Timeline for Transform Chinese, Korean, Hebrew and Arabic to IPA
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
4 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 20, 2017 at 8:11 | comment | added | melissa_boiko | @Joker: this is because IPA is a representation of sound; it's not a representation of other writing systems. IPA doesn't represent letters like "ough"; it represents sounds, like /ɒf/ (in "cough") or /aʊ/ (in "bough"). If you want to convert a text to IPA, first you have to convert the text to sound; then you have the object that IPA represents (sound), and may convert to it. However, that first step of converting text to sound is already nontrivial. Determining the sound of "ough" needs a dictionary; determining the sound of "the" needs syntactical parsing w/ stress/prosody, etc. | |
| Aug 20, 2017 at 8:07 | comment | added | melissa_boiko | @Joker because natural writing systems are underdetermined. That is, they carry less information than that IPA needs. There's no information, for example, in the strings of letters «cough» and «bough» that tells you that one is read with the rhyme /-ɒf/ and the other, /-aʊ/. There's no information in the Japanese letter は that tells you whether it's pronounced /ha/ or /wa/; no information in the Chinese letter 好 that tells you whether it's /haw˧˥/, /haw˩/, /haw˨˩˦/ etc.; no information in 的 that tells whether it's /te/ or /ti˧˥/ or /ti˥˩/, etc. | |
| Aug 20, 2017 at 7:06 | comment | added | Joker | Why does it imply "converting text to sound"? There is a written representation of the IPA, so it's text in one alphabet to text in the IPA (another alphabet). | |
| Aug 14, 2017 at 13:34 | history | answered | melissa_boiko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |