Phonetic systems...

Question

the IPA phonetics symbols seems popular on the web. However, most dictionaries don't use it. Why is that?
For example, my software versions of American Heritage Dictionary and Merriem-Webster Collegiate Dict each uses their own. (and what system do they use?)
also, in Taiwan ESL circle there seems to be something called K.K. system. Anyone know what that is?
Xah
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo dir/more.html

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]also, in Taiwan ESL circle there seems to be something called K.K. system. Anyone know what that is?[/nq]
Kenyon & Knott?

Josh Norther

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]the IPA phonetics symbols seems popular on the web. However, most dictionaries don't use it. Why is that?[/nq]
Because they don't expect most readers to know it.
[nq:1]For example, my software versions of American Heritage Dictionary and Merriem-Webster Collegiate Dict each uses their own. (and what system do they use?)[/nq]
You answered your own question they each use their own system.
Mark Brader > "You wake me up early in the morning to tell me Toronto > I am right? Please wait until I am wrong." (Email Removed) > John von Neumann, on being phoned at 10 am

Usenet · Answer

Which means everyone still has to learn whatever the system is anyway. They should all migrate to some sort of standard.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]the IPA phonetics symbols seems popular on the web. However, most dictionaries don't use it. Why is that?[/nq]
[nq:1]Because they don't expect most readers to know it.[/nq]
It's only American dictionaries which tend to avoid IPA. British and Australian dictionaries tend to use it, and I would expect dictionaries written in other varieties of English (with the possible exception of Canadian English) would tend to use IPA as well.
[nq:2]For example, my software versions of American Heritage Dictionary and Merriem-Webster Collegiate Dict each uses their own. (and what system do they use?)[/nq]
[nq:1]You answered your own question they each use their own system.[/nq]
In computerized contexts, such dictionaries often use a novel system. This is because the diacritics used in the traditional system of punctuation in America, the macron a straight line above the vowel and the breve a curved line above the vowel, which looks like a flattened "u" are not universally available on computers. However, American dictionaries in paper form typically use these symbols when representing pronunciation. Although there is no one system, the American practice of using the macron to mark the "long vowels" and the breve to mark the "short vowels" a system derived from one invented by Noah Webster, is a widespread one. Most Americans were taught such a system when they were in school and they still remember the basics.
The *Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary* does not use this system, but the online *Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary,* 11th edition, and the online *American Heritage Dictionary,* 4th edition, do use it.

Except for certain ordinary consonants, such as "b" and "k," only two symbols seem to be used with any regularity in both the traditional American system and the IPA: The schwa (which looks like an upside-down "e") and the "ng"-ligature. (Although the online AHD4 uses "ng" instead of the ligature for this last sound.)
It seems to me that I've read in this newsgroup that most British students don't really learn the IPA. I've certainly read that in the fr.lettres.langue.francaise about most French students. In contrast to that, I would expect most Americans to remember the basics of the American system, including the signs used for the "long" and "short" versions of "a," "e," "i," "o," and "u." Other vowel sounds, such as those used in "look" and "heard" are likely to vary from one publisher to another, so that when we look a pronunciation up in a dictionary, we have to look up in the pronunciation key to see how those vowels are represented.

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

Usenet · Answer

As always, Americans use their own system. The good dictionaries from Oxford, Cambridge, the bilingual ones here in Germany and specialized pronunciation dictionaries almost exclusively use the IPA notation.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]As always, Americans use their own system. The good dictionaries from Oxford, Cambridge, the bilingual ones here in Germany and specialized pronunciation dictionaries almost exclusively use the IPA notation.[/nq]
I may have mentioned this before in this newsgroup, but I've found a very odd usage of one IPA symbol in *The Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary, French-English, English-French,* Oxford University Press, (C) 1994. For some reason unknown to me, the vowel in "bed" is represented in English pronunciations as /e/, while in the French pronunciations, /E/ (a small epsilon) is used instead. As a result, the pronunciation of the word "sec" in the English section (as in "hang on a sec") is represented by /sek/, while the pronunciation of the French word for "dry," "sec," is represented by /sEk/.
For those who may be unfamiliar with the system I am using, it is a variant of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Evan Kirshenbaum's ASCII IPA, developed for alt.usage.english (and for sci.lang , although it seems to be less popular there). See the specifications for that system at

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/faq.html
or
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

Usenet · Answer

(stupid google doesn't show email address so i had to reply in public)

hi Raymond Wise,
try using another computer. If particular, if you can get to a Mac with its Safari browser. (but any MS Windows computer of recent years will do too.)
in your case, i'm guessing the problem is your browser. There are two chars with double o. One with a breve above them, one with a bar. What's K-Meleon? it is from Linux K-desktop? Firefox & Opera should do the job. The probelm with the misplaced char of u and oo is because these two chars are made using a combining way in unicode, as oppose to being standalong. So, some lesser unicode software will not render them correctly, because these combining mechanism are less popular. Xah
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo dir/more.html

Usenet · Answer

My point was that Unicode still needs work if the average person cannot see some of the characters, or cannot see them rendered properly. I didn't just have problems when using the K-Meleon browser, but also with recent versions of Internet Explorer, on two different computers.

As for the K-Meleon browser, as it says at
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
"K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine (the rendering engine of Mozilla). K-Meleon is free, open source software released under the GNU General Public License."
I found the following Web page concerning problems with viewing Unicode:
http://www.unicode.org/help/display problems.html
Unless people are comfortable with reading such a page and making the changes required, they're going to have problems with Unicode, and I expect most people would not bother. I'm more computer-savvy than most people, but when I look at that page I see a hassle that I'd rather not have to deal with.
By contrast, when people come across a PDF document for the first time, if it so happens that their computer isn't already loaded with Adobe Reader, they are often (usually?) given a link via which they can download Adobe Reader. It's a bit of a hassle, but not too much (except for those people who are spooked about computer security issues, and I expect that number is growing, not diminishing).
So I'd say that at this point there is indeed good reason to avoid writing Web pages using the International Phonetic Alphabet, or any other non-ASCII pronunciation symbols, if you wish to reach a general audience.
You should be able to read an e-mail address of mine below. It's been munged so that it *is* readable via Google Groups Beta. It should have shown up on my previous message, but since I was replying to myself, I just used the previous sig and removed the angled bracket. (Since I write posts in three languages, I type a different sig depending on the language I am writing in and don't just have a sig automatically added.) Google Groups Beta, however, *continued to treat it as having come from the previous message and hid it!*

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

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