read things like "sænɪtʃ/" then you'll have no trouble understanding this article. I can't. Mandsford (talk) 12:11, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good point, but who's to say what looks correct? Tavix (talk) 15:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep but improve The list may be silly, but who hasn’t marveled over the odd pronunciation of some English village or surname and wondered if there was a nice compilation somewhere? Wikipedia seems a perfect place for that. Its general interest is evidenced by the hundreds of people that have edited it over the years.

The submitter makes one point in two or three different ways, i.e. “counterintuitive” may be hard to define (and by the way, few if any say “ta-MOT-o”, as for the people that say tə-MAH-to "motto" and "tomato" don’t rhyme).

In the lead of the article “counterintuitive” is defined as “the pronunciation does not correspond to the spelling, or because a better-known namesake has a markedly different pronunciation”. Examples of the latter are Chili and Rio Grande, but also places or names resembling common English words like Reading, Leap, Loose and Buyer. If you didn’t know these names from somewhere else or are aware of their origin, their pronunciation could be regular. We could consider splitting these names off.

The first, much more common category is possibly definable, perhaps by a link to the IPA chart for English, and wouldn’t raise heckles if limited to indisputable ones; the pronunciations of names like MaliVai, Belvoir, Thames, Pou or Happisburgh do not correspond to their spelling ("make sense") in any dialect of English.

The problem this list does have is shared by thousands of other wikipedia lists, like almost all lists of people, namely it is hard to define the cut-off for inclusion. Indeed, the list currently contains too many names that are merely non-obvious, rather than conflict with their spelling. Some serious weeding is necessary and would make this list less controversial. Afasmit (talk) 21:17, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's still textbook SYNTH, regardless of scope. Protonk (talk) 04:44, 23 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Strong Keep. I accept that there are cases of names where more than one pronunciation might be intuitive, but I think that most of the names in the list are not in this category. "Halford" is one case that I have queried before, and you can see my comments on the talk page. Otherwise, I think that anyone who speaks English would consider the majority of the names on the list to be pronounced in an unusual manner. I agree that verifiability is a big problem. However, there is a B.B.C. Pronunciation Dictionary of Place Names. Perhaps, that could be used to verify the inclusions. I do not have a copy, and am not sure whether a small village would be included in it, but it is worth a try. Epa101 (talk) 21:24, 26 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Weak delete, ultimately as Wikipedia is not a dictionary or pronunciation guide. This list is largely useless to 99% of readers who are not literate in IPA. One will be left with the knowledge that a given name has a counterintuitive pronunciation, but little idea of how to pronounce it (I am aware of the links to the IPA pages, but I imagine the clickthrough rate is quite low). If the article is kept, I recommend using List of words of disputed pronunciation as a model of how to give a bit more description. Given the paucity of content, this material would be much better presented as as a category on Wiktionary. Setting aside the state of the article and considering its potential, this still does not pass muster; the scope is far too wide for this to be an encyclopedic topic worthy of inclusion and were it complete, it would have tens of thousands of entries. Skomorokh 01:44, 27 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as non encyclopaedic and original research. If the article does stay it needs to be renamed or severely trimmed, half the entries come under non-English names that English speakers find it difficult to pronounce. Nuttah (talk) 08:28, 27 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. ——An gr 09:37, 27 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Transwiki. It's not really much of an encyclopedia article, but it's exactly the sort of thing that would make sense as an Appendix at Wiktionary. —An gr 09:37, 27 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. All this is right now is a subjective list of place names, with no commentary or proper sourcing. The only things it references are lists of place names and lists of pronunciations, and all decisions on whether the pronunciation is counterintuitive is either original research or a synthesis of those publications to reach a new conclusion. ~ mazca ^{t | c} 10:20, 27 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The concept of a counterintuitive pronunciation needs more development within the article, but the list forms a basis for further research (for example, investigating different categories of counterintuitiveness) so I think it should be here. It's the sort of list that would be very difficult to develop outside of Wikipedia. --Northernhenge (talk) 12:09, 27 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.