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Potential edit war about pronunciation

The last several edits to this article indicate a decided difference of opinion over whether the name needs to be accompanied by a pronunciation guide. The edit summaries on both sides suggest little willingness to compromise, suggesting that this will become an edit war. In an effort to head that off, I'm starting this conversation so that we can discuss the pros and cons.

Just to be candid, I happen to agree with Avilich that the article doesn't need a pronunciation guide; occasionally Latin pronunciation differs from English, but in English most Latin names are pronounced as though they were English, and the names "Manlius" and "Manlia" appear to be perfectly transparent; there is no ambiguity about how any of the letters should be pronounced, except perhaps the 'a', and that really is a matter of personal preference with no absolute right or wrong. In fact I think that's a good reason for not telling people how to pronounce it—it suggests a degree of certainty inappropriate to a matter that in English is left up to the speaker.

Most articles about Roman gentes—and most articles about individual Romans—don't have or need pronunciation guides; it's usually fine to pronounce the names as though they were English, leaving it up to individuals if they want to say "Julius" or "Yulius", "Valerius" or "Walerius", "Tybeerius" or "Teaberrius". Some people will be sticklers for Classical Latin pronunciation, others for traditional English, and some may opt for a more idiosyncratic selection (and it's worth pointing out that besides regional variations and obvious changes in pronunciation throughout Roman history, there are several systems of Latin pronunciation in use today)—but in my opinion it's neither necessary or desirable either to prescribe one pronunciation and proscribe others, or to list a whole litany of "acceptable" pronunciations for names that most readers aren't even going to think about how to pronounce. In fact most readers who are sticklers for "authenticity" in pronunciation will either know how they want to pronounce the names, or will simply visit our articles about Latin for guidance.

But to return to the present case—most of the variations between different systems of Latin or English pronunciation would agree on a name like "Manlius", which isn't likely to confuse anybody. I don't think it's "vandalism" to add a pronunciation guide, but I can see it as potentially patronizing and essentially unconstructive, although I'm willing to assume good faith on the part of the editors who seem to think it needs it, and I can only ask them to consider whether there aren't articles, or subjects, that would benefit much more from this kind of guidance than this article or, for that matter, most other articles about Romans. Roman names really aren't that confusing for English speakers to pronounce, and when there's a significant amount of variation in pronunciation, most if not all of the possible pronunciations are technically valid, rendering pronunciation guides unhelpful, unnecessary, and superfluous. P Aculeius (talk) 03:52, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

My reverts back in March were the first to be labeled 'quasi-vandalism', just so we're clear. Both Libhye and his friend whom he canvassed used that term before I did. I agree that a pronunciation guide with IPA symbols matching exactly the alphabet is more or less useless, especially for a straightforward pronunciation like Latin. The wiki also has a dictionary entry with the pronunciation, so again, pointless to include it here. Avilich (talk) 12:10, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that any one particular party was at fault for the term—merely that it's not really appropriate to describe either adding or removing a guide when the editors involved are merely disagreeing over whether one should be included. I might add that I find IPA largely indecipherable without visiting the IPA pages—and I cannot quite figure out whether an article about pronouncing a Roman name or Latin phrase in English should be using IPA for Latin (in which case I think it would be valid to ask whether it needs to be a specific version of Latin) or IPA for English—and on the whole due to the wide variety of possible pronunciations, none of which is absolutely right or wrong, I think we generally don't benefit from having these guides in Roman articles.

I realize that readers of British English are much more likely to be familiar with IPA, but I wonder just how familiar the British public really is with IPA. Kwamikagami is an experienced user of IPA whom I encountered a number of years ago, after attempting to provide IPA pronunciations for a few names—his understanding of IPA was so different from the instructions that I had read that it produced what I felt were irreconcilable results and a basic disagreement over how to pronounce Latin—which I did study in college and had a very good idea how to pronounce. As a result I began to suspect that IPA was somewhat less useful for readers and editors than I had at first thought, and on reflection I concluded that it was unnecessary in the great majority of Roman articles for the reasons that I outlined above. Obviously not everyone agrees! P Aculeius (talk) 12:55, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

If you were to consistently give the full Latin spelling, agreed, that would be sufficient for those who know Latin. But, (a) you don't do that, so even if you know Latin phonology you can't tell how this name is pronounced, and (b) not everyone reading this article is going to know Latin phonology. WP is for the general public. As for whether readers understand the IPA, we can add even more pronunciation info if that's what you prefer, though IMO the IPA (and linked key) is sufficient. But, regardless, readers need access to some way of determining the pronunciation. It took me a while to find it, and there will be readers even more ignorant than I am who won't know where to look. And why should they spend the time looking it up at some site like Perseus, when we can provide it so easily?

