The International Phonetic Alphabet: A Latin-based alphabet designed for transcribing all sounds of all languages.
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Does an IPA to 'English' translator exist?
IPA is really tricky to read, especially for beginners like me.
Are there any online tools that can almost 'convert' pasted IPA into phonetic pronunciations or similar?
I've tried Wolfram|Alpha ...
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Animated phonetic sound of Arabic and French
I randomly found this terrific site that contains a good structured collection of images, animations and videos to show how a sound is articulated in some languages. I need a similar resource for ...
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Is it hard for software speech synthesisers to handle IPA? If so, why?
Yesterday on ELU, the IPA sequence ˌoʊkeɪˈhiːɹjəˌgoʊ was posted in a comment. I'm not very familiar with IPA, so I thought the easiest way to "decode" that would be through a software speech ...
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Is IPA obsolete?
It seems to me that IPA is badly designed and not suitable well for many languages other than English.
Some problems are:
It uses different characters to denote the same sounds. For example, [ʍ] ...
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IPA for phonemes - does this make sense at all?
On the Wikipedia page for the International Phonetic Alphabet, slashes for phonemes are mentioned quite casually, without getting into the discussion of how or if it makes sense to use a phonetic ...
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Help me convert the English phonetic alphabet to Gregg Shorthand? [closed]
I've used a Gregg Shorthand dictionary and tried to match the sounds of English to Gregg Shorthand. Ideally, there will only be a handful of ways to write each character. Using the Roman alphabet, ...
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What is the most common vowel?
Of all the languages for which there is sufficient data, including extinct languages, which vocalic speech sound, or phone, as represented by the IPA, has been used by more languages, with more ...
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IPA transcription of the American English “bunched” /r/
There are 2 common articulations of /r/ and /r̩/ in American English, one retroflex, and the other dorsal. This phone is called the molar or bunched r. It can be described roughly as a back-palatal or ...
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How can the IPA vowels be memorized?
Memorizing IPA consonants is trivially easy; each symbol represents one sound, and that sound can be described with a variety of parameters about manner of articulation, etc.
The IPA vowels, however, ...
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Why IPA does not indicate “soft” consonants in English?
I am a native Russian speaker. Sometimes I encounter English speakers who are trying to learn Russian and wonder how to pronounce "soft" consonants.
At the same time while learning English I noticed ...
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What do the “less-than” and “greater-than” signs mean when used as IPA vowel diacritics?
I was recently reading an academic paper on Amdo Tibetan phonetics and the author uses IPA vowel diacritics that look like "less-than" and "greater-than" signs.
Here is a picture so you know what I'm ...
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Is whispering transcribed in IPA?
When a language is being transcribed to IPA, is the whispering included in the transcription? If so, how?
I saw the Wikipedia mention about not being anything for whispering, but I was wondering if ...
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Is there an IPA character for the sympathetic sucking in sound?
Is there an IPA symbol for the sound you might make when you burn yourself or someone tells you a story about an injury they have—when you suck your breath quickly through your teeth with your ...
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Cents symbol in phonology
In examining Chol's phonology, I came across the (old?) cents symbol ¢ (with a slanted line) as a phoneme symbol.
I have not been able to track what it corresponds to in IPA terms, but I suspect it's ...
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4answers
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Why in English words, the [o] is followed by [ʊ]?
The close-mid back rounded vowel is, according to Wikipedia, "usually diphthongized to [oʊ]".
Examples: row, also.
In fact, in Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary I didn't see o standing ...
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Alternatives to IPA?
Are there any other graphic systems that attempt to be as complete as the International Phonetic Alphabet?
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Automated French/Italian/German to IPA transcription
I'm looking for a website or software that will take text written in a source language and produce a transcription in IPA. The languages I am interested in are French, Italian and German, but if you ...
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6answers
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When should one use slashes or square brackets when transcribing in IPA?
When should one use /fubar/ and when [fubar] when transcribing in IPA? What are the differences?
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What is the reasoning behind the selection of the IPA symbols?
There are many weird characters in IPA, like Glottal Stop symbol ʔ for example.
Why these characters? Is there any reason for selecting them, or was their selection just arbitrary?
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How are syllabic consonants written in IPA?
Suppose that, in some hypothetical language, there were two different words:
/tump/
/tump/
What's the difference?, you might ask. In the first one, the word is one syllable long. In the second ...
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Is there a difference between /ɕ/ and /sʲ/?
Are /ɕ/ and /ʑ/ simply shorthand for /sʲ/ and /zʲ/ as with many of the possible diacritic combinations in IPA or are they different sounds? If they are the same, is there any good reason to use one ...
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Is there a difference between /d/ and /t̬/?
IPA contains diacritics for indicating voiceless (/x̥/) and voiced (/x̬/) sounds. There are also different symbols for many voiced/voiceless pairs, e.g. /d/ and /t/ or /g/ and /k/.
Is there a ...
