IPA Fonts:
If you have an up-to-date operating
system installed, 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'.
This Web page offers a very
convenient and quite efficient way to input IPA symbols:
http://www.i2speak.com/
Another
way to input IPA symbols: 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://westonruter.github.com/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://software.sil.org/products/
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
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://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/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
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
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