If the IPA pronunciation is wrong, that's another matter. If our treatment of Latin phonology is inaccurate, that should be taken up on the talk page of the Latin IPA key, because it affects more than just this article. But I doubt that's an issue, since the ppl there seem to know what they're talking about. As for the variety of Latin, they settled on the Classical (more or less, best we can tell, Ciceronian pronunciation), and if you know that, you can predict Church Latin or whatever. But you need to start somewhere. — kwami (talk) 12:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Interesting that you're replying to me, instead of addressing the person who you've used edit summaries to call a "quasi-vandal", an "idiot", and an "ignorant edit-warrior", after having ignored this discussion for months. But both sides can be a bit uncivil, so let's discuss the underlying issue. This is English Misplaced Pages, so if there's any room for doubt, what we're after is what English speakers should say when pronouncing this name in English; not English speakers speaking Latin, not Romans speaking Latin. But there isn't any room for doubt; by English rules of pronunciation, there have to be three syllables, because we don't have a sound /nl/ in English, nor a diphthong /ia/. The first syllable is stressed, and has to consist of 'Man-'. The first 'a' has to be short because the 'l' is followed by an 'i', the 'i' has to be long (European) because that's the only way it's ever pronounced in this position (and would be difficult to pronounce otherwise), and the terminal 'a' has to be short. There are no alternatives in English pronunciation.

"MAN-lee-uh" is a possible pronunciation. "MĀN-lee-uh" is not a natural pronunciation due to the position of the vowels, and would not be suspected by either English speakers nor Latin students. There's a remote possibility that in the 18th or early 19th century an English-speaking Latin scholar might have said "man-LĪ-uh", but that wouldn't occur to anybody today. It's not possible to say "MAN-lih-uh". Best of all, it doesn't matter much if we pretend we're Romans speaking Latin, because the stress on a name such as this would still be on the antepenultimate syllable, and that pretty much determines how the vowels are pronounced. So there don't seem to be any other likely pronunciations—nor would you expect there to be. You don't need a "Ph.D. in Latin Linguistics" to pronounce something the way it would naturally be pronounced in English—or Latin. Although the other person who so far has engaged solely in argument through edit summaries, and who went to your talk page to alert you that someone was fiddling with your work and needed to be stopped, suggested that even a "Ph.D. in Latin Linguistics" wouldn't be enough to figure out such a complicated name as this one!

As a rule, Roman names are fairly transparent in pronunciation. You can pronounce them as if they were English, or if you studied Latin you can pronounce them according to any of several versions of Latin pronunciation. The occasional uncertainty as to how to pronounce 'c', 'g', 'j' or 'v' is an artifact of multiple forms of Latin and English pronunciation—but for this there is no easy solution using IPA or any other method of indicating pronunciation. And it does not come into play with this name.

Bringing this to the discussion page was an attempt to head off an edit war, but the three of you seem determined to go on warring until the stars fall from the skies—shoot first, maybe post something implausible or irrelevant on the talk page after the victim is dead. It's clear that nothing I say is going to persuade you, and I doubt very much the person you've been warring with is going to listen to anything you have to say either. Maybe it's time to move on. P Aculeius (talk) 15:29, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

You say it must be pronounced this way because it must be pronounced this way -- that's hardly a convincing argument. Why must it be pronounced this way? Okay, forget a PhD in Latin -- what of just some high-school Latin? What of just high-school English? How is the reader to know that it's Manlia and not Manlīa? You say it may have been Manlīa in the 18th century. Did Cicero speak differently in the 18th century than he does today? Lewis & Short specify that it's Manlĭus, so at least they don't think the pronunciation is so obvious it doesn't need to be indicated. I don't know how *Mānlius got in there. But the solution to incorrect information is to correct it, not to delete it. If someone attempting to indicate the pronunciation gets it wrong, then it obviously wasn't obvious to them, and by extension it isn't going to be obvious to others.

I originally added the pronunciation because I couldn't predict it, and it's not a trivial thing to look up. And although I hardly have any Latin, I probably have more than the average WP reader. So the argument that the pronunciation must be obvious to everyone because it's obvious to you doesn't carry any weight with me. — kwami (talk) 21:22, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

BTW, Wiktionary doesn't have an entry for Manlia. It does have one for Manlius, but that won't come up if a reader does a search for Manlia. Also, the Wikt. entry has it as Mānlius. Since you say that's wrong (and Lewis & Short concur), if the reader did manage to find the Wikt entry they'd still be lead astray. That's presumably where we got the long ā from.

