IPA converter

[Tom Zurinskas]

Why focus on IPA when you could do truespel and develop an English friendly notation that can actually be used by English speaking people.

I've been looking at the Navaho language of the code talkers.  It was used in WW2 as a USA telephone code that was never broken.  See
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-4.htm

Notice it's not described notation-wise in IPA, but ~noenaemspel.  Folks don't use IPA for English around here.

Meanwhile, somebody spelled the Navaho language in such an arcane way, it's sure to die out quickly.  The spelling is a mess.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
see truespel.com



----------------------------------------
> Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:53:55 +0000
> From: chris at LASCRIBE.NET
> Subject: Re: IPA converter
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Chris Waigl
> Subject: Re: IPA converter
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 12 Mar 2009, at 04:45, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>>
>> Hopelessly unreliable. I tried it on a number of words and phrases.
>> Some it doesn't convert at all, some it converts in almost a random
>> way, like orthographic replaced by [Q]. It didn't recognized the
>> SIL IPA 93 font in my font library, even though that's the font it
>> asks for. It couldn't transcribe "caught." It comes up with
>> unexplained symbols like a double>. It does, however, convert
>> "little" with a syllabic /l/.
>
>
> I've been putting together an embryonic IPA converter, which currently
> lives here here: http://ipalizer.appspot.com/ .
>
> Right now, all it does is to transform Merriam-Webster style phonetics
> into IPA. So in order to use it, you need to:
>
> *Access the MW page for a word (say: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/friday)
> * Copy the phonetic transcription into your clipboard
> * Paste it into the tool's text field and hit submit
>
> There are two major limitations:
>
> 1. It can't distinguish between [T] (as in "thief") and [D] (as in
> "this"). The reason is that whoever spec'ed the MW representation of
> phonetic characters had the extraordinarily bright idea of using the
> element in the HTML markup to realize underlining, which
> distinguishes the two phonemes in their version of phonetic
> transcription. Markup-level underlining does not copy and paste.
> 2. This is not really at a publishable level of completion. Way pre-
> alpha. While I'd be delighted about any feedback, please get in touch
> if you want to use it for pretty much anything beyond playing around.
>
> The next thing I want to do is to replace the input field with a field
> asking for the word to transcribe, then retrieve the MW page myself,
> scrape out the phonetics, and then transpose those to IPA. Also, the
> same could be done for AHD4 (as per bartleby.com), but they use even
> more markup, which complicated matters.
>
> Chris Waigl
> who is still very unhappy with the state of phonetic transcription in
> English online dictionaries (the OED *still* uses small images for
> some characters! do they need someone helping them out with Unicode?),
> and amused about MW's choice of class names:
> class="pronchars">
>
>
>
>
> --
> Chris Waigl -- http://chryss.eu -- http://eggcorns.lascribe.net
> twitter: chrys -- friendfeed: chryss
>
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