9. IPA fonts, charts, and tests

IPA Fonts:

     If you have an up-to-date operating system installed, like Windows XP, you already have IPA fonts available on your computer! With these fonts, you can add IPA symbols to any document you create, and don't have to fill them in by hand anymore. Just click on 'Insert 插入', then 'Symbol 符號'. A table of symbols will appear on your screen. Choose the Lucida Sans Unicode (or MS Mincho) font, then double click on each symbol you want to input, or click on 'Insert/插入'.

     An even easier way to input IPA symbols: just go to the following page and click on the symbols you want in the table. They will appear in the field below the chart, from which you can copy and paste them into your document:

http://linguiste.org/phonetics/ipa/chart/keyboard/

     There are further options available for specialized IPA computer fonts.

      SIL International, formerly called the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), is an organization devoted to (according to their Website) "work[ing] with language communities worldwide to facilitate language-based development through research, translation, and literacy." SIL has made remarkable achievements in linguistic fieldwork 田野調查, practical phonetics, and many other areas of linguistics. Their site is a great place to go for all kinds of phonetic and other linguistic tools:

http://www.sil.org/

       To download SIL's IPA computer fonts, go to this page:

http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa.html

and click on the 'Download...' link. The SIL Encore IPA fonts are free; SIL also has a larger font set that can be purchased. Make sure you choose the correct font package for your system. Rather than using the keyboard to input the symbols, which is also possible, do the same as you do for the Lucida Sans Unicode font: click on 'Insert 插入', then 'Symbol 符號'. A table of symbols will appear on your screen. Select an IPA font, then double click on each symbol you want to input, or click on 'Insert/插入'.

     Another alternative for PCs is the TrueType IPA-SAM phonetic fonts, available through a link on John Well's site:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/fonts.htm

     John Wells has lots of practical suggestions on how to add IPA symbols to a Word document here:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/phoneticsymbols.htm

Displaying IPA symbols on a Web page:

     The SIL and IPA-SAM fonts will not, unfortunately, display correctly on a Web page. You can, however, use the Lucida Sans Unicode font mentioned above. Just follow the instructions John Wells has posted on his Web site at:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-unicode.htm

     You can take the grunt work out of producing IPA symbols in html for Web pages with this very clever online Unicode Phonemic Typewriter:

http://web.tiscali.it/davidbrett/phonology/phonemic%20typewriter/phonemic%20typewriter2.html

     A more roundabout way is to insert links from the Graphical IPA Keypad created by the University of Victoria, Canada. The URL:

http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/ipa/

IPA charts, sound files, and tests

     Here is an IPA chart on Peter Ladefoged's site with sound files you can click on, one row at a time; there are also links to enlarged versions of the chart with sound files for each individual sound:

http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter1/chapter1.html

   The IPA symbols are not well known in the US among those who do not study linguistics or phonetics. Most people are more familiar with spelling-based ad hoc symbols, commonly used in English dictionaries published in the US, to indicate the phonetic values of words. This has led to a number of misunderstandings about English phonetics. Can you find things on the following page that are different from what you have learned about the phonetics of American English vowels? In spite of some misconceptions, this page is still useful – it gives good models of the vowels of standard US English:

http://www.tampareads.com/realaudio/vowelsnds/voweltest.htm

     Here is a useful "Introduction to phonetic transcription" from antimoon.com:

http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-trans.htm

     On this page, phonetician John Well of UCL explains "Why phonetic transcription is important":

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/whytranscription.htm

     And here is an overview of the sounds of English by Timothy Morris of the University of Texas at Arlington:

Phonetic Transcription Workshop
http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/courses/4301f98/2sept.html

      Match each phoneme with the correct picture of the vocal tract: (Source page)

http://web.tiscali.it/davidbrett/phonology/curvy%20lines%20phonemes/trial2.swf

     Test yourself on articulatory features of English consonants: (Source page)

http://web.tiscali.it/davidbrett/phonology/articulation%20drop%20down.swf

     Here is a list of BBC vowels in example words with accompanying sound file by Peter Ladefoged:

http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/BBCVowels.html

     Here's a vowel test, using Flash:

http://web.tiscali.it/davidbrett/phonology/vowel%20sounds/vowel%20sounds.html (Source page)

     This page will test you in some of the vowels of RP that are different from American English vowels:

http://web.tiscali.it/davidbrett/phonology/grouping_words.htm (Source page)

     Here is another page, from the University of Arizona, with a clickable IPA chart and some practice exercises:

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/IPA.html

     Go to this page for some IPA transcription practice (RP accent):

http://web.tiscali.it/davidbrett/phonology/transcription%20exercises/index_of_transcription_exercises.htm

     You can also test yourself with this phonetic flash quiz by John Maidment at University College London here:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/johnm/flash/flashin.htm

     You can choose which sounds you wish to be tested on. You might like to start with 'RP consonants', which are the same as those for general American English. If you know some French, try the French consonants and vowels. (Here are tables of French sounds in IPA from About.com. Use 'Western European (Windows)' encoding on your browser; and here is a unit with audio files on how to pronounce "difficult" French sounds like the uvular fricative [ʁ] and nasalized vowels. Do you agree with all the tips?) See if you can discover the main distinguishing characteristics of Northern British vowels as compared to standard Southern British. (Sometime if you have time and interest, there's lots of information on English dialects here.) You can come back and do the IPA consonants test (which includes many non-English sounds) after you have learned more of the symbols and sounds. Doing that one now might frustrate you a bit!

SIL's IPA Help

     SIL has a very good tool for learning and practicing use of the IPA symbols. Only download this if you have a fast connection and a lot of available space on your disk – the program takes up over 30MB. It's called IPA Help. It 'reads' the IPA symbols for you when you click on a symbol, and it can test you by pronouncing a random vowel or consonant and having you click on the correct symbol. Go to this page:

http://www.sil.org/computing/speechtools/softdev2/IPAhelp2/IPAdownloads2.htm

and choose your preferred download method.

The huge size of the program is mainly due to the large number of audio files. You will find illustrations of all of the IPA symbols (i.e. not just the ones we're using for English), with example words and phrases in many different languages – including many exotic ones that you've probably never heard of. The program has a number of bugs, like double-image symbols and missing or wrongly labeled audio files (the download page mentions that it's still 'under development'), but it is an incredibly rich phonetics resource, and it's free, so I recommend it highly. The site offers plenty of other interesting software to experiment with if you are interested.

SIL's Ethnologue

Another outstanding feature of the SIL site is Ethnologue. Use this to check what languages are spoken in any country in the world. Or if you have the name of an unfamiliar language, check what country or countries it is spoken in, how many speakers it has, genetic affiliation, and related dialects. The paper edition of this work is available at Bookman.

http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/