If the pronunciation is not obvious to the Latin editors of Wiktionary, again, how is it supposed to be obvious to the average reader of WP? BTW, the long ā was added w the edit-summary "updated macrons in la-proper noun per Bennett (with corrections by Allen and Michelson)". If that's an error, we should contact the Latin project so that it can be corrected. Who knows how many similar errors might've been introduced.

The reason Julius, Valerius and Tiberius don't need pronunciations is that they're accessible in readily available sources. Manlia is not.

If there's a phonotactic rule that there can be no sequence -īV(s) at the end of a native Latin word, is that clear from our articles on Latin? — kwami (talk) 21:36, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Ah, it is ⟨MÁNLIA⟩ per chapter 3 of Bennett (1907) The Latin Language – a historical outline of its sounds, inflections, and syntax. So it looks like the transcription was right after all. And certainly not predictable. — kwami (talk) 23:24, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Difficult to make a coherent reply to a stream-of-consciousness reply—but you're still missing the point that I was talking about English and not Latin. There's only one possible pronunciation in English—and since you seem baffled by my mention of 18th/19th century English pronunciation of Latin, maybe you should familiarize yourself with the history of how Latin was taught and pronounced in English. On second thought, don't. It was a digression, and I thought that was clear, but apparently I shouldn't have mentioned it since now I have to explain and defend it in endless detail. I point out, however, that macrons aren't used in Latin—they're found in dictionaries aimed at Latin students, but are not found in written Latin. I am not speaking of apices, which are at best used intermittently and inconsistently, rather than a standard part of Latin orthography. The accent mark in Bennett is presumably an indication of stress—not vowel length.

Speaking of which, you'll find a general pattern in the names I mentioned, and which you recited above. In Julius, Valerius, and Tiberius, the stress in each case is on the antepenultimate syllable—never on the 'i'. Manlius follows the same pattern—virtually all Roman nomina do. -ius and -ia are two-syllable terminal nominative endings, and while I don't propose that there couldn't be any names in which the 'i' is stressed, I can't think of any. Because the stress on Latin names is generally predictable, and the vowels are usually predictable—there is little if any variation in the endings—these names are extremely transparent, and not in need of pronunciation guides.

But you're also forgetting something important: I'm not the one you're warring with. Talk to the person whose edits you keep reverting. I left your edits alone since it was clear from past experience that you'd just keep reverting me. You're fighting someone else—that's what this discussion was created to deal with—and you're not addressing him at all. You should have done that before reverting him with name-calling. There's still time to thresh out these issues, but it takes a willingness to engage with one another—not just reverting back and forth. P Aculeius (talk) 00:25, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

If readers are to be misled by wiktionary, you may want to use your inexhaustible energy to fix that instead. As has been said above, there's no evidence that Manlius/Manlia doesn't follow the same pattern of other Latin names, with the stress belonging to the antepenultimate syllable. Readers who even care about precise pronunciations probably won't be looking at Misplaced Pages in the first place, and putting a pronunciation guide whose characters match exactly those of the word itself, especially in a language whose letters mostly stand for one single sound each, doesn't tell anybody much to begin with. Avilich (talk) 02:25, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Ante penultimate in an i-stem noun (as most nomina are). The 'i' is a separate syllable, but I'm not aware of any instances where it's stressed. P Aculeius (talk) 02:59, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

My bad, thanks, fixed. Avilich (talk) 03:05, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

The apices marked length, not stress, which was predictable if you knew what the vowels were. This was never about proper English pronunciation, but about Latin pronunciation, and the idea that we shouldn't provide Latin pronunciation for unpredictable Latin words is just stupid. If the IPA ends up being identical to the Latin orthography, that confirms that the orthography isn't defective, which is valuable information. Without knowing that, you're left wondering how the word is pronounced. Honestly, I don't understand why anyone would intentionally obscure the pronunciation of a word and then argue about it. Articles are written for people who don't know the subject, not those who already do.

As for macrons, they're the universal modern convention, so that point is also irrelevant. If you really believe we shouldn't use macrons because they're not authentic, then we shouldn't use lower-case letters either. Sorry, but this whole argument is just stupid. — kwami (talk) 20:35, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

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