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://davidbrett.uniss.it/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
pages that are different from what you have learned about the phonetics of
American English vowels? In spite of some misconceptions, these pages are
still useful – they give good models of the vowels of standard US English:
Long vowels: http://www.pronuncian.com/materials/podcasts/Episode_8.aspx
Short vowels: http://www.pronuncian.com/materials/podcasts/Episode_9.aspx
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:
http://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/page%20with%20frames2.htm
Test yourself on articulatory features of English
consonants:
http://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/page%20with%20frames2.htm
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://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/page%20with%20frames2.htm
Here are some minimal pairs exercises. Click
on "index" for more exercises:
http://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/page
with frames2.htm
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://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/page
with frames2.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!
You
have learned how to represent the sounds of English in KK pronunciation symbols,
and now in IPA. But how would you transcribe the sounds of Chinese into IPA?
Next: Writing
Chinese in IPA and the International Phonetic Association