Dear phoNet members,
It's difficult to
discuss any phonetics issues without having recourse to an accurate
transcription system. Although there are a number of informal substitutes as
well as specially devised notations for online communication employing
combinations of ordinary characters to symbolise various sounds, the "Phonetic
Alphabet" recommended by the International Phonetic
Association (IPA) is quite indispensable for anyone interested in phonetics.
It is a standard phonetic script known to linguists worldwide and used in nearly
all serious linguistic publications. It is also increasingly popular as an
international language-independent way of indicating the pronunciation of words
in dictionaries and handbooks for learning foreign languages, so familiarity
with it may be of considerable practical advantage to any would-be
polyglot.
Unfortunately, very few popular fonts include phonetic
characters. One that is freely available is Lucida Sans Unicode, with a
relatively large set of IPA symbols encoded as UTF-8 characters – in
addition to plain and fancy Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and a variety of other
character subsets. Despite some minor problems (no software is perfect), mail
browsers can generally be configured to cope with it. I recommend that all list
members download and install Lucida
Sans Unicode, and that the font be regarded as an acceptable medium of
transcription on this list. If we find it advisable, other phonetic fonts may be
recommended in the future.
just to have a look and also to contemplate (and
perhaps download) the charts of standard phonetic symbols. They may come in
handy especially if you own no comprehensive handbook of phonetics. (The IPA
have just publish their own excellent, if rather expensive, phonetic
guide.)
At the moment the membership of the list is open
and you are free to invite anybody who might possibly be interested; and as long as there are no Netiquette problems I'm not going
to step in as the whip-cracking moderator.
Piotr Gąsiorowski
(If you install Lucida Sans Unicode, you'll see my
IPA signature below.)