Is there any part of the Symbol font that allows you to type out the pronounciation of a word using the phonetic alphabet? I ask this question because some time ago, in this Cafe Society thread, I ran into some awkwardness trying to type out phonetic transcriptions.
The theta symbol used to represent the unvoiced “th” is already available: /[symbol]q[/symbol]/.
And the symbol for the “a” as in “father” phoneme: /æ/
But none of the more–exotic–phonetic symbols seem to be available. Not even the schwa, which really suprises me.
For instance, the aforementioned linked thread, I was stumped in my search for the symbol that would represent the voiced and unvoiced affricates. (Or, in other words, the “j” as in “judge” sound and the “ch” as in “chore” sound.)
I’m not hoping for all of the IPA, just the ones that pertain to the sounds of English (American English, if you want to get picky about it. )
Is there a solution to future attempts at phonetic transcription?
As a matter of fact there is. The IPA is (I believe) covered in Unicode. Every Unicode character has a numerical code. To insert a Unicode character, put in & then # then the code then ;. For instance, in order to get this funny h-looking thing (ɧ) type in:
ɧ
There are lists on the Internet of the Unicode IPA codes, but I don’t know enough about IPA to verify that this list is complete. Another caveat: I don’t know that every browser on Earth supports Unicode, but the good ones should. Good luck!
Um, really? That’s odd. For me to check it with your configuration, I’d have to upgrade my OS and downgrade my browser. So, can you tell me what you see here:
Have you done that yet?
For the record, using IE 5.0 / Windows 2000 I saw the same thing in your last post that :smack:Fu did.
Tonight if I have time I’ll check on my Macintosh.
Okay, I can’t afford a new operating system right now. I wish there were some sort of emulator for this. It appears that Internet Explorer supports some Unicode, but not all. I’ll see if I can find some documentation on this, and in the meantime, maybe some IE guru can shed some light on it.
FYI, those six symbols are all correct, provided that “cross w/ a circle on top” means the Venus/female symbol.
Using Opera 5.0 and Netscape 4.75 (MacOS) I only see 4 out of the 6 characters in your post. Using icab (MacOS) I see all of them. It looks like the characters shown depend on the browser you’re using, and that Unicode support is not consistent.
You could try specifying a Unicode font yourself. On the next line I’m using Lucida Sans Unicode, and schwas display correctly on my PC using IE5.5:
əɚ
Of course, all users viewing the page must have the same font.
Hey, you may be on to something rowrrbazzle. In Netscape I see a scwha, then a schwa followed by a little squiggle. So do you think that everyone who wanted to see Unicode in IE just specified the same font, we could make it work?
Achernar: I’m cool, daddy-o. I just want to clue you hep cats in to the happenest OS around. I ain’t gonna blow my cool over it if it ain’t your style, cat.
(My god, I feel strange. I need to hack some assembly now, get the geek spirit back.)
